What is an enterprise help desk and how does it benefit your team?

When’s the last time you called a major corporation and hung up, thinking, ‘Wow, what amazing customer service!’

Mature enterprise companies often struggle to meet customers’ expectations.ani They’re often slow to integrate their customer service software with new support channels and integrations. Partially, this is because legacy brands still rely on the traditional methods upon which they were founded.

But in today’s digital-first age, phone and email alone simply don’t cut the mustard.

The challenge is finding software that you can adopt quickly at scale without increasing operational costs. One that allows your agents to work more effectively, efficiently and collaboratively. Only then can you deliver consistent and personalised enterprise customer service.

Allow me to introduce a beautiful thing called an enterprise help desk.

Chris Grosspietsch, Senior Manager of Advocacy Operations at Zendesk, explains the concept of a help desk perfectly when he says, ‘A help desk can mean many things, depending on the nature of your business. But it all goes back to the core principle of helping people and serving as a place where they can go to get help.’

Digital-first enterprise companies resolve customer support tickets more than 40% faster than their legacy counterparts. Their secret: using enterprise help desk software to manage workflows more efficiently.

[Source]

These advanced tools sync all your systems, channels and records into one platform. This means that your agents have complete customer context from a single view.

Enterprise help desks can support both your employees and your customers. They generally include features like:

• Self-service tools, such as knowledge bases and answer bots
• Ticket-management systems for handling and organising support requests
• Issue trackers for automatically recording IT issues and bugs
• Analytics, such as CSAT and first-contact resolution, for measuring the entire customer experience
• Automation for skills-based ticket routing, macros, repeat actions and more
• Advanced integration, so companies can connect and access all their internal tools from one centralised view
• Omni-channel support, so you can meet customers wherever they are

These features are only a fraction of what enterprise help desks can do for your organisation. This software helps large organisations manage complex workflows without compromising productivity or customer satisfaction.

Still not convinced? Take a look at some of the key benefits below.

Four benefits of an enterprise help desk

You might be thinking, ‘Adopt and successfully implement a completely new solution? With 5,000 employees across several countries? That’ll be the day.’

Well, today’s the day. Enterprise help desks are designed to solve the key customer service challenges of large and rapidly expanding companies. And with the right provider, they’re easy to implement at scale.

Boost efficiency with improved agent workflows

Enterprise companies support a lot of customers in many different ways. To provide fast, reliable service, agents need tools to simplify their complex workflows.

Skills-based routing automatically directs tickets to the most capable agents. No one receives a ticket that they can’t handle, making it easier to fly through a higher volume of enquiries.

Enterprise help desks also boost agent productivity by pulling up the resources needed by agents, based on the problem that they’re solving. In Zendesk Support, we call this feature ‘Contextual Workspaces‘.

When you open a ticket with Contextual Workspaces, you’ll only see the macros relevant to the ticket at hand:

You can also create unique ticket interfaces that pull up the exact form used by the customer to submit their request.

If you’re using Zendesk’s enterprise help desk, our knowledge capture app will automatically suggest knowledge-base articles based on the ticket. This means that agents can:

• Provide a resource to help customers solve their problems with one click
• Handle a higher volume of tickets

Streamline self-service with improved knowledge-base management

For enterprise companies, the challenge is managing a system for creating and updating these resources in real time.

With Zendesk Team Publishing, your agents can:

• Suggest improvements to knowledge-base articles
• Update articles personally
• Add entirely new resources

You can assign publishing permissions to specific agents to control the quality of the content that you’re sharing. That way, any agent can write and submit a knowledge-base resource that they think will benefit customers, but only a qualified SME (subject matter expert) can approve it.

‘The Team Publishing workflow allowed us to streamline our knowledge-creation process by making it much easier for agents to create articles and have them reviewed. Articles that once took a week to publish are now live in 1-2 days. Our team loves the ability to assign an article to someone for review, which sends an automatic email notification so that they know there’s something waiting for them without having to monitor the queue.’Mary Paez, Knowledge Manager, Veeva Systems [source]

You can also set triggers that notify SMEs when it’s time to verify content and ensure that it’s up to date.

The best part is that some enterprise help desks use AI to analyse knowledge-base content. At Zendesk, we call this feature Content Cues. The technology can:

• Suggest the archiving of content that isn’t performing well
• Flag top-performing content for regular upkeep

Collaborate seamlessly across your organisation

Customer support agents often need a colleague’s or manager’s involvement to resolve a ticket. The agent might need to get approval for a customer discount or confirm billing details. Enterprise help desks streamline this communication by enabling side conversations (chats) within the ticket view itself.

For example, Zendesk’s Collaboration add-on allows agents to communicate with any internal team member – such as an in-house SME – without leaving the ticket view.

With this feature, customer support agents can get the answers they need quickly without transferring the customer to another agent or department. This increases first-contact resolution and improves overall customer satisfaction.

Get up and running in less than 30 days

Adopting a new customer support solution can seem like a daunting undertaking, especially for an established enterprise. But it doesn’t have to be.

At Zendesk, we’ve built an entire team dedicated to helping enterprise companies adopt innovative, modern customer support solutions. Our proven customer service adoption paths can help you get started in less than 30 days.

‘The biggest benefit of Zendesk is that we can customise it exactly the way we need – from the triggers, business rules and automation to the reporting and API. Zendesk allows us to build our workflows just right, exactly the way we want.’
Orlando Gadea Ros, Business Innovation Manager, Stanley Black & Decker

We’ll help you set goals and continuously scale operations via regular check-ins and reports. And we’ll use industry benchmarking to help you stay on the path to success.

Enterprise customer service is extremely challenging. You have to meet the growing expectations of thousands of customers, and within budget. Not to mention that it’s hard to maintain a personalised and consistent customer experience when over 1,000 agents are fielding tickets.

The path of least resistance is an agile and easily scalable tool – an enterprise help desk.

Building real, human relationships at scale

Without the right tools, processes and technology, it’s impossible to be human at scale.

Enterprise help desk software helps large companies:

• Streamline collaboration between agents
• Keep team members accountable
• Centralise workflows
• Engage employees

And with Zendesk, it’s easy to be up and running in no time. Request a demo or speak to our team today.