Cynergy’s Help Desk Software Helps You Do More With Less
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010Every company needs to deliver a superior customer experience and reduce operational costs. Cynergy’s integrated, multi-channel Help Desk Software is your best option to exceptional customer experiences at reduced operational costs. In fact, Cynergy’s customer experience products lower your costs, increase your agent’s productivity, and provide a better customer experience in a number of ways. Typically, these benefits begin through the deployment of an effective self-service and email management strategy.
Your company may see phone calls and inbound emails reduced by 30 to 40 percent. Just think of the impact on your call center. Also by reducing the volume of inquiries that is flooding your call center, you can focus your support agents on the customers that really need the help. Reduced costs and better service, it’s a win-win for you and your customers.
A large number of customers is able to immediately get the answers they need 24 hours a day. Because of these successful self-service experiences, customers keep returning to the website when they have questions. So, the percentage of customer issues resolved through immediate online self-service continues to grow over time. This growing volume of self-service resolutions saves your company more and more money every month. Every time a customer uses web self-service instead of calling or emailing the contact center, your company could save between five and fifteen dollars.
To provide a great customer experience, and do it with less cost, you have to get information to your customers in ways that are convenient for them, and cost effective for you. Cynergy Help Desk Software’s tools let your customers help themselves while empowering your front-line staff. Our customer relationship management system includes web self-service, email management, live chat, ivr, and other call center applications, so your agents and customers can more easily work together to solve problems. You’ll have greater insight into customer interactions, your customers will be better served, and you’ll save money.
Help Desk Software: Your Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow?
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010Looking for a Pot of Gold Help Desk Software?
Help Desk Software can be a pot of gold
Does your Help Desk Software answer your needs or are you hoping St. Patrick’s Day will help you find a pot of gold? Help Desk Software can deliver like a pot of gold.
Follow the Rainbow to Your Pot of Gold Help Desk Software
The colors of the rainbow are “ROYGBIV” — Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. Let’s use ROYGBIV to understand how the correct Help Desk Software used with your company’s strategy can increase your business and deliver you a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
R – Relate to each individual customer or prospect through your Help Desk Software
O – Orchestrate a long-term relationship through a strategy of e-mails, phone calls, and up-to-date information
Y – You need to think of your customer as a person and visualize that person and his reactions and needs
G – Give your customers (and prospects) timely information they can use
B – Build a customer-centric strategy that answers your customers’ needs
I – Invest in the best software to accomplish your strategy
V – View your company through your customers’ eyes to see where to improve
Selecting CRM Help Desk Software
Thursday, March 4th, 2010CRM Help Desk Software: What You Need to Consider
CRM Help Desk Software is not a priority for someone starting a business. Their customer relationships are built one at a time through personal contact. However, once the company grows to the point of adding employees, the customer-company dynamic begins to change. The challenges faced by small businesses become more similar to those of larger organizations – to get a unified view of customers throughout the company and to keep in contact with those customers.
All companies want to provide a consistent customer relationship management service, which also yields profits for the organization. As businesses grow, informal customer communication cannot be sustained, so some other method must be instituted. That is when CRM Help Desk software becomes a possible solution.
When considering what CRM Help Desk software to purchase, it often does not matter how large the company is. The concerns are basically similar. Three C’s must be considered: Customization, Communication Strategy, and Cost.
Customization
Most CRM Help Desk solutions for small business often do not fulfill the expectations the firm has of the software. If the CRM system cannot closely integrate with the other existing systems or does not store information within the customer database in a centralized manner, it can deprive the small business of leveraging the complete potential of the CRM software. If the CRM database cannot be customized or configured as per the organization’s requirements, it can result in the CRM system being completely inflexible.
Communication Strategy
Small businesses should consider only those CRM help desk systems which can be incorporated easily into the existing IT infrastructure. Ideally, CRM solutions should be considered as a strategy as opposed to just technology. These need to be implemented directly to curtail costs as well as errors pertaining to sales, thereby raising revenues. Since most customer information is already available within current systems in the organization, creating a new application, which contains entirely new information, is a redundant process and in the case of small businesses with limited resources, this can be a painstaking process.
Cost
Before any purchase of CRM software solutions are made, the small business should ask if the software will truly communicate with customers and be easy to use by the employees. You also need to know the overall costs for integration of the CRM Help Desk system.
Since most small businesses have limited resources, they cannot spare their employees on a full-time basis to carry out CRM Help Desk Software implementation. Ideally such companies should consider a web-based application. This eliminates installation and licensing costs and nearly eliminates all labor costs for installation and maintenance. Yet, it gives them regular updates and upgrades and access to expert advice and help as needed. This ensures the success of the relationship management system implementation.
Web-based Software
Friday, February 26th, 2010Web-based software, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions, will account for 25% of all new business software by 2011, according to Gartner. Why are decision-makers increasingly turning to SaaS for application deployments?
Find out how to achieve business benefits through SaaS, which include:
• Higher productivity and ROI
• Lower upfront software license and staff costs
• Increased agility to scale software in meeting business change
• And more!
SaaS can make a great impact on your business’ bottom line.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or web-based software is software that is delivered via the web and priced as a monthly, quarterly, or annual subscription. It transfers the burden of implementing, maintaining and keeping the application up to date and running smoothly from the customer to the vendor. It eliminates the costs and complexities of installing and integrating hardware to support the software and hiring additional staff to support the application.
SaaS permits users to more quickly and fully leverage the software functionality. It also enables users to immediately benefit from the software vendor’s latest technological features without the disruptions and costs associated with software updates and upgrades.
All types of businesses and all sizes of organizations can benefit from web-based software. Mid-sized organizations using help desk software or customer management software stand to benefit most from this new innovation.
Today’s economic environment has intensified these companies’ needs. Customers expect more service than they got in the past couple of decades – and research shows that customers’ expectations are rising. Customer loyalty is fleeting. Competition is rising and intensifying due to globalization and eCommerce. Employees are being encouraged to work from home or forced to spend more time on the road meeting with customers and partners face-to-face. Rising costs and tightened credit are forcing organizations to tighten their operating and capital budgets.
If you are wondering if SaaS, or web-based, help desk software or customer management software would work for your company, please contact Cynergy Software at 800-349-0527.
Help Desk Software Saves the Day!
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
About a month ago I got a call from a client overseas. They were having issues keeping track of a flood of calls that they were getting from remote users. They had been tracking the clients in the past using emails and an Excel spreadsheet. Thus every time they would receive a call or email, they would copy and paste the email from Outlook over to Excel, or write the info from the call into the Excel spreadsheet that they had been using for several years. Problem was, they had to update the spreadsheet on a regular basis, and invariably they would miss tickets by not pasting the correct cells, or some of the help desk ticket calls would disappear when they pasted from one place to the other. After a short overview of Cynergy’s ticketing system, the prospect was able to see how easy it was to log a ticket in Cynergy, and keep track of it on the user dashboard.
Help Desk Software to the Rescue!
And, the client was able to see where tickets could be ordered in any way they wanted as well as escalated from one service level to the other. In addition, the client was able to see their customer’s information on the same screen without changing to their spreadsheet or CRM system. Thus callbacks were much easier and more orderly.
Then yesterday, the same customer called us for some additional training on our project management system. They had been using another Excel spreadsheet for keeping track of projects and their Outlook for scheduling those projects. After a short training session, the client was ecstatic about some of the features they learned about, as well as a much deeper understanding of how the project manager could actually save them valuable time without having to call each other on collaborative issues.
Thus, another satisfied customer! But more importantly, we saved them time, and made their job easier. Now that’s what I call a Win/Win situation!
Help Desk Software
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
There are 5 distinct ways that Help Desk Software can improve your business in 2010
1. Help Desk Software will give you a way to keep track of tickets that you have posted for a client or customer. These tickets can be escalated automatically so nothing falls through the cracks. They can also be monitored so that anytime a change takes place, the ticket owner can be notified of the change.
2. Help Desk Software can also contain a calendar that allows the user to schedule installs, moves, adds, changes, just about any event that takes place can be scheduled and tracked. These scheduled events can also be alarm coded to notify people prior to the event so they don’t lose the date or schedule of the event. This also allows management to view all of the users and their status on any given day.
3. Trouble Ticket Software systems generally contain a KnowledgeBase module that can help the agent solve issues. The knowledge center or knowledge library can also give the agent a resource for getting to resolutions in a short amount of time. Some of these modules will even allow end users to submit tickets to their portal, or use email to submit trouble tickets in an efficient manner.
4. No Help Desk Software would be complete without a robust CRM (customer relationship management) or Contact Management system. Generally this system will give you multiple addresses for contacts, companies, jobsites or divisions, as well as places for additional phone numbers, notes, and user defined fields to further describe the contact or client company.
5. Imagine being able to see a listing of ALL of the customer service issues within your organization that are outstanding, along with the status, user assignment, and estimated time of resolution. These helpful dashboards are a great way to allow owners and managers to be able to keep track of their help desk tickets, and improve their business.
Help Desk Software does not have to be expensive. There are many affordable systems available today. Just make sure that you choose one that is easy for your agents to learn and use, and one that you can grow into. Because as you improve your customer service, you are going to improve your business.
Improve Your Business in 2010 through Web-based Helpdesk Software
Monday, January 11th, 2010Improve Your Business in 2010 through Web-based Helpdesk Software
Helpdesk Software will improve your business in 2010. The recession is over – or so they tell us. However, most of our companies are not yet in recovery mode. Therefore, the question is: How do we improve business in 2010? How can Helpdesk Software improve business in 2010?
To better understand how helpdesk software will help your company improve its performance in 2010, take stock of the various customer touchpoints. Does your company use each of these? How does each relate to the others? Which type of customers most often use which touchpoint? What do they do if that does not solve their problem or answer their question? Touchpoints include:
- Web Self-service
- Interactive voice response
- Contact center agents
- Face-to-face
Your helpdesk software must allow your clients to help themselves using the internet. Some companies call this web-based help desk software or Software as a Service (SaaS) . The software must do two things at this touchpoint: it must have a database of questions and answers that the client can access and it must generate a help ticket that alerts a contact center agent.
Often the database of questions and answers will be sufficient to answer the client’s questions and solve the problem. When it does not provide the solution, the customer must have a method for generating a help or trouble ticket that provides a live person enough information to provide help to the customer through e-mail or a telephone call. This ticket should also be trackable throughout the system. For example, if the customer calls the agent back two weeks later, both of them should be able to see that ticket and what the agent did to resolve the problem. The agent’s boss or other colleagues should be able to access the ticket to continue the process of resolving the problem. And managers should also be allowed to see the time taken, number of people involved, and other history to the ticket. Each of the agents and managers should also be able to see the same database of questions and answers that the client sees so that they understand what he is talking about and can correct any misunderstandings.
Interactive voice response, chat, contact center agents, and face-to-face techs all employ real people to solve clients’ problems. Many clients prefer to “talk” to a real person. However, this is a more expensive option for the company. There are many ways in which to slash the amount of time these people are involved in each case. One of the simplest, yet most effective, is to incorporate the ticketing process into the company’s e-mail program to keep everyone in the loop. Tickets can be initiated from the customer or from a company employee. This increases customer satisfaction and professionalism, decreases time for each task, and increases the accountability of each company employee as well as increasing overall company profitability.
Help Desk Software: 3 Humorous Things to Think About
Monday, December 21st, 2009Help Desk Software: 3 Humorous Things to Think About
If you are a Help Desk Agent, you have spent many hours waiting on the next phone call or e-mail and many more hours chasing down answers to customers’ concerns. What do you do during those idle hours? Have you got any really good or really funny thoughts or activities in which you engage?
Let’s take a look at three things help desk agents think about during their idle hours:
1. What does the customer look like? It is true the “customer” is probably a company in many cases, but the person who calls or e-mails is a real live person. What does that person look like? What is his role in the company? One great way to answer those questions is to start imagining Dilbert comic strip characters like dorky Dilbert, air-head Alice, awful Asok, elevated Ellen, or the diligent Dog. Check them out.
2. How am I supposed to get everything done that is expected of me? This one is a little like the recent For Better or For Worse comic strip. The kids and mom are Christmas shopping and see a Santa at the mall, one ringing a bell for the Salvation Army on the street corner, etc. One child looks at Mom and asks, “Mom, how come there are so many Santas?” Mom says, “maybe they’re all Santa Claus?” and the boy wonders, “Is that possible?” to which the Mom replies, “The job of being a Santa is pretty special . . . it’s just like the job of being a Mom. Everyone expects you to do everything and be everywhere at the same time!”
3. How could they break our product like that?! What did they do to it? Perhaps the thoughts turn to The Nutcracker and the broken nutcracker! Must have a been a jealousy thing. From there the imaginations run wild! Check out the story.
Give us some ideas about humorous things you or your help desk agents think about.
Fast, Effective Help Desk Responses Build Loyalty and Revenue
Friday, December 18th, 2009Fast, Effective Help Desk Responses Build Loyalty and Revenue
Responding quickly and effectively to customers’ concerns builds loyalty to your brand. It is well documented that customers who experience problems with a company’s products or services to which the company responds promptly and effectively are even more satisfied with and loyal to the company than are customers who never experience a problem.
- Fast, effective responses show that your organization views its customers’ concerns as high priorities.
- Fast, effective responses eliminate (or greatly reduce) the time your customers spend worrying about or wondering whether their concerns will be addressed.
- Fast, effective responses eliminate or reduce the need for your customers to investigate alternative solutions or workarounds to address their concerns.
One of the most productive and highest-payoff applications of corporate resources is responding to feedback from profitable customers and addressing their concerns quickly. The moment a customer expresses dissatisfaction is the very moment at which an organization, through its response, can most influence customer retention, recurring revenues, and customer lifetime value. A satisfied customer will become loyal and will tell others; a dissatisfied customer will broadcast far and wide his dissatisfaction, driving business away.
Your help desk or customer management software is your first line of defense when a customer expresses a concern or his dissatisfaction. That software must immediately open a ticket (sometimes called a case) and notify the correct team or person to deal with the issue. It must also make it easy for that person or team to include other team members from across the organization without re-explaining the issue or what has previously been done. Therefore, real-time alerts and real-time collaboration are key elements to fast, effective responses.
Having a KnowedgeBased Software can certainly take a load off your customer support agents and make their job easier. It will also give answers to your customers which can certainly increase their confidence in your willingness to deliver world class support customer service.
Your software must have escalation rules set up and must generate a deadline for resolution in order to keep the process moving quickly and smoothly to completion in a timely manner. It must provide quick and easy access to a well-structured knowledge base. By tracking who has done what (and when), your software will eliminate duplication of effort and streamline responses to the customer.
What Does Your Help Desk Need?
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009What Does Your Help Desk Need?
It is obvious that a Help Desk needs to help customers. But what are some of the ways in which a Help Desk should be helping customers? And are there ways in which a Help Desk can actually help your company?
Let’s look at five ways a Help Desk should help customers:
1. A Help Desk should speed and coordinate responses to customer concerns.
2. A Help Desk should build the satisfaction and loyalty of all customers.
3. A Help Desk should be able to save the customers who are at risk of discontinuing to use your products or services.
4. A Help Desk should disseminate information across departments and collect responses from various departments to speed effective answers to customers and inform the correct departments of potential problems.
5. A Help Desk should use software that can aid in the above functions without adding a great deal of cost to the company.
Since the Help Desk will be saving customers and answering their concerns, that Help Desk will be adding the future value of those customers’ loyalty and continued use of the company’s products or services. This increases the overall customer lifetime value.
The Help Desk will also be gathering information for future use on customer likes and dislikes and on what does or does not work well about the products or services. This translates to significantly increased profitability through new or improved products or services or different marketing of those products or services.
Through that process and the record-keeping that accompanies it, the company can make improvements to its products and services and cash in on the value of long-term satisfied customers. The Help Desk, therefore, adds long-term profitability to the company.