3 Crazy Ways Your Customer Help Desk Can Improve Your Organization
Your customer help desk is probably one of the most poorly used groups in your organization. Your help desk has more contact with actual, paying customers then anyone else in your company. But too often organizations limit the role of the help desk to simply closing out help tickets or answering support calls. Here are three suggestions for getting a lot more out of your help desk:
1. Have Your Help Desk Develop New Products
Your help desk team talks with customers all day. They will often speak with customers who are trying to use your product to do a job that it wasn’t designed to do. If your help desk gets enough similar requests it might be a sign that there is an opportunity for a new product. Have your help desk team enhance your existing product or create a new complimentary product that will work for these customers.
2. Have Your Help Desk Fix Bugs In Your Software
The help desk has to hear customers complain about bugs in your software all day long. If you put the help desk in charge of fixing bugs in your software the most important bugs will get fixed first.
3. Have Your Help Desk Write Your Software Documentation
Your help desk knows what questions customers have. They know how to answer those questions. Let them write your documentation and you will get help files that are more useful to your customers.
By this point in the article you are probably thinking:
“Is he crazy? You can’t have the help desk develop products, fix software bugs and write software documentation.”
No, you probably couldn’t with most help desk teams. But what if you had someone from your product management, software development and documentation teams “man the phones” once a week? Each one of those people would go back to their teams with an amazing amount of insight. Your products would be better. Your most important bugs would get fixed faster. Your documentation would be better.
It’s not about making your help desk people do things they weren’t trained to do. It’s about getting everyone in your organization on the help desk team.
Think this is crazy? Freshbooks has been doing this for awhile with what appears to be great success.
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July 14th, 2010 at 3:08 pm
Or do the reverse of the PMs getting on the phones (though I think that may bring on a good dose of reality): Have someone from the help desk participate in brainstorming, planning, and prioritizing. Have them review documentation and suggest additional material. Use their knowledge base (I’m currently developing task topics based on some knowledge base articles that help desk agents have written).
July 14th, 2010 at 3:41 pm
Ben- What you suggest is great in theory. But in practice it’s not quite the same. PMs should definitely talk to the help desk but it is a little like someone telling you what it is like to be in war. Hearing about it and actually being there are two very different things.
That is great that you are creating task topics from content created by help desk agents. I think that is a great approach. Have help desk agents create content and let technical writers refine or rework it.