Poor customer support costs brands $83 each year in the U.S. alone. Active investment in exceptional customer support can produce lucrative returns and can combat customer loss. A combined study by Bain & Company (management consultancy) and Harvard Business School found that:

Companies can see an increase of 25 to 95 percent in their profits if they can increase their customer retention rates just by 5 percent.

Of course, you need good products to keep your customers coming back for more. But an exceptional customer experience can increase the retention rate more than ever.

Exemplary customer service distinguishes your brand, builds repeat business, combats price competition, and even improves employee morale.

– Chris Hurn, Entrepreneur

Brands can develop a solid competitive advantage by simply modifying as per the customer’s needs. And mind you, we’re talking about exemplary customer support here! The one that’s above and beyond the customer expectation, not just the standard and average one.

So what are the five qualities that define great customer support?

• Customer-Centric Solutions
• Timely Response (sometimes even at lightning speed)
• Empathetic (and Personalized) Response
• Seamless and Transparent Communication
• Data-driven Solution

Brands can foster customer loyalty by offering quick customer support, thorough self-help features, and helpful support staff. These qualities are unremarkable, and buyers consider them as the bare minimum. Hence exceptional customer support seeks to delight clients, and you must have unanticipated strategies that the audience can rave about. And it is not possible to do it without leveraging helpdesk support software. Let’s find out what a helpdesk support software is, how it works, benefits, and most importantly, why you must have a helpdesk for your business.

The two aspects we will focus on, here:

• Use Cases of a Helpdesk
• 4 Challenges Faced by Customer Support Teams

Use Cases of a Helpdesk

Many businesses view customer support as a cost-centric problem that they need to spend their time and energy on. They end up tightening their team’s spending and moving customer support offshore—the results: Unhappy customers, high employee turnover rate, and PR debacles galore. By contrast, excellent customer support is a revenue generator. It provides a cohesive customer experience that aligns with an organization’s purpose irrespective of the industry niche.

Following are some well-known use cases of helpdesks in various industries:

I. Retail and Ecommerce

Ecommerce businesses face problems like missed queries, long response time, managing customer data, and maintaining support requests at high volumes. A customer support solution can change this drastically. An ecommerce helpdesk can let you scale your business while keeping up with the same level of personalized relationship with your customers. It can help you:

• Manage queries from multiple channels
• Streamline queries through a single dedicated inbox
• Monitor and organize all queries from one place
• Align order fulfillment with customer expectations
• Decide who deals with the query when it is registered

II. Travel and Hospitality

Travel is a highly volatile, dynamic, and quite competitive industry. The support vertical of the travel industry has seen a tectonic shift in technology usage over the past years. Following are some of its significant benefits and use-cases:

• Bye-bye to conventional manual processes of query booking
• End users and sub-agencies can check their status online (on their own)
• Help center to solve repetitive booking queries
• Track customer history and communication seamlessly
• Web admin panel for centralized planning

III. Software and IT

• Decrease the overall wait-time of the user
• Provide instant solutions through a well-articulated knowledge base
• Eases the ticketing process with the latest features
• Allows you to define agent roles and privileges
• Customizable dashboard to maintain IT incidents and queries.

IV. Manufacturing Industry

Manufacturing businesses and customer support may sound very unusual. Due to the excellent opportunities of outsourcing, manufacturing companies usually have to manage international clients, sometimes even across countries. Manufacturing helpdesks can be deployed at various levels to streamline processes and reduce costs. Here are its business benefits:

• It helps you serve a personalized experience to your users
• Organize and integrate communication through various channels
• Increase support efficiency by reducing repetitive tasks and queries
• Keep your clients and their staff informed with the latest information.
• Create performance and efficiency reports, and manage resources accordingly
• It enables 24 X 7 support for your clients

V. Healthcare

Patients are always looking for top-notch care when it comes to healthcare. They’re looking for quality healthcare with easy procedures and efficient systems.

Best Care = Patient-Centric Approach = Quality Medical Care + Quality Assistance

The best care is the one that encompasses quality care along with focussing on providing timely support assistance. And a helpdesk helps to create a patient-centric experience. Here’s how a helpdesk can help.

• Eases all the simple day-to-day operations and tasks for administrators
• Query management to streamline patient inquiries
• Patient history management to gain complete context before the treatment begins.
• Easy and accessible self-service options
• An easy system to keep and update appointments, medicines, bills, and so on.

VI. Education

While students juggle many roles in universities or schools, the institutions they attend are infinitely complex with assets, academic services, administrative functions, requests, and other activities, that need to function like clockwork. Institutions need to exercise the utmost care and use dedicated tools to manage these tasks to function smoothly.

*Enters a helpdesk solution*

• No more fragmented knowledge, services, and information.
• Boon for administrative staff as helpdesks save time by eliminating manual and repetitive tasks
• You can communicate new announcements by updating the announcements section
• Prioritize tickets as per impact and urgency
• Gain insight into how well your team is performing and whether the end-users are satisfied or not

So these were the industry use cases of customer support solutions. Now let us look at the significant challenges support teams face today and how customer support solutions or helpdesks solve them.