How Using a Help Desk Service Impacted These Six Brands
Table of contents
Any business leader knows this – your marketing team brings in prospects into the funnel, your sales team converts them into customers, and your customer support team helps retain them.
Let’s specifically look at customer support’s role here. If they don’t provide the right kind of assistance in a timely manner, there’s a good chance that you risk losing customers.
In fact, Hiver found out that 72% of customers are ready to switch brands after just one negative experience.
So, how can your support team consistently provide experiences that are memorable? Furthermore, how can they ensure that these experiences improve loyalty and retention metrics?
That’s where having the right help desk service makes a difference.
Table of Contents
- A Brief Overview of Help Desk Services
- 6 Real-life Examples of Brands Using Help Desk Services
- The Benefits of Using Help Desk Services
- Final Word
A Brief Overview of Help Desk Services
A help desk service is a tool designed to help you address any technical problem or query your customers might have about your products and/or services. Simply put, it facilitates smoother communication between your customers and your customer support team.
Most help desk services bring several different channels of communication – email, live chat, phone, social media, and more – under one roof. Support teams can organize, sort, and prioritize incoming tickets. The primary goal of such a help desk service or program is to ensure that no queries or complaints slip through the cracks and that your customers get timely, helpful responses.
Let’s look at some real life examples of brands using help desk services and how it impacted them.
6 Real-life Examples of Brands Using Help Desk Services
Let’s look at a few of the many success stories of brands that use Hiver for customer support to better understand the various ways using a help desk can benefit your business and your customers.
1. Flexport
Flexport, founded in 2013, is a freight forwarding and customs brokerage company based in San Francisco, California. They are on a mission to foster free trade across the world through technology. Their full-service logistics platform uses state-of-the-art software to fix the user experience in global trade.
The Challenge:
The team at Flexport receives about 1000 customer emails per month. In order to assign these emails, the team would either forward them to the relevant people or share the subject line with them on Slack. This meant that emails often got missed. Customers were left waiting for a reply.
Establishing ownership for these emails was another nightmare as the Ocean Freight Operations Manager at Flexport, Nathan Strang, would have to spend a lot of time manually finding out who was working on the email — and then ask them what happened to it.
They opted for a helpdesk service to manage their emails and were able to see the benefits right from day one.
The Result:
Saved 387 hours in a month. Resolved customer queries 50% faster.
When Nathan has to assign emails to a team member, he simply tags the email with the team member’s name. So now every mail has an owner and there’s clear accountability. No emails get missed.
When a team member needs Nathan’s input on an email, they just have to write a Note to him, as opposed to forwarding the email or reaching out on chat. Similarly, if teammates have to discuss a customer query among themselves, they write Notes to each other.
Working with the team is much easier because there are no internal email exchanges like before. As a result, the team has been able to resolve customer emails 50% faster.
2. New Hope Fertility Center
New Hope Fertility Center (NHFC),a New York-based fertility clinic, is a global leader in human reproductive medicine. Offering a variety of IVF treatments, NHFC prides itself on customizing treatment procedures for every patient – and proactively supporting them every step of the way to parenthood.
The Challenge:
Eech of the different departments within the clinic – nursing, lab, and billing -had a separate group email which they used to communicate with patients. But every time a customer emailed one of these group emails, all the members in that group would receive the same email in their personal inbox, i.e. all nurses in the nursing department, and so on. This meant, there was no easy way to find out if a patient’s email was responded to or not. NHFC gets over 2000 emails a week. So, this led to duplicate responses and unanswered emails.
Operations associate at NHFC, Jennfier Nguyen, tried out a few customer service tools but they were all complex and required multiple integrations. She then found a help desk service that could work on top of the Gmail inbox. This worked out well because her teams were already using Gmail and did not need much additional training to work with the help desk service.
The Result:
Saved 634 hours in a month. Staff efficiency up by 50%.
The help desk service could categorize emails into Unassigned, Open, and Closed. So there was no longer a need to manually check if a query has been responded to or not. Everyone has visibility on all patient emails – which ones are yet to be acted upon and which ones are resolved.
On top of that, the Collision Alerts feature notifies a team member in real-time (when they start replying to a query) that someone else is working on it. This further prevents two people replying to the same email in real-time. At NHFC, it prevents about 400 collisions in a month or 33 hours of their agents’ time.
Moreover, remote work has become a breeze for the employees of NHFC. Irrespective of where the staff is located, they’re able to have quick discussions by writing internal notes – which reside next to email threads.
3. Kiwi
Kiwi.com is a Czech online travel agency founded by Oliver Dlouhý. They started off in 2012 as SkyPicker.com and rebranded to Kiwi.com in 2016. They are a technology-centered solution that helps users book flights, trains, and buses at the best prices.
The Challenge:
David Pinto manages business development at Kiwi, where his team collaborates with airline and travel agency partners to consolidate ticket availability and pricing information. This is done primarily through email, averaging over 1,500 emails monthly. They used Gmail lists to distribute emails, but in this approach, every email was sent to every team member’s inbox. This made it tough to establish accountability.
As a result, one team member had to verbally announce they were handling each email.
Now although one person would be dealing with the email, all the others that got the email would have to delete it. This slowed down the team. For David too, keeping track of the status of each email was impossible this way. Not surprisingly, the team often failed to meet their SLA targets.
This is when they adopted a help desk service.
The Result:
Saved 167 hours in a month and achieved 100% SLA success rate.
Now that the team has moved to using shared inboxes, email queries can easily be assigned to people without needing them to announce that they’d be taking it up. Everyone is on the same page when it comes to who is working on what.
David now has visibility into the ownership and status of emails and individual performance of team members. He can stay on top of the overall workflow with ease. And subsequently, the team has achieved 100% SLA success rate.
In summary, the team’s a lot more efficient now and there’s no delay in responding to partners.
4. Air Comm
Air Comm is an award-winning wireless communications and solutions provider, founded in 1973.
The Challenge:
The company primarily uses Gmail for managing all their support queries. As the team scaled, it became difficult to find out who was working on which email. The only way Tai Roach, the support manager, could know if a support request was being worked on was when someone replied to the email with ‘Working on it!’.
There was a lack of visibility for Tai. Further, team members had to forward entire email threads while keeping colleagues in Cc — not the most efficient way to have a discussion on a support query.
Tai tried using an email collaboration tool to solve this but it didn’t work out for his team. She then switched to a more well-equipped, complete help desk service that was better suited to what his team needed.
The Result:
Saved 195 hours in a month and delivered 25% faster customer support.
Tai can now:
- automatically assign customer emails based on the availability of her team,
- track which query is assigned to whom, and
- see the status of every email (open/pending/closed).
Moreover, whenever a support team member needs help with a query, they can just tag a teammate next to the query and write a note to that person. This helps the team collaborate on emails without having to forward them internally.
5. CGX Systems
Founded in 2010, CGX Systems (A part of Cognionics, Inc.) is a leader in designing dry and mobile wireless EEG (electroencephalogram) systems.
The Challenge:
CGX’s sales team reaches out to prospects who have made inquiries about their products via email. As sales grew, it became harder for Ira Friedman, President at CGX Systems, to keep track of the emails. Some prospects received dual responses from members of the sales team, and some were left unanswered.
In order to centralize email communication, they ended up at Hiver.
The Result:
Saved $2500 in a month.
With Hiver, Ira can now:
- Identify unassigned emails and assign them to members of the sales team depending on the type of deal.
- Track which emails have been assigned to whom.
- View all email replies.
There’s more accountability now and dual responses have become a thing of the past. No inquiries go unanswered which means the team doesn’t lose any business.
Moreover, Hiver has helped the team collaborate seamlessly on prospect queries. This has increased their chances of closing deals.
6. BNI Alberta South
Business Network International (BNI) is an international networking organization that supports small business owners with networking opportunities and referrals. BNI Alberta South is a branch of the organization that focuses on assisting small businesses in southern Alberta, Canada.
The Challenge:
The Operations team at BNI Alberta South, consisting of three people, previously managed support emails using a shared Gmail ID. This made it difficult to track email status—whether a query was pending, in progress, or resolved.
The lack of visibility also caused work to become siloed, as team members couldn’t see what their colleagues were handling. They had to manually check emails for updates and coordinate via forwards and CCs, resulting in delays and inefficiencies.
After some research, they came across Hiver and opted for it.
The Result:
Saved 23 hours of man-power for a team of three people.
With Hiver, the team is not only able to attend to queries from their Gmail inbox but also get complete visibility into their status.
All incoming emails arrive in the Unassigned section which can be accessed from the Gmail side panel. Depending on which team member is in charge on a particular day, they respond to these emails one by one, right from this section. The ones that are resolved are then filed under the Closed section.
Hiver has brought structure to how the team members handle their daily workload. Using Hiver’s Email Tags, the team is able to categorize the different types of emails arriving inside their group inbox. For instance, all invoice-related emails from vendors are assigned a particular Tag. Similarly, all emails regarding application submissions are assigned a tag.
They’ve also been able to keep track of metrics such as first response time and average response time to get a clear, quantitative understanding of how efficiently the team handles incoming queries.
The Benefits of Using Help Desk Services
1. Centralize all support tickets
Help desk services allow your customers various different ways to get in touch with you whether that’s through phone call, live chat, email, or other methods.
More importantly, it helps centralize all these queries and requests into one single location. This way, all the information is present in one central location, and it’s easy to find and sort different kinds of queries based on urgency or importance.
Hiver, for instance, converts your inbox into a multi-channel help desk service. You can offer support to your customers through email, live chat, voice calls, or WhatsApp right from inside your inbox.
2. Organize and route incoming tickets
Good help desk services offer powerful organizing and routing functionalities so that you can ensure your team has a clear view of what they need to prioritize and everyone knows what they need to work on. Help desk services also let you automate the routing of the ticket to specific people within the team.
With Hiver, you can automate ticket routing in a bunch of different ways. You can specify conditions, which if the incoming email meets, will be assigned to a specific person. For example, emails containing the word ‘Payment’ in the subject line / mail body will be assigned to finance specialists.
3. Analyze data and provide insights
Help desk programs help you track your support team’s performance and the quality of assistance they provide. You get insights into stuff like:
1. Ticket Volume – How many tickets your agents are handling on a daily basis?
2. First Response Time – How long do your agents take to respond to customers for the first time since receiving the ticket?
3. Average Resolution Time – On average, how long does it take your agent to fully resolve a ticket?
4. CSAT score – How satisfied are your customers with the service they’ve received?
5. First Contact Resolution Rate – The percentage of tickets your agents resolve with the first response they give to customers i.e. on first contact.
And much more.
Now let’s say for instance, you’re noticing a very high average time to resolution, you can further drill down and see what category of tickets are taking long to resolve. You can also understand which agents have been working on these tickets and whether or not they need more support.
Recommended Read: 10 Customer Experience Metrics and KPIs Every Business Must Track
Final Word
I hope these 6 success stories will give you some insight into how using help desk services can benefit your business both in the short term and in the long run. As I said before, your marketing and sales teams need to operate in tandem with your support team.
Think of it this way – marketing brings in potential customers, sales turns them into paying customers, and support makes them loyal brand advocates.
If you’re looking for a help desk service that can run right on top of your inbox and has no learning curve, you should check out Hiver. Get started for free.
