5 Reasons Why Customers LOVE Automated Help Desks
Written by Toonimo
It’s not hard for businesses to reflect on the reasons why automated help desks make sense – with the main reasons being, of course, that they lower costs, increase efficiency, and liberate over-worked, stressed-out help desk staff from fielding the same inquiries over…and over…and over again!
However, it’s not just businesses that reap the rewards of automated help desks. Unlike many other automated systems (like dreaded “please listen to the following 10 options” phone systems!), customers LOVE automated help desks. Here are the 5 biggest reasons why:
1. The Need for Speed
Customers don’t want to wait until “the next business day” or even later the same day to get the information they need. They want it NOW! An automated help desk fills this craving.
2. “3:00am Convenience”
Many customers can’t carve out a few minutes – let alone half an hour or longer – to call the help desk during business hours; because they’re busy with their own jobs, or taking care of other day-to-day tasks. An automated help desk delivers the all-important “3:00am convenience” factor, which means that customers can get the information they want on their own time (yes, even at 3:00am).
3. Easy Does It
In addition to speed and convenience, the other horse in the customer love trifecta is ease – and an automated help desk certainly satisfies this need.
This isn’t to say that customers are lazy. Rather, it’s the understanding that customers fundamentally don’t like asking for help, because it typically means that something has gone wrong (or at least that’s the perception). Making help as easy as possible goes a long way to reducing friction, and helping customers focus on the product or service they bought: not the after sales help they need.
4. Tender Loving Care
Customers want and, frankly, deserve to feel that the businesses they choose care about them. This isn’t a fuzzy “touch-feely” thing and it’s certainly not gender-specific. It’s just a basic human preference and, at the deepest level, it’s also a core need.
An automated help desk addresses this preference and need because it demonstrates that a business cares. In other words, the business is saying: “We know you want to solve any problems quickly, conveniently and easy, and so we’ve invested resources to satisfy those requirements because we care”.
5. Forward Momentum
While many problems can be solved through an automated help desk, there are invariably going to be some that can’t be fixed.
Even in these situations, an automated help desk can guide customers to take meaningful action that speeds up the process and makes them feel that they’re moving forward. For example, customers can be told to have their serial or license number handy (and even better, told where it is so they won’t get frustrated hunting for it).
Or at the very least, customers can be ushered to a kind of “inner circle” where they will be told (by the automated help desk system) that their problem or concern has been noted, and that a help desk representative will contact them. True, this isn’t the ideal outcome that customers want – because they want their problem solved right away – but it’s far better than leaving them with the impression that, on top of their un-solved problem, they just wasted minutes of their valuable time.
Using a Digital Concierge
And last but not least, a remarkably cost-effective way to help customers appreciate all of the above automated help desk advantages – and therefore deepen their love of both the service and the business behind it – is to use a digital concierge.
Digital concierges combine real voice scripts and live graphics to proactively provide personal assistance to customers on the page, in context, and at the right time. Digital concierges can also be implemented to serve a wide range of use cases around the customer life cycle, including those that involve onboarding new users, increasing activation rates, introducing new features, and boosting digital channels adoption.
The Bottom-Line
Customers LOVE automated help desks – but only when businesses deliver the speed, convenience, ease, care and progress (“forward momentum) that they want. Keep this in mind as you build or upgrade your automated help desk – and don’t forget that a digital concierge is the automated technology that pulls it all together!
