Using quality assurance to track and improve help desk effectiveness
Tracking and improving the effectiveness of a company’s help desk operation is a key factor in customer satisfaction and help desk performance. An efficient help desk is a key area of support when addressing client and personnel issues. Most help desks are the first line of communication within a company when clients call with issues.
As a result, it is important to increase help desk performance. Help desk department managers and staff must have the tools they need to understand their customers’ needs and to develop best practices. The first step in assessing a help desk’s efficiently is by conducting a customer satisfaction survey. Feedback from such surveys helps managers decided on how to improve their business.
Another tool management uses to asses help desk performance is the use of recording devices and regular meetings. Help desk department manager use the recordings of actual help desk calls to provide an ongoing assessment and a review for help desk callers.
Once the help desk’s performance has been assessed, managers may seek out software solutions or devise scripts from commonly asked questions or responses. Call tracking software is an excellent tool for help desk managers to use especially since it can record and track a number of help desk quality assurance indicators. Scripts are another excellent tool for managers to standardize their help desk response to customer questions.
A scripted reply allows the help desk staff to give standardized questions to the most common helpdesk questions. Scripts help streamline quality by assuring that staff has a standardized reply. For companies that outsource their help desks the need for standardization in help desk replies and a stable way to assure quality assurance is found through the use of scripts and recording calls for management review.
Some help desk organizations even have weekly meeting which use these recorded calls as a tool to train staff on best practices. By using such quality assurance tools such as help desk scripts, software, and conversational recording, help desk manager can elevate or eliminate such quality issues as customer dissatisfaction, slow help desk response times, and poor communication.
