Clients today interact with custom software development companies through a variety of communication channels. Using a help desk solution streamlines your agents’ job duties because they can get and communicate with customers’ issues from a unified workspace and provide personalized, high-quality customer support. Support automation or custom software development allows you to save 670 working hours annually, cut the phone calls by 10%, and free up 25% of your help desk resources for incident resolution.
Benefits of a Help Desk Automation Platform
Help desk automation tools enable software development companies to elevate their customer service by automating ticket processing and providing customers with status updates on their requests. Furthermore, they can automatically send out customer surveys to collect customer feedback to analyze your agents’ performance and provide training as needed.
The following are some of the several advantages of implementing help desk automation or a custom software automated ticketing system:
When getting customer queries via various communication channels, a help desk solution will aid in gathering all information needed and routing a customer to the appropriate agent, reducing response time.
- Increased agents’ productivity
According to 86 percent of development companies, automated solutions have helped to increase employee productivity. Automation of repetitive help desk tasks (ticket registration, filling out customer information, and so on) and self-service capabilities for customers save agents time and let them focus on more challenging tasks.
- They improved customer experience
Customers expect problems to be resolved as soon as possible. Natural language processing chatbots can assist customers in resolving minor issues without interfering with your agents.
Top 5 Help Desk Automation Software
- Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Hallmark features:
- Omni-channel helps enable agents to resolve customer issues through multiple channels such as email, social media, etc.
- Self-service portals – developing a self-service portal where customers can search for solutions to their problems or request assistance.
- Customer Voice entails creating and automatically distributing customer surveys to gather customer feedback across multiple channels. It aids in understanding the strong and weak points of customer service.
- Power Virtual Agent – developing, testing, and deploying a chatbot with natural language processing capabilities capable of resolving common customer issues.
- Dashboards and reports – automatically generate reports to track the performance of your agents.
Limitations: There are only a few integrations with third-party services.
Pricing:
- Professional Edition – $50 user/month.
- Enterprise Edition – $95 user/month.
- Virtual Agent – $1,100 tenant/month.
Hallmark features:
- Omni-channel helps assign issues submitted by customers of a custom software development firm through various communication channels (web, email, phone, chat, social media, and so on) to the appropriate agent based on skills and availability.
- Service process automation – create rule-based customer service workflows with service process automation.
- Contextual AI-powered recommendations for agents help in following to provide a better customer experience.
- Self-service portals and communities: It utilizes a drag-and-drop editor, creates self-service portals and communities, and integrates a knowledge base into them. It includes a chat where clients of a company can ask agents for assistance if they cannot resolve their issues on their own.
- Einstein bot – developing, testing, and launching a chatbot with built-in natural language processing capabilities to answer common questions without the assistance of a human agent.
Limitations: There is no option for on-premises implementation.
Pricing:
- Essentials Edition – $25 user/month (billed annually).
- Professional Edition – $75 user/month (billed annually).
- Enterprise Edition – $150 user/month (billed annually).
- Unlimited Edition – $300 user/month (billed annually).
Hallmark features:
- Advanced Work Assignment – defining routing factors so that tickets are automatically assigned to FortySeven IT (https://fortyseven47.com/) agents based on their availability, skills, and affinity
- Virtual agents are beginning the development of chatbots that will get integrated into self-service customer portals to resolve common customer issues.
- Predictive intelligence: Machine learning capabilities are used to evaluate case models, automatically classify and route tickets, and suggest ways to resolve issues more quickly.
- Communities – making forums for your customers and employees to share ideas, experiences, and solutions; linking customers to FortySeven software professionals to find an answer to the problems instantly; analyzing forum conversations better to comprehend your customers’ and employees’ demands.
Limitations:
- Customization options are limited.
- There are only a few integrations with third-party services.
Pricing:
- CSM Standard – $125 user/month.
- CSM Professional – $175 user/month.
- Virtual Agent CSM add-on – $25,000/year.
- 1,000 additional portal visits – $60/month.
Hallmark features:
- Web Widget and Mobile SDKs – combining FAQ bits or live chats into every other app or website.
- Answer Bot – developing AI-powered chatbots or starting mobile app development to provide instant answers to common questions for your customers.
- Reports and dashboards – use 20+ built-in reports to track key help desk metrics (first response time, customer satisfaction, etc.).
- Satisfaction Prediction Scores – determining which features are probable to occur in customer satisfaction based on previous customer support and satisfaction rating data from your software development agent.
Limitations: Customization options are restricted.
Pricing:
- Essentials Edition – $5 user/month.
- Team Edition – $19 user/month.
- Professional Edition – $49/user/month.
- Enterprise Edition – $99 user/month.
- Elite Edition – $199 user/month.
- Answer Bot – $50/month.
Hallmark features:
- Canned responses – composing pre-formatted responses to the most frequently asked customer questions
- Automatic email notifications – notify customers when changes to their tickets occur.
- Freshconnect integration – enables you to discuss tickets with a custom software developer from across your software development company directly from the helpdesk.
- Freddy AI – developing a chatbot to interact with customers and solve common problems.
Limitations:
- There are only a few social media integrations.
- Report customization options are limited.
Pricing:
- Blossom Edition – $15/user/month (billed annually).
- Garden Edition – $35/user/month (billed annually).
- Estate Edition – $49/user/month (billed annually).
- Forest Edition – $99/user/month (billed annually).
- Freddy Ultimate – $75/agent/month + $500/ Freddy sessions/month.
Achieve Better Customer Service With Help Desk Automation
Help desk automation can help you provide better customer service.
An custom software or automated help desk improves the quality of service you provide to customers. Because process automation and streamlined knowledge sharing enable your agents to respond to and resolve customer issues more quickly, contact FortySeven or any custom software agency for assistance in selecting and implementing a help desk automation platform.
Hanna Shnaider describes how help desk automation contributes to a positive customer experience. You can learn more about her here.