How does the service catalog help the help desk?

The IT services catalog is an important tool to help reduce the number of unnecessary help desk tickets. This document helps to document and manage all the services that the IT area is committed to deliver.

The importance of the service catalog is given by charting the role that the help desk will play in a contract with the customer and defining a clear scope (the so-called “job description”) for the customer service staff.

Thus, all remain aligned on what to expect from efficient service and how to perform this type of service on tickets.

And you, want to know more about how the services catalog helps in your help desk? Keep reading our post!

Cartoon character gif signing a contract. Service Catalog metaphor.

The concept of service catalogs

The service catalog is a key piece in the customer service industry because it has the guidelines for this sector, either on the side of the user making the request for a ticket solution and for the professional who works directly in this area.

The client side

The service catalog serves as a detailed presentation of all the help desk industry resources that are allocated for the delivery and resolution of open tickets. With this, the client gains a clear view of the services that can be provided and what to expect when opening a tickets for this sector.

The customer must know all the services that are available and the time that must take to solve a ticket, in addition to all the necessary resources.

The agent side

This side may be the most impacted by the existence of the service catalog due to the assistance that this entails for the entire industry. With a well-crafted document, the help desk can define services that are part of or not of the scope “do-it-yourself” role.

The service catalog should also contain a clear picture of what is provided to the customer, tools that define and manage the types of requests that the help desk industry can address.

Besides, it should also serve as guidance to the IT team on known the importance of each resource and give attention to the relationship with the customer.

The relationship of the service catalog with the help desk and examples on how to use the service catalog

This type of documentation can assist in targeting customers in solutions to low-priority or easy-to-resolve problems by the help desk industry.

With this, gains in efficiency and productivity are guaranteed to the customer service sector due to the fact of handling tickets from a single document.

The service catalog is an important way to maintain good customer service and some are important for your development and application.

Since the service catalog is an important document, there must be a person or sector responsible for its development and updating. Here some important tips:

1 – Make the document available to both customers and the help desk / service desk industry;
2 – Organize the types of services;
3 – Keep the document in clear, concise and efficient language, in addition to avoiding
exaggerations;
4 – Avoid out-of-scope requests and make outline or proposal suggestions to run the service within the scope of the service catalog.

Besides knowing some tips on a good development, execution and maintenance of the service catalog, it is also interesting to know some examples about this document. Below are some good practices.

Create, delete, and change user accounts;
Release and revocation of accesses to specific folders, printers and systems;
Set up email accounts, local and/or network printers;
Clarify doubts about the operating system used by the company;
Perform backups of company server files;
Restore backups in case of incidents;
Manage systems, upgrade and install licensed applications;
Manage running systems;
Maintenance and replacement of hardware;
Establish and maintain security policies;
Provide SLA compliance reports;
Among others.

Gif of person making the sign of the cross. Ahead the following caption: "Waiting for feedback from client".

How a service catalog can help the help desk /service desk

The service catalog offers a way for the help desk and service desk to maintain the level of service and keep customer satisfaction always at the best possible levels.

This is due to the clarification of everything this sector can provide in the resolution of request and how the customer can seek help in the customer service sector.

Besides, maintaining an up-to-date service catalog impacts directly on the level of work provided by the help desk professional, since this professional will have clear information about how to help and what he or she is free to do for the resolution of the requests.

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It’s service desk only for IT?

It has been a while since the service desk assignments stopped being just answering open tickets. With the advancement of technology and the transformations in the way the customers and brands relate, the service team has even more important responsibilities.

Of course, the team has developed strategies and procedures for delivering an efficient and effective service.

Does this strategy only apply to IT (usually responsible for the service desk) or can the idea and format of work be encompassed by other sectors? That’s what we’re going to discuss today. Follow along.

We can consider that the service desk is a help desk advance, because in addition to being able to solve more complex demands, it brings other aspects of customer service improvement. Be an internal customer, be an external customer. In general, service desk bases can support other industries in delivering quality and excellence to the customer.

Even if you have not formalized the service desk “dialogue” with other departments, know that much more of this service desk is already part of the activities of the structured sectors and focused on serving your client in the best way.

Believe me, the teachings of the service desk are already part of your business.

Do you know the pillars of the service desk? We will list the key ones below and show you that they are certainly already part of your scope of work. And, if you don’t do it yet, you will soon understand how these pillars can be applied.

whole view of the problem and solution;
optimization and integration of management processes;
effective solutions to customer demands (internal and external);
mapping processes;
prevention of technical incidents and information security;
empathy with the client;
assistance in the execution and standardization of tasks and functions;
SLAs as compasses for carrying out the work.

Need to talk about SLA…

When thinking about SLA always keep in mind “alignment of expectations”. What does that mean? Come on: SLA stands for Service Level Agreement and it is a document, a kind of contract, in which all the details of the service provision are listed.

From: what is the task, what is the goal, deadlines, responsible, possible related difficulties, resources involved and any other factor that is part of the work or sector. According to ABNT (Brazilian Association of Technical Standards) SLA is required for IT hiring. In other areas of the company, it can serve as a guide to have a better flow of work relationships and job performance.

The information contained in the SLA also serves as a basis for analyzing metrics and indicators of success.

Discover the advantages of being inspired by the service desk.

A department that is organized and committed to fully meet its demands can easily identify traces of the service desk. As you saw in the previous topic, none of the aspects is unique to the IT area and much has to contribute to the company as a whole.

We have raised three of the key advantages of applying service desk features in other departments. Check it out and see how it can all be adapted to the reality and needs of your business and your teams.

Increased employee productivity.

The automation of tasks and creating a smart (and shared) database of data streamlines access to customer history, information exchanged between sectors, reduces the time to build the solution, and enables effective methodologies to be performed for all the activities of the company.

Productivity is linked to well-being in the work environment. And one of the elements of well-being is the availability of resources necessary for the employee to perform his duties. In this way, we can expand the benefits of service desk even to personal fulfillment, which results in quality and commitment.

It is worth mentioning that productivity is linked to the good use of useful time and not to exhaustive production and without consistency to actually serve customers well.

One of the factors that most influence the quality of a service is the average waiting time. The more agility, the more chances of ensuring customer satisfaction. Added to the standardization of the processes and the workflow, together with the automation of the sorting step and after sending answers, it is possible to reach the solution more easily.

Besides, the integration between areas allows information to flow more smoothly and thus, it also supports the speed of call resolution. And you can be sure that all of these benefits noticed in the process reflect directly on the relationship with the customer and their experience with your company.

Saving of financial resources.

Investing in a service desk brings great results to the company, both in terms of cost savings and profitability. In addition to increased productivity and better use of resources, the company gains quality in its deliveries, avoids damages caused by the fragility of the system, reduces the customer’s dissatisfaction rate and even the turn-over.

Who does not want all those benefits for your company, right?

By relying on the service desk in addition improve processes, you can see that the consumer experience is even more rewarding and the chances of customer loyalty increase significantly.

To continue accessing our materials and leveraging your expertise on service desk, help desk and the entire sphere of customer service, follow the Mildesk blog.

Why should you choose a Help Desk?

Despite the excellent options currently available in help desk software, there are still companies that use spreadsheets to control tickets and services.

Unbelievable right?! Oops!! Is your company one of those that use spreadsheets? So, you´re in the right place because we´re going to present a comparative to answer a very important question:why should you use a help desk?

You will see that using help desk is the best choice for any business that wants to differentiate itself by the quality of customer service. Let’s go?

Information storage.

The first big difference is on how tickets information should be entered.

With the spreadsheets, the customer should contact your company and then the clerk will have to pick up the information about the request and manually insert it into the spreadsheet.

Meanwhile, with the help desk software, the customer can create a ticket in the system with all the information of his request and if the customer prefers to send an email to his company, a good software can even automatically convert this e-mail on a ticket by entering the data into the system.

So, what do you prefer: your team spending precious time working to enter data in a worksheet, or free to do what really matters, which is to serve and help customers?

Oh, and don’t worry: if you ever need to switch help desk, the exporting data is as easy as inserting it!

Workflow.

A worksheet is merely a record of tickets. The workflow is old-fashioned: the clerk needs to pass on the customer´s request to the corresponding industry, control the deadline for charging a resolution, recording a response, forwarding back to the customer, and more.

Meanwhile, the help desk software allows you to create workflows to be given adequate progress
for each ticket automatically.

Once a customer enters a new ticket in the system, it has a sequence of steps with pre-defined deadlines. Each new step forward, the responsible person receives a notification, to know that must take an action.

Reports.

The analysis of data is indispensable for the management of care; therefore, the possibility of creating reports is a priority.

It is clear that it is possible to create reports with spreadsheets. However, it is much more difficult than with a help desk software, especially if you want to create reports from specific data or across different data.

If you are not an Excel genius, help desk software is sure to be the simplest option for getting complete and detailed reports.

Security of data.

When you choose to work with spreadsheets, you are taking a very high risk because the data in a spreadsheet can be easily lost.

Just a person who has access to it accidentally hit the “Delete” button on the keyboard … and there goes the ticket registration! And you cannot do a thinner access control: either a person can see the whole worksheet, or cannot see anything.

On the other hand, if you adopt help desk software, you can count on greater data protection.

It is not so simple to delete a ticket, which avoids accidents; in addition, there are resources for the access limit, allowing to control who can use the software and what are the permissions of each user.

Reliability.

The worksheet is like a piece of paper – it accepts everything. If the attendant wants to insert a ticket in the worksheet saying that it was created on the 10th, when the customer actually contacted and made the request on the 1st, how will you find out? Probably will not.

However, the information in the help desk software is much more reliable because the system itself generates internal histories that allow you to track everything that has happened during the life cycle of the ticket.

So you can figure out who did what and when. This type of audit enables the manager to identify problems and bad practices in the way the tickets are being conducted – something that would be very difficult to do with a spreadsheet, don’t you think?

Centralization.

If you think that it is possible to control all tickets of your company with a single spreadsheet, here´s a bad news: No, it is not. You will need several different spreadsheets, which is bad, since the lack of centralization makes it very difficult to work with data.

Let´s imagine, for example, that you have chosen to use a spreadsheet for each month. If you want to see a customer´s ticket history, you´ll need to search spreadsheet by spreadsheet for the tickets that he has already opened.

And just imagine how it will be tricky to track the open tickets in the previous months, since you´ll have to be alternate between several spreadsheets! Pure chaos, isn´t it?

That´s why the help desk software wins: all data is centralized in one place. Therefore, it is very easy to locate a specific ticket, track customer histories, and check open tickets, among other tasks.

Additional features.

If none of the above items were enough to convince you, and you still have no answer to our question why use help desk? here is one more good reason to choose the software instead of the worksheet: is that the worksheet is just a worksheet.

Meanwhile, the software brings numerous additional features. Depending on the software you choose, you can count on resources such as sending collective messages to all your customers, controlling staff hours and even implementing a chatbot for service.

You can reduce costs

These are just a few answers to the question why should you choose a help desk? There really is no comparison between a spreadsheet and help desk software, taking into account everything the system can do.

You can even try to defend spreadsheets because (some of them) cost nothing to the company. But in fact, they cost a lot for your team´s productivity, agility, and quality of service.

It´s … the cheap sometimes is expensive! And, in the end, the help desk can even help reduce your business costs.

Do you want to know more about helpdesk systems, their advantages and their implementation in practice? So, follow the Milldesk blog and do not miss our exclusive ideas.

6 tips to improve retail sales with customer service.

The era of technology has brought great strides and changes in all sectors of the economy, especially in retail. The online sales format is considered by some to be the big retail villain without noticing that consumer behavior itself has changed with technology and new ways of ensuring customer satisfaction have become important in the face of such a change.

With this, good customer service has become the great asset to ensure that full consumer satisfaction occurs, since changes are always constant and adaptation is necessary. The so-called “offline retail” is just as important as “online selling,” since proximity to the consumer can be considered important in order to achieve sales success.

Want to know more tips on how to improve retail sales through customer service? Check out our post!

Tips on how to improve retail sales through service

Even experiencing big changes in the environment of retail, some tips can be critical for business success in customer service.

Create a harmony of service between online and offline.

The harmony among the forms of customer service are essential to ensure engagement with the brand, product or service sold to the consumer. Knowing how to receive the customer and transform the service into a success case for the business is already a challenge in face-to-face, and on-line it gains new difficulties.

With a harmony between the service channels, presenting the same type of language and the same way of constructing the dialogues, one can then achieve the identity of the communication, which can be considered as a characteristic of the company.

Invest on online customer service.

As we all know, the era of technology has come to stay, not as a revolution but as an evolution of how we communicate and interact with our devices. With this, online service is a great way to gain customer trust and ensure success in service.

Customize the service.

This tip is one of the most important, both for online and offline retail: customize the service. Today customers have several shopping options and ways to contact companies. Serving this customer well is essential to ensuring success and showing that the company cares directly about him.

The customization is since the first contact, treating the customer not only as one but as the most important factor in the entire sales equation. It is showing that there is a brand commitment to the consumer, not just listening but understanding their needs.

Invest in connectivity through mobile devices.

Connectivity can bring much more dynamism and interaction between service channels, since online is close to offline retail. As a result, investing on mobile devices, in a way that helps the attendants during their sales day, is important to the company.

Using technology as an ally in customer service is an important step. It has a well-trained team that can easily adapt to the environment of constant changes that technology imposes.

Social Networks in Service.

Social networking is a great way to communicate with everyone who wants to stay in touch, even with businesses. This new form of communication can bring several challenges to the business, since the consumer happens to be an important and central piece in social media.

The relationship with consumers through this new service channel can make a difference to the success of sales, also with retail acting in this new field.

Integrate customer service + marketing + sales.

In this tip, shows the important concept of integration between the company’s sectors. All are important and have their place within a company and with their integration the work becomes much more complete, making the different teams work as if they were one, for the same purpose.

The multichannel integration is the term that gives to this new concept, with the areas being combined so that there are different channels of communication with the customer, always seeking to achieve their satisfaction. In addition, it is a good way to manage the channels of care, once combined facilitates the management and monitoring on the part of the company.

Learn more!

The retail sector has evolved as well as all channels of customer service, that being integrated and combined to achieve customer satisfaction and the engagement on the part of the company. With this evolution, we can perceive the use of technology as an ally in all sectors and the steps of the journey of sale must bring the consumer more closely and helps understand their needs.

Wants to know more about tips of how to improve the sales on Retail with a good service? Keep following our blog, enjoy our Facebook Page!

The importance of a Help Desk for retail.

You already know how important is to preserve the satisfaction of a customer, and this satisfaction without any doubt goes through the service. When a customer buys something on your shop – whether on a virtual store or a physical store they expect that all the problems they face after the purchase are resolved quickly and efficiently. To ensure that this expectation will be answered, you need an excellent help desk.

The Expectation of a customer

It is illusion to believe that customers go to your retail just because they have the best prices or products.

Currently, most brands are present in many retail stores, to increase themselves. Therefore, the same product that a customer finds in your store, he also finds in the concurrent.

Besides that, with the high competition in the market, prices and payment terms are totally changeable. Right now, it may be that one of your competitors do some “super promotion”, offering discounts to overcome your store.

If these are not the weighing factors in the customer’s decision, then what is it? The answer is, in large part, on customer service.

How many times have you heard someone say (or do you even said) that would never return to a store, after having a negative experience of customer service?

When a customer buys a product, he already has some expectation of problems. It may be that the item is damaged with missing parts, that it is not exactly like the advertisement, or simply that it does not fully meet your needs. All this is already, to some extent, expected. So the customer wants to do business with a retailer that offers a good resolution to all of these problems.

In short, what really bothers the customer is not the problem itself, but the store’s apparent inability to solve the problem.

That’s where the help desk comes in.

Good and bad help desk in retail

The good help desk is one that is focused on the customer. In practice, this translates into a search for agility and efficiency. This is the minimum expected, although, in fact, the consumer is much more demanding than that. He wants personalized service and, above all, humanized.

Meanwhile, the bad help desk is one who:

applies phrases made of customer appreciation, without converting them into actions;

prioritizes procedures, not results;

“Pushes” the problem to other areas, rather than actively seeking the resolution of requests received;

treats all customers as if they were the same person, without taking into account the particularities of each case.

In the retail sector, the concern with the speed increases. The majority of care in this type of company involve a situation in which the customer has already bought and paid for a product, but for some problem, is unable to take advantage of it. It is natural that he feels prejudiced; and, the more your company takes to close the case, but this negative feeling is strengthened.

Help desk for offline vs. online retail

At this point, you may be wondering if there are differences between the help desk in the case of an offline retail (physical stores) and an online retail (e-commerce). The answer is yes, and these differences start from the customer relationship model in each of them.

In the physical store, there is greater customer trust with the company, thanks to the simple fact that the contact is direct. The customer enters his building, he sees the product before buying, he talks to the seller. At the very least, he knows the store actually exists. So when he looks for the help desk, it’s with some assurance that the problem will have to be solved. This, of course, greatly facilitates the service to this client, who is more open.

Meanwhile, in the case of an e-commerce, the entire relationship that the customer built with the store went through the internet. There was no right contact. If your store is not part of a large retail group, and it is the first time the customer is shopping with you, he will probably have “a foot behind”. When facing a problem, this event will only strengthen its defensive position. Therefore, when looking for the help desk, this will be a more complex customer service.

In this sense, an online retail help desk needs to develop even better quality care than its offline competitor. This is how you can ensure that even when facing some difficulty in the shopping experience, the customer will not lose confidence in your store.

Ensuring a high standard help desk

If you’ve already convinced yourself of the importance of the help desk for retail, you’re probably wondering how you can develop this activity with quality.

There are many ways to ensure a high-standard help desk.

It can be said that everything starts by developing in the company a culture of customer appreciation, without which it is impossible to have a service that meets the expectations of the modern consumer. It is also worth emphasizing the role of the team’s formation, from the elaboration of a rigorous selection process to the establishment of professional training and retraining policies.

However, one of the most important elements may be the use of good tools to help the day-to-day care. An example of a tool is the SSC, that is, Shared Services Center. This tool allows centralizing information that is necessary for service, ensuring greater agility and efficiency. In addition, it also allows for organizing and monitoring care through reports to identify opportunities for improvement.

Milldesk, for example, has a solution in SSC that you can apply to your retailer to obtain superior results in help desk. The system is entirely web, turning the implementation much easier. And it can still be configured to adapt to the specific needs of your business, whether it is a physical store or e-commerce.

In this post, we explore the importance of the help desk for offline and online retail, we talk about good and bad practices, and we present a tool that you need to adopt in your company: SSC.

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