Perfecting Help Desk Workflows: Problems, Causes, and Solutions

Posted by
Tetiana Belevska

Updated October 21, 2024

When customers experience great customer service, 91% are more likely to make another purchase from the same company. This single fact says a lot about the importance of excellent customer service.

Meanwhile, a path to an effective customer support strategy and well-oiled help desk workflows isn’t typically smooth sailing. Fortunately, there’s a remedy to each hiccup along this journey.

If you’ve already embarked on this endeavor and see that your help desk workflows require fine-tuning, this article is for you. Here, we'll discuss the common problems support service teams experience, describe their possible causes, and suggest solutions to them.

Support Service Problems and How to Solve Them

Customer service may seem easy for small companies that don’t have too many customers. But once the customer base grows beyond a certain point, support service teams often face multiple challenges that affect their quality of service.

Let’s take a closer look at the most common problems, their causes, and possible solutions.

Problem #1: Long waits

Customers don't receive timely support when they reach out to the help desk.

Causes

• Manual data entry. All customer questions are answered by support agents, even common ones, and agents have to enter all data manually.
• Missing interaction history. Help desk personnel can’t quickly find customer interaction histories or solutions to the customer’s problem.
• No standard operating procedures. Employees don't have standard procedures for addressing customer inquiries.
• Outdated software. The customer support software (if there’s one in place) isn’t configured to the company's needs, is outdated, or personnel doesn’t use the software to its full potential.

Fixes

First of all, start by reviewing your employees' work processes, ask them what would make it easier for them to do their jobs, and even try posing as a customer to experience first-hand how your team handles inquiries.

Next, depending on the cause of the problem, you can take one or several actions:

• Create a knowledge base so customers can look up answers to common questions themselves.
• Acquire a help desk solution and configure it for your needs. You should have a solution that automates certain processes, consolidates support channels, and keeps all important customer and company data accessible.
• Create and introduce standard operating procedures, thorough training sessions, and a knowledge base for employees to access whenever they need it.

Problem #2: Too many support requests

An inability to cope with customer demand for support, especially in a growing company, is one of the most common reasons for poor quality of customer service.

Causes

• Lack of self-service options. If you think your customers only need live agents, you are wrong: 81% of customers prefer self-service options. So, if your customers can’t resolve even the most minor issues without contacting support agents, it’s time to change.
• Lack of automation. It takes too much time for employees to manually create each new ticket, they fall behind, and they can’t possibly process all the customer requests.
• Lack of priorities. Even with a ticketing system, your employees may spend too much time addressing non-urgent issues instead of urgent ones.
• Lack of staff. You simply might not be having enough agents in your support department.

Fixes

• Create a knowledge base based on the frequency of questions asked by your customers so customers can address minor issues themselves without contacting an agent.
• Integrate chatbots that, depending on the complexity of the underlying algorithms, can simply collect information for tickets or send articles from the knowledge base to customers. An AI-based bot can even provide full, informative answers interactively, taking on a significant chunk of repetitive tasks.
• Automate everything that can be automated, from creating and assigning tickets to prioritizing and escalating support requests in help desk software. For example, a powerful help desk system can display urgent requests like "Call within 15 minutes" and less critical requests like "Answer via email within 24 hours." It can also remind employees to resolve requests as deadlines approach.
  Although this process can be challenging for team members with little knowledge of the help desk solution’s capabilities, you can hire professionals who know how to design help desk workflows for a growing business.
• Hire more personnel if you have too many requests and self-service and automation helped, but your team is still inundated.

Problem #3: Employee burnout

Employee burnout is bad news for any help desk team. When support agents don't want to work due to stress, they perform poorly or just quit. You then have to overload other team members while recruiting and onboarding new employees. So, it's in your best interest to prevent burnout.

Causes

Mundane tasks are one of the main threats to employees' well-being, leading to burnout and making them feel underappreciated. Other causes include:

• High workload. Your agents need to address more issues than they can handle.
• Unclear expectations from management. Your employees don’t know what is required and make mistakes because they don’t know the rules.
• Feeling undervalued by the management. Your agents feel their concerns aren’t heard.

Fixes

Depending on the underlying cause, you’ll use one or several tips from below:

• If a high workload is causing burnout, use the same solutions listed for Problem #2 (too many support requests). Creating a knowledge base, introducing chatbots, using automation, and in some cases, hiring more agents will take a considerable chunk of your support team’s workload off their shoulders. If they can spend less time on mundane tasks, they can focus on more meaningful, more engaging tasks.
• If unclear expectations are the cause, introduce a comprehensive set of rules. Formulate clear requirements for employees to meet. Write down workflow procedures for the various types of customer requests, develop key performance indicators (KPIs) for support agents, and formulate criteria for receiving bonuses. When given clear guidelines and expectations, employees won’t feel lost or frustrated.
• If poor communication is the cause, reevaluate management’s communication style and the corporate culture as a whole. Create a supportive environment for employees where they can easily voice their concerns and share ideas for improving processes.

Now that you know how to prevent help desk staff burnout, let's move to another problem with similar causes but different outcomes.

Problem #4: Inconsistent support

You may be wondering what inconsistent support means. Well, we’ll give an example.

Suppose a customer reaches support through multiple communication channels or contacts support several times with one request. With inconsistent support, this customer might be treated differently every time they contact your team.

Causes

• Silos exist between channels and agents. Silos isolate agents from each other, prevent integration across channels, and impede communication.
• Lack of standard procedures. When there are no standard operating procedures, customer support and solutions with be inconsistent and inefficient.
• No automation software. Manually entered information is prone to errors and inconsistencies.
• Inefficient help desk workflows. Inefficient processes promote suboptimal performance.

Fixes

Here are the best ways to improve consistency in help desk services and gain customer loyalty.

• Introduce standard procedures for serving specific types of requests and for routing customers to specialized support agents.
• Provide an omnichannel support solution that collects and displays customer interaction histories across all channels and automates repetitive processes. And, of course, you should train your support service to use these tools and follow the standard processes and procedures.
• Set up and enforce help desk workflows in a way that mirrors your customer journey.

Problem #5: No effective performance measures

If you don't have objective data on your team’s performance, you won’t know if they’re doing something right or wrong until it's too late. But what causes such a lack of visibility into team performance? Let’s see below.

Causes

• You don't have tracking tools to collect customer support performance data, such as customer feedback or support ticket logs.
• You don’t have analysis tools to evaluate the team's performance.

Fixes

This problem can be fixed by integrating tools and practices for collecting and analyzing data. The following steps will come in handy here:

1. Define metrics to track for measuring help desk performance. Consider customer service KPIs, such as first response time, average ticket handling time, and customer satisfaction rate.
2. Set up or integrate data analytics services as needed.
3. Integrate automated workflows to collect data and analyze data.
4. Train your team to collect feedback about employee experience if automated solutions are unavailable.

This way, you’ll have detailed reports on your team's performance and, if you have AI-based analytics tools, the AI will even suggest areas and methods for improvement.

Problem #6: High cost of inefficient help desk workflows

Does your help desk devour more budget than it should? Chances are, you have one or more of the issues below.

Causes

• You haven’t automated routine processes, leading your employees to complete tasks manually, reducing efficiency.
• Silos between agents and communication channels promote a decentralized system where agents can’t collaborate.
• Lack of knowledge of team performance enables inefficiencies to persist, leading to unnecessary spending.
• Your staff has inadequate training on the help desk system and can’t use it to its full potential.
• Agent burnout leads to increased turnover rates, higher staffing costs, and exhausted unproductive agents.

Fixes

• Automate processes where possible to optimize operations.
• Create self-service solutions, like a knowledge base and chatbots, to cover minor issues.
• Implement omnichannel support with centralized data to enable collaboration between agents.
• Integrate analytics tools and practices.
• Use best practices for training and supporting your staff, so they can use get the most of help desk system’s tools.
• Free service agents from routine tasks to help your team operate more efficiently and prevent employee burnout.

As you can see, most problems can be solved by increasing staff training and optimizing help desk workflows. But if you buy new software, you’ll also need to deal with migrating your existing data.

Help Desk Migration Improves Performance Without Hassle

In many cases, the most cost-effective solution for scaling a help desk operation and improving customer support is to buy a new help desk system. Moving to a new platform allows you to leverage multiple automation tools. But migrating data can be scary — data can be lost or mismatched during migration, and the process can takes ages.

But with Help Desk Migration, you need not be afraid, and you’ll quickly see the benefits of platform migration for help desk efficiency.

Help Desk Migration software lets you migrate data from legacy help desk platforms or from simple apps like Gmail to advanced tools and technologies for optimizing help desk workflows by simply clicking on the data you want to transfer. With Help Desk Migration, you can:

As you can see, data migration doesn’t have to be a complicated and time-consuming process. And of course, it shouldn't stand in your way of applying continuous improvement strategies for help desk operations.

How to Build a Successful Support Strategy for Your Business

Businesses tend to face challenges and issues when growing their customer base. Often, support service has to deal with most customer issues. However, well-tailored help desk software can solve most support team issues by automating mundane tasks, organizing customer data, and providing a knowledge base with ready answers to common questions.

Still, to achieve superior results, you have to choose the right software, set up a help desk workflow, and provide employees with training and clear instructions. Otherwise, you may still face problems like long response times, staff burnout, service inconsistencies, and increased expenses.

On your journey to technological transformation, at least you won't need to worry about transferring data — Help Desk Migration will take care of it for you.