It's a given that customers want help with their problems and to feel like you're hearing their suggestions. But how do they want this communication to happen?
Guess right, and you're rich. Guess wrong, and you may be out of business.
When it comes to online customer service, there are two main ways for customers to reach out to your team for help: they can either send an email or log in to a help desk portal.
Email is faster and easier for customers to use, requiring no additional logins. But email offers fewer benefits to customers and to companies. Help desk software that enables customers to log in does require a little more work, and trust, from customers. But it also offers a lot of value.
Despite the extra step, a help desk portal offers so many benefits for both customers and businesses that it's a better solution than email over the long term. In this post, I'll explain why I believe this is true.
What is a help desk portal and what are the benefits?
What do I mean when I talk about a help desk portal? I'm talking about any system that requires the end user (an employee or customer/client of your organization) to log into a separate website to get help.
So what's so great about logging in?
In a portal, customers can submit their issues, ideas, and questions publicly or privately. This is potentially very powerful for a few reasons.
When you handle queries via email it's usually a one-to-one conversation. A user asks a question or offers a suggestion and an agent provides a response. Sometimes agents will work together behind the scenes, or an agent will forward or escalate a ticket. But generally speaking it's a two-person conversation.
A portal allows many people to work on the same issue at once. This makes your customers happier and saves time for your agents.
Here are some things users can do in a portal that they can't do via email.
1. Customers can search for solutions
Chances are, not every question or suggestion you get as a customer service agent is brand spanking new. Oftentimes customers ask the same questions over and over again. This leaves customers waiting for an answer while agents either having to repeat themselves, or go look up where the canned answer is stored to copy and paste it into an email. It's a waste of time for both parties.
In a portal, you can create a knowledge base. This is a central repository of information relevant to your users. It can include frequently asked questions and their answers, tutorials, how-to guides, and more.
Here's an example of a search-driven knowledge base from Atlassian.
Example of a search-driven knowledge base (Source)
2. Customers can offer feedback on your content
Over time, you can make your knowledge base more effective by asking customers whether they find your answers, tutorials, and how-to guides helpful. This allows you to reap the benefits of great content while focusing your energy on improving low-performing content. Here's an example from Raco's knowledge base.
3. Customers can solve each others' problems
Another huge benefit to customers and to agents is that in an interactive help desk portal, customers can add comments to theirs and others' discussions. This saves agents time as users help each other.
It also enables customers to get to know each other and build community around your brand.
“Your knowledge base is even better when paired with an online community where your audience can gather to share information and help each other," writes Atlassian head of product marketing Christophe Capel.
In some cases, customers can vote for their favorite solutions. This surfaces better answers to the top; in some cases the answers from customers are better than agent's.
One example of this community help desk is Atlassian Answers, a help desk portal that allows users to ask questions, interact with each other, and vote for topics they find most exciting ideas and requests they want Atlassian to see sooner.
Here's what it looks like when a community member asks a question that was up-voted and answered by other community members:
An Atlassian Answers question that was up-voted and answered by other community members (Source)
4. Customers can take control
In a portal, customers are far more in control than with email. For example, when a user logs in to a portal they can often track their requests without having to ask for a status update from an agent.
For example, RepairShopr allows you to see where your ticket is in the progression towards resolution in the help desk portal.
See where your ticket is in the progression towards resolution in the help desk portal (Source)
Users can also add to and edit their personal information such as age, location, and headshot. More accurate information about your customers helps you offer more personalized service and marketing. And in 2018, personalization will help differentiate brands.
Here's an example from Atlassian Answers:
User data in Atlassian Answers (Source)
The main drawbacks to a help desk portal
Of course, a help desk portal isn't a perfect solution. Here are some things to consider before investing in building one.
Any website that allows users to submit information must be moderated. “Our experience shows that unmoderated Q&A communities are the most likely to fail." Capel writes.
In addition, the more customer data you're storing, the more of a target you are for hackers.
Be sure you have the resources available to devote to moderation and cybersecurity before setting up your help desk portal.
What to do next
Despite the minor drawbacks, I recommend that businesses adopt a help desk portal over email for customer service because it:
Saves time for customers and agents
Helps you gather actionable feedback from users on your content
Gives users the chance to get to know and help each other
Allows users to check on the progression of their tickets without having to wait for an agent to respond
If you decide you're ready to explore setting up a help desk portal, check out our help desk software directory. It allows you to narrow your options down by feature, and looking at the options with knowledge base functionality is an excellent place to start your search. There are more than 150 web-based help desk products with knowledge base capability in our directory. You can then narrow down your options further by only seeing the best options as rated by users.