Email Automation

Have you outgrown your "helpdesk" email system?

Transform your support operations with a proper system

Signs you need a help desk solution, rather than email

Email is the back-bone of business communication.  It's simple, quick and universal. 

Email allows staff and customers to quickly reach out for help and contact for all business matters - sales, support, feedback, and general business.  However, email is often used for customer sales and support long after the company has grown to the point where dedicated help desk tool is warranted. 

Holding-on to tools and techniques that worked when the company was smaller, or less complex can actually impede progress and hold you back from reaching your potential and compromise your customer service operations.

Here's some common tell-tale signs that you need a dedicated help desk tool:

  • Are you currently using your "support inbox" as the company "help-desk"?
  • Are you spending too much time searching for responses to clients, rather than responding to them?
  • Are customer support requests "Falling through the cracks", or being forgotten?
  • Have you devised an elaborate system of colour-coding, tagging, and sorting email depending on:
    • Who should deal with it?
    • Who the customer/client is?
    • The nature of the email request?
  • Are clients starting to complain about your service?
  • Do you want to report on how many support issues you responded to last month?
  • Is too much email starting to affect your business?
  • Are multi-channel inboxes starting to confuse both your customers and staff member?
 
 

Email Helpdesk System

 

Common approaches to dealing with customer email

Here are 3 of the most common methods of dealing with customer email with a traditional email system such as Microsoft Outlook.  Each of these methods achieve a limited measure of effectiveness, but ultimately don't scale, and will hold your team back from reaching their support potential.


The problem(s) with using email as a help desk

Each of the methods above have significant drawbacks and will compromise your service delivery in one way or another.   These issues include:

  • Email folders have limited searching, filtering and classification capabilities
  • Colour coding, tagging and custom folders quickly become unwieldy, and difficult to change
  • Meaningful data to create reports, statistics, dashboards is hard to extract from email
  • Automation possibilities are limited
  • Queue management, staff assignment, prioritization and other classification is difficult, or simply not possible
  • Staff can quickly acquire "email fatigue", when email is circulated, and "reply to all" is overused

In short, email was never designed to be used as a helpdesk system.

Transform the way you do business

If your company has out-grown your current email solution, a dedicated issue tracking system like HelpMaster will transform the way you process and work with email, and give you statistical insight like never before.  Contat PRD Software today for a demonstration.

Convert email into help desk tickets

Create, classify, assign and build workflow around different email types. Automatically convert into help desk tickets and assign to the most appropriate person and/or group for action

Increase efficiency

Manually classifying, sorting and responding to email is time consuming, inefficient and leads to other problems such as lack of reporting, lack of automation and disk bloat.

Log, track and manage

HelpMaster is a dedicated ticketing and tracking tool specifically designed for the helpdesk. Once an email has been converted into a ticket, a whole new world of workflow opens up.

Collaborate, share and search

Once an email has been logged as a helpdesk ticket and assigned to a job queue, all staff within your organization are able to work on the job, share knowledge, view updates and communicate with all parties involved

Fast response time

When clients, customers and staff email your helpdesk, they will get a near-instant response to their email. New email is logged via processing rules, and replies to existing tickets are automatically updated

Standardise communication responses

Use email templates and link appropriate knowledge base articles to out-going email responses from your team. Templates ensure consistency, speed and efficiency

Automation = Saving $$

We've been encouraging people to email their requests rather than phoning them in. Previously about 5% of requests were email. Now email requests make up just over 40% of total requests.
[The HelpMaster] Email Manager was introduced to log new jobs and update existing jobs automatically. This is doing the work of an extra staff member...

Submitted via discussion forum

IT Support - Police Credit Union