Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Help desk leadership is always an ongoing topic. People can’t seem to feel they know enough about it, so they keep digging, looking for new ideas, perspectives, methods, or whatever can make them even better at their jobs. And don’t get us wrong; that’s exactly what you should be doing! And to help you with that, we discussed “Service and Leadership in 2023” in April’s Ticket Volume podcast live recording.

Call center agents are often asked to do the impossible: Make every customer happy—while struggling with slow tech, increased workloads, stress, and burnout. Thankfully, many in the world of CX are discovering how to spell relief: AI. According to “The New CX Priorities,” a new industry report from Freshworks, CX leaders must treat customer support as a strategic function with far-reaching impact across the organization.

According to Freshdesk’s Future of CX report, the pandemic has forced consumers to adapt to digital channels. While the consumers of 2023 prefer digital-first experiences, they expect service providers to keep up with quality customer service across channels. As companies revisit their customer service strategy, they can take a leaf out of companies that get customer service right.

Service teams have lots on their plates right now, and customers expect seamless, instantaneous customer support. And while AI can certainly be used to make support agents' lives easier, it's too difficult to implement without an army of developers and accruing high costs…right? Not quite. Zendesk has made AI tools that are accessible to companies and teams of all sizes.

Customer expectations are changing – shoppers want instant answers to their questions at any time of the day. More importantly, they expect their interactions with customer service teams to lead to a resolution. No friction, no bumps. Technology is changing, too. AI has never been more available, and bots are more sophisticated than ever before. That's why businesses are looking for ways to introduce bots in customer conversations.

Reducing customer service costs while still providing a five-star customer experience doesn’t happen by magic. Find out how tailoring your customer service into tiers can solve this challenge.

Suddenly you have a spike in Ticket Volume, but you didn’t see it coming? Don't panic! The first step to effectively manage any help desk is to measure this service desk metric. Organizations want to provide the best possible support to their customers. Several metrics can help them analyze trends, forecast future demand, and optimize support team resources to provide better service. Understanding metrics leads to data-driven decisions.

Any customer support team receives a range of customer requests throughout the day. These can include requests for adding new users, “how-to” questions, password retrieval, and more. The requests are often recurring, and a technology-based customer support tool is needed to implement an agent workflow that allows easy and efficient management of each customer request.

Ticket triage is a central process of all service desks: when something goes wrong, it must be solved. It is at the heart of every support team's work and is related to what ITIL describes as Incident Management. Well implemented, triage can save time and help deliver consistent IT services, which is a main goal of all high-performing organizations. Complete service desk solutions include different features, such as automation, to triage support tickets simply and quickly.