For business-to-consumer (B2C) enterprises, a help desk is one thing you should never overlook. Satisfying your users is the foundation of your customer experience. However, when it comes to UX, refining your help desk process can be even more important. In fact, help desks form a part of your UX, contributing to the experience of all your users.
Help desks have so many use cases that can help your users deal with problems, onboard new employees, and more. So, how can you refine your help desk processes?
What Is a Help Desk Ticketing Process Flow?
A help desk is the first point of contact between your users and your team. If a client needs help, they’ll go to the help desk to solve it. It’s not just for customers, though. Although its primary purpose may be to help your customer base, it can also benefit your staff.
The use cases are practically endless. When your users can’t figure out how to set up a profile, they’ll turn to the help desk. When employees can’t log into the system, it’s the support desk to the rescue. But how does the process work in practice?
Essentially, the user heads to the help desk and opens a ticket. This ticket is what employees working on the help desk look at to try and diagnose the problem. If they pass the issue on to a colleague, the ticket explains the history of the problem up to this point.
As a result, ticket management is one of the most crucial parts of a help desk flow. Having the right process in place will ensure that the flow is simpler for both users and agents. It helps you:
- Assign and prioritize tickets
- Organize tickets
- Escalate problems in the most effective way
- Resolve issues
Now that you know what the process entails, you need to learn how to create a system. And how to create a good one at that. But first, where does UX fit into the picture?
The UX of Help Desks
Help desks are inherently about customer satisfaction. It’s their raison d’être! UX, too, is all about ensuring users get a positive, streamlined experience when interacting with a product.
If you design your help desk with UX in mind, you can contribute to better satisfaction. Imagine you had a problem logging into your favorite social media app. You need customer service assistance, but getting through to the help desk is a huge challenge. There are buttons all over the place, and it’s not clear what each one means. You have to answer twelve security questions before you can chat with an agent. All of these things cause friction, and by the time the user gets help, they’re already irritated.
Instead, design teams should try to create intuitive and meaningful experiences for their users. So, throughout the process, make sure you consider all the typical UI best practices and usability heuristics.
If you choose to use help desk software, UX is absolutely something you should consider in the selection process.
6 Steps To Create a Helpdesk Ticket System
With UX in mind, it’s time to create a helpdesk ticket system. Generally, there are six steps you can follow.
1. Set Your Goals
Prioritizing clear goal-setting is the first step. What does “success” even look like? You might determine that your help desk is successful if you have an average response time of under an hour. This is a great metric to use, by the way. After all, 71% of 16-24-year-olds believe that quick customer service improves their user experience. Alternatively, you could determine success by first-time resolution or net promoter score.
Either way, you need to decide what a good customer experience means to you and set measurable goals.
2. Define the Scope of the Help Desk
As much as you might want it to, your help desk can’t do everything. So, you need to decide exactly what the desk will offer and how you will manage these services.
To make these decisions, think about these questions:
- How many requests do you receive per day? Your ticket volume can determine how much you can cover.
- Where do these requests come from? Are you going to offer omnichannel support?
- Which departments resolve the issues? You also need to decide which employees are responsible for handling the tickets and which ones.
- What are your service level agreements (SLAs)? Defining your SLAs will help you build a ticketing process that meets expectations.
3. Use the Right Software
Many teams use software to help them build a help desk flow more easily. There are tons of options, all with different features, so it’s important to research the best options.
Some software comes with different options for organizing and assigning tickets, while others have robust features for knowledge bases. Some even offer CRM integration.
When making your decision, think about budgeting and customization options beyond just features. That said, you should also consider ease of use. Your support team should be able to provide exceptional service no matter their level of technical expertise. So, they should be able to learn how to use the software and navigate it easily.
UX matters for your employees, too!
4. Create a Process Flow
Next, you need to actually build the flow. Depending on the software you’re using, you might be able to do this really easily.
When building your flow, you need to do all the things you normally do for UX research. It’s like building a user flow. Think about where your users might encounter issues with the product and how they’ll try to contact you. From there, you can map out the process across the various touchpoints.
- Consider where users will go first. Is there an opportunity for them to self-solve the issue?
- Think about how users will get into contact with your desk agents. Who will they contact first? Are there levels for possible escalations?
- Ensure the workflow is flexible enough to cope with various demands.
- Provide guidelines for your agents, ensuring they understand the process clearly.
Map your flow from start to finish with a clear way to resolve problems and close the ticket.
5. Build a Knowledge Base
Self-solving is a key part of a help desk. For common questions and minor issues, your users might not want to go through the hassle of contacting an agent. Instead, there should be somewhere they can go to get answers and troubleshoot themselves.
A knowledge base gives consumers this option. Essentially, it consists of a bank of articles and tutorials to help them solve issues on their own. Trust us, both your users and your agents will be glad this exists!
6. Iterate and Optimize
If there’s one golden rule of UX, it’s iteration. You need to constantly refine and optimize your UX, and that includes improving your customer service desks. The best way to do this is to continuously collect customer feedback, following up interactions with a simple survey. Based on this feedback, you can improve your flow.
Ideally, this involves updating and honing your knowledge base articles, altering the task flow, or improving the UI. Remember those goals you defined at the beginning? You can also start to hone your help desk to work on achieving them.
Creating a Help Desk Escalation Process Flow Chart
Unfortunately, not all tickets are easy to solve. As a result, you’ll need a help desk escalation process to deal with those trickier issues. Customer service, after all, is a team effort, and some agents might be unable to resolve certain problems.
There are two types of escalation:
- Functional: The ticket escalates due to a lack of knowledge or skills.
- Hierarchical: The ticket escalates because the issue demands managerial attention or approval.
Your customer service team should be able to handle these escalations as swiftly and efficiently as possible. To do that, it’s helpful to develop a help desk escalation process flow chart. Essentially, this is a guide that will help your agents understand when and how to escalate a ticket. Think of the flow chart as a visual guide, like a task flow, that highlights the process of escalation.
Here are some best practices for ticket escalation:
- Avoid unnecessary escalations where possible.
- Ensure your team has as few knowledge gaps as possible, preventing the need for functional escalations.
- Evaluate your escalated tickets regularly and see if you can avoid recurring instances.
- Encourage consistent communication among the team so that they can deal with hierarchical escalations swiftly.
Common Problems With the Support Ticket Process Flow
Understanding the common problems with help desk processes can help you avoid them. There are two primary issues that design teams encounter with the support ticket process flow. Let’s explore them in more detail.
Not Designing for Multiple Channels
Many businesses accept tickets from different channels, whether it’s via phone, email, or social media. There could also be a dedicated portal. Your help desk workflow needs to take this into account, thinking about where customers come from. A user might contact you first via email before following up by calling. If you raise two separate tickets, the user has to explain the problem twice, creating friction.
If you’re providing omnichannel support, make sure you have a way to coordinate between them.
Not Collaborating Across Departments
As we said before, customer service is a team effort. Your help desk needs to facilitate seamless collaboration across departments. That way, the different departments involved in solving the tickets can all understand each other.
Some software integrates with existing asset management software. This is a factor to consider when choosing a platform for your help desk.
How To Improve Help Desk Process: Best Practices
So, do you want to make your help desk absolutely flawless? These best practices will help you understand how to improve the help desk process.
1. Automate It
Automation will make your support system much more efficient. It reduces the manual effort your team needs to put in by providing automatic updates when they resolve a ticket. Simple things like this might seem minor, but it will save a huge amount of time in the long run!
2. Gamify It
Gamification might not seem important, but it can greatly improve your workflow. It improves the user experience, after all, which has an effect on satisfaction.
Consider, for example, setting up a points system for the agents dealing with tickets. The more points they earn, the more badges they can collect. With a leaderboard, their desire to satisfy customers becomes even more intense.
You can cater to these elements to suit your specific goals.
3. Centralize It
With omnichannel support, there might be multiple touchpoints. It’s vital to centralize all the information that comes with a ticket. That way, any new agent that deals with the ticket can see what has happened in the past. This will make your customers much happier because the agent will know exactly what to do next!
4. Personalize It
Customers crave personalization. Providing ways for your users to deal with things in their own way will greatly improve their experience. For example, simply providing multiple channels can help them to feel comfortable. Also, offering a self-service portal can help users address minor concerns quickly and easily without much effort.
5. Iterate It
You’re probably sick of hearing it, but continuous iterations are highly necessary. Make sure you track and analyze how your help desk is working. That way, you can continue to improve it as time goes on.
Build Better UX With Page Flows
A help desk is one way to keep your customers happy, but you also need to improve your UX all-round. So, with the help desk process nailed, it’s time to focus on other aspects of the user experience.
When you’re in need of design inspiration, why not learn from proven products? Page Flows is a helpful resource for finding interaction design ideas. Get started today to access our growing library of user flow recordings and finally stay up-to-date with current design trends.
