Q&A with Real Help Desk Users

The ability to interact with customers efficiently and affordably are among the reasons businesses of all sizes and verticals are leveraging help desk software as part of their customer service strategies.

If your company is toying with the idea of getting some much-needed assistance — in the form of a help desk — let a pair of current users from two of the most wellknown solutions, UserVoice and Zendesk, be your guide.

How Did Your Help Desk Help Your Company in 2012?

(UserVoice) Nate Munger, Director of Customer Satisfaction at LaunchRock: The UserVoice ticketing system seamlessly connects customers and support team members in a single conversation strand, creating a more personalized experience for the customer. Likewise, UserVoice customer profiles help us better understand our customers with an easy-to-access ticket history and social media information like recent Tweets about LaunchRock.

The easy-to-use UserVoice interface and efficient ticket management system made it possible for LaunchRock to support 50,000 customer accounts with a single full-time customer support agent. As a result, we were able to stay lean and focus our resources on building new products instead of paying for more team members to help support the current one.

(Zendesk) Chase Sheaffer, Co-Founder of Out of Milk: We are a small team and we all wear multiple hats — running the business, development, IT and, of course, support. Zendesk allows us to provide top-notch, fast support without making it a major focus of our daily activities. As a direct result, Out of Milk is able to maintain a great relationship with our users, keep reviews high and learn about what our product focus should be straight from the consumer.

What Are Your Favorite Features?

(UserVoice) LaunchRock: The feedback forum is a favorite way for us to engage our customers and empower their ideas with responses from the LaunchRock team. Because UserVoice allows customers to vote for ideas, the forum has been key to helping us deliver improvements and new features we know our customers want.

(Zendesk) Out of Milk: Zendesk has many great features, but two of them really shine when it comes to our productivity.

Feedback Tab – integrating a support panel directly on our main product page on our website has been a tremendous boon. This allows us to deflect a significant portion of tickets by funneling users through an integrated knowledge base where the result of no matching support articles or helpful solutions results in a very focused ticket.

Reporting Suite – Using the tools Zendesk provides, we are able to see what our common issues and search terms are, where they are coming from, how successful our knowledge-based articles are at handling these issues and more. Taking this data and converting it into meaningful actions makes handling tickets a breeze.

What Features Do You Want in 2013?

(UserVoice) LaunchRock: We would love to see analytics of customer search inside the knowledge base and feedback forums. Knowing what keywords or phrases are most frequently searched will help us improve our knowledge-based articles. Customers will also get more instant answers, and our support load will be reduced.

(Zendesk) Out of Milk: Email Deflection — Tickets filed via email tend to bypass the entire process of funneling users through support articles and other processes designed to help them resolve an issue. Heading off an email ticket with a potential resolution allows the user a chance of resolving a ticket before we need to spend time on it.