Helpdesk software beats Inboxes every time for me

Photo by Mathyas Kurmann on Unsplash

Outlook’s “focused” mode is sh*t, when it comes to customer service inboxes!

In fact, in general email software clients are not great for handling customer services enquiries. From inbound queries ending up in spam to not being able to keep track of whether you’ve replied to someone.

At my previous employer we were getting several bad reviews which mentioned not getting a response to an email about their order.

Once you have more than a handful of emails a day you’ll want to move away from the traditional inbox to something more robust quite quickly.

1. Linking your ecommerce platform to Helpdesk

Most platforms will have an integration for your ecommerce platform, which will be able to show you order details alongside the inbound query from a customer (normally providing their email matches). This makes it much easier to know the context of a query. You can also see if they are a new or returning customer.

2. Reminders for queries without responses

Help prevent things slipping through the net and being missed, direct these to staff inboxes as a reminder to head to the helpdesk client and respond to queries. You’ll probably want these to escalate to a team leader over time, so they can give someone a gentle nudge/kick before the customer gets annoyed.

3. Linking your online chat to the helpdesk

Making sure that if someone chats about something and then emails in later, you don’t repeat yourself or start talking at cross purposes. Either auto linking based on email, or being able to merge tickets by hand.

4. Tracking performance of customer services

Keeping an eye on things like Time to first Reply can help you understand problems within your organisation.

5. Macros or auto replies

For all those commonly asked questions, you can create stock replies, so that you can reply to a customer in close to a single click.

Love to hear your reasons for switching to a help desk solution below.