At an early stage, every business uses email to handle customer queries. Even the customers prefer emailing whenever they want to get in touch with a brand. It will only be a matter of time before you realize that this system isn’t working for you anymore. As your business grows and your emails will start getting cluttered with overflowing queries.
It calls for a severe need for an alternative. Despite leveling up to a vast customer base, if you’re still using a shared inbox or email, your support is undoubtedly going to suffer. Emails serve little purpose when catering to a large customer base and need to build a certain support standard and adhere to it.
Although emails are faster and easier for customers, they offer few benefits to any brand’s customer support departments. Emails are slow, and they lack advanced features. They aren’t designed for team collaboration. It is no surprise that companies across the globe complain about inbox overload, lost productivity, and rising frustration among their support reps.
What if I tell you that there is a similar but faster alternative. What if you can have it both ways? Your customers can still send you an email and manage all this more simply.
Perhaps, it is time to move over to a suitable (and lucrative) form of email support: An Email Helpdesk. Helpdesks offer a lot of value to companies and benefit the customers too. It is more like a permanent solution to all your support problems. Take a look at these advantages of the email helpdesk and see why traditional emails are phasing out.
Let’s rethink email.
9 Reasons to Switch From Email to an Email Ticketing System
Here are some supposed situations that can prove to be red alerts and indicators that it is time to rise above the sluggish, manual email support process.
1. Team Collaboration: Major Barrier
Customer support is something that’ll always require the involvement of more than one department. In an email system, you’d get lost scrolling through long email trails.
This is where switching from an email system to an email helpdesk can make a massive difference to your team and eventually to your customers. The email helpdesk permits you to assign tickets to relevant departments. For instance, you can assign a customer email inquiring about key product features to the sales team with just a click.
2. It Takes Forever to Respond to Customer Emails
Flooded inboxes make sorting and filtering emails difficult. Sooner or later, you’ll be in a place where you receive far more customer emails than your team can attend. It also means that urgent customer issues will get lost in a sea of emails.
We can all agree that it is impossible to collaborate and resolve customer issues through manual systems. Besides, your team will not be able to segregate the issues as per their priorities. It becomes difficult to follow the SLA rules. Hence causing more delays in responding to the customers. All signs call for only one solution:
Adopt an Email Ticketing System!
An email ticketing system automates numerous processes for you. You have to set the SLA rules, and your queries will be sorted accordingly. Email helpdesk automatically converts email queries in the form of tickets. DeskXpand does precisely this. It uses the round-robin method for ticket assignment empowering support teams to maintain the priorities as per the SLA. It improves the overall support flow and productivity. In fact, with DeskXpand, companies have improved as much as 23% of their agent productivity. You can achieve this too.
3. Your Customers Want More Than Just Emails To Report Their Queries
Interacting with customers through only one channel is just not enough. The sad part about manual email systems is that they’re just emails. You can’t switch to other channels swiftly. Even if you want to, you’ll have to write back and forth emails to share the contact information and agent details. Then you’ll have to allot more time to the agent to solve the query on the call.
All this ruckus is not worth it. Email helpdesks will let you switch from one channel to another within seconds. You can also enable support through multiple channels like social media, chatbots, and so on. The email dashboard allows agents to offer a 360-degree support experience precisely as they want.
4. Your Support Team Lacks Accountability
Another primary reason to switch to an email helpdesk is your team’s lack of transparency and accountability. Lack of accountability reflects the loopholes in data acquisition and team collaboration.
If your support system does not have a data management system, agents might face problems like collisions. Think about two different agents working on the same ticket and both contacting a customer. Imagine what impression the customer would have of your brand. If you’re managing support through email helpdesks, your agents will be able to see what other agents are doing. Hence you can avoid potential collisions. It will also affect your agent productivity.
5. Well Organized Support Communications
A ‘cluttered inbox’ can act like quicksand and slowly eat up your team’s time. With an email helpdesk, each query is assigned a unique identification number.
As an admin or support manager, you can track the ticket lifecycle from the time it is generated to when it meets complete resolution. Plus, you can use features like label, status, category, and internal chats to have all the information at your fingertips.
6. Reduce Ticket Volume With a Knowledge Base
Along with improving your current support, you also need to focus on reducing repetitive customer issues actively. Your support agents certainly don’t want to answer the same questions all of the time.
When it comes to self-service, an email system falls flat on its face. A helpdesk allows you to adopt a proactive approach to customer support. You can create a knowledge base within minutes and make relevant information available in the form of self-help articles, FAQs, video tutorials, step-by-step guides, and more.
7. Integrate Knowledge Base with Chatbots for 24*7 Support
Another benefit of having an email helpdesk is that it enables you to provide round-the-clock support. A knowledge base is just one way to provide 24*7 support. You can add features to help your customers find the correct answer from thousands of knowledge base articles.
Connect Chatbots to Knowledge Base
You can do this by integrating a chatbot with the knowledge base. So, let’s say a customer is searching for a particular answer when all your agents are offline. They’ll naturally turn to your chatbots on your website. So, when the customer reports their query, the chatbot can directly find the answer and send the link to your customers. If the customer is still not satisfied with the answer, the chatbot will generate a ticket.
8. Measure Customer Delight
Many businesses believe that they’re already delivering superior customer support without even knowing if the customers feel the same way or not.
The best way to find out what your customers think of our products and post-sales support is by asking them through surveys. You can easily create, design, and share surveys to measure customer satisfaction rates with an email helpdesk. The survey responses will help you gain insights about performance as well as improvement.
9. Reduce the Error Margin
Using manual spreadsheets and emails for data management will make it very hard for you to make sure that you meet every timeline. It calls for a tone of flaws in your workflow.
With an email ticketing system in place, you can collect all essential information and even ensure its security. Your email helpdesk will ensure that everyone follows the deadline and that the customers receive day-to-day updates regarding their queries.
The Bottomline
When brands manage customer queries through email threads and other disparate tools, the processes become improper and inefficient. They risk wasting their resources and leaving their customers unsatisfied. The only key to customer success is managing and fulfilling customer requests effectively and accurately. Hence, it would be wise to opt for an email ticketing system to delight stakeholders and avoid disruption.
DeskXpand helps companies to avoid the pitfalls by organizing, controlling, and automating their workflow. All from a single place! It consolidates all information into a single system and makes it easy for managers to track the status of their support team.
So, if you’re looking to yield a solid customer support record and improve your business efficiency, you MUST check out DeskXpand.
The Article is Originally Published On:
https://www.deskxpand.com/blog/why-you-should-switch-to-email-ticketing-system/
