What You Should Consider in a Standard Help Desk Protocol
Despite the evolution of help desks, many businesses still find it hectic to utilize their advantages.
They continue to experience chaos, find it hard to motivate the support team and customers. The solution is using a standard help desk protocol.
You might be wondering,
- What is help desk protocol?
- How will applying help desk protocol benefit your business?
- How does a typical help desk operating procedure appear?
If you have any of the above questions, worry no more.
This article answers what, why, when, and how you can use the significant tool. What more should you know about the help desk standard operating procedure? Find out below.
Why You Need a Help Desk Protocol
Before understanding the role of a help desk in business, it would be best to define it.
A help desk protocol is a group of procedures for handling inquiries in business. It composes the customers, support agents, salespeople, departmental managers, and chief managers.
The primary reasons for applying a standard help desk protocol are
- Pioneering change
- Attracting consistency
- Simplifying training
- Boosting efficiency
- Fostering fairness
Promoting Change
One of the best parts about a help desk protocol is that it ensures business adaptability. It positions your business as a market leader. That is possible because the guidelines shape that decision-making in your company.
Your organized business handles customer expectations reliably.
Additionally, support staff knows their expectations and form of motivation. Therefore, they can channel their energy to maximum output because they expect a specific degree of compensation.
Be Consistent
A standard help desk protocol ensures you maintain quality and quantity of service.
For instance, it lets you eliminate errors that would occur during help desk ticketing. Mostly, chaos rise when support agents cross the boundary of their roles.
Besides, they could forget the procedures of tackling particular customer inquiries. Such mistakes could lead to massive data and sales losses.
However, with a classic help desk protocol, you serve many customers efficiently due to error minimization and role awareness.
Ease Training
Documented guidelines speed up agent training. New support staff finds learning simplified because the protocol outlines their roles. They easily fit in the organization's culture.
Boost Efficiency
Help desk protocol drastically reduces staff questions that would make customer service slower. That is possible because the staff and customers know where to find answers to simple questions.
In the long run, the team can give more attention to the most technical questions. That leads to overall output quality.
Promote Equity
One of the worst scenarios that you can ever experience in your business in the competitive fast-paced business world is customers complaining of being discriminated against.
However, with a standard help desk protocol, you give all customers the equal potential to get assigned tickets. Besides, they can track the progress of the tickets before closure on satisfaction.
3 Factors to Consider in a Standard Help Desk Protocol
The best help desk protocol should entail the following:
1. Version History
You should find it easy to track request version, approval, and revision date. You should be able to monitor changes in the version description.
Most importantly, you should find out the author of the ticket versions. That makes it comfortable to track issues and solve complaints that may later arise from a particular ticket.
2. Complete
A comprehensive protocol presents you with an introduction, procedures, agent details, and customer guidance.
The introduction describes the help desk department. It then discusses target customers and their needs. Procedures entail agent responsibilities and boundaries.
For example, they know how to report or address issues. The procedures guide you into customer metadata to gather, such as country language and ticket details.
A typical help desk protocol outlines support team information and procedures. Some of the details are the login method and support portal, such as phone numbers and addresses.
The document shows tickets completed and the customer support duration per agent.
Lastly, a complete help desk protocol explains to the customer the expected response upon submitting a question.
For example, should the customer expect a detailed email acknowledgment? The consumer should also know how to track the ticket and follow up on the inquiry.
3. Priority Matrix
A typical help desk protocol clarifies how to handle ranks of issues. A standard grading should have critical, high, medium, and normal tickets depending on attention needs.
Conclusion
Before investing in the help desk protocol, you should understand its significance. Next, you should ensure it is completed with a priority matrix and ticket versions.