10 ways to improve productivity with Freshdesk!

It’s almost Christmas week, and as you jump hurdle after hurdle to get every ticket resolved, anticipate and negate every possible complaint, you know you are racing against an unforgiving clock. And with the holidays looming large in your mind like the mistletoe on Christmas trees, you need every trick in the box to get things done as fast as it possibly can.

We just thought we should help out, you know, this being the festive season and everything!

So here are 10 ways you can improve your productivity with Freshdesk, get everything done at supersonic speeds, and head off for that much needed vacation –

Stay on top with (Email) Notifications
Get your tickets dropped right into your mailbox by getting your email notifications configured, set and working before you get ready to welcome Santa. That way, you know when there is a new ticket to address even as you unwrap that warm smile from your customers for Christmas. Make sure the notification email has a link back to the ticket in your customer ticketing system. So you don’t waste time searching for it, in case you need to access it quickly.

Keep the automations ready for new tickets
Why should someone in the support team need an alert when the customer has a sales query? Apart from filling up inboxes and being an unnecessary false alarm on a holiday, having bad workflows (or none at all) only adds to the delay. A simple automation that files each incoming ticket in the right category, prioritizes it, and assigns it to the right agent or support group can save you hours that you could spend sipping apple cider. The tickets you need to answer will come to you, because that’s how it should be.

Set your business rules and workflows on auto-pilot
There’s something magical about support tickets during Christmas. Your customers who happened to raise all those tickets somehow disappear when you need a response from them. Now, you could either spend the rest of your vacation running through every pending ticket, or just create a rule that sends a gentle reminder email to customers automatically if they haven’t gotten back to you in a day. There’s just so much more you can do by bringing your workflows into your help desk software system – like auto-closing resolved tickets, or even keep customer frustrations low during their day off.

Keep the motivation high, without losing focus
Productivity falling, support getting boring, agents losing motivation? The last thing you need is your team losing its holiday cheer. Why not transform your support portal into a game, let your agents compete, win badges and trophies, compare achievements and drive each other? You could even consider setting them on short-term “Quests” to keep customer satisfaction levels high, or resolution times low.

Productivity banner

Have responses ready in a single click
You know those questions you keep getting over and over again? You are probably going to get a lot more of them during the holidays. Consider creating pre-formatted canned responses to the top 10 questions you get every day. That way, you can post answers and actually resolve tickets in a single click. Your helpdesk will soon resemble the wild west, with your agents slinging guns and shooting down tickets in single shots. Fast will never mean the same again.

Don’t stop with workflows. Automate entire processes
Consider this – a support ticket raises an issue. The agent needs to email the customer with a bug ID, move the ticket to ‘Pending’, assign it to the QA team and notify the QA Engineer about the ticket. This is a time-consuming process, albeit a frequent one. And your team is sure to “forget” a step or two, especially with the vacations so near. Have automations ready that can run the entire scenario, from emailing the customer to assigning the ticket to the engineer and accomplish them in a single click.

Don’t search. Choose from smart suggestions
You have already written a thesis on the subject in your solutions page. You know you could search through your knowledge base for all the related articles, find the right one and share the link in your response. But why? In the world of Google Suggest, actually searching by keywords is preposterous. Make your help desk suggest the solutions that might be the best fit. Of course, the catch here is to make sure your knowledge base is ready and updated.

Keep the Kbase updated and ready
Which brings us to the knowledge base. As you type a reply to a customer, you realise that what you are writing is a great knowledge base article or an even a possible solution. You want to save it, but then you need to copy it, navigate to the solutions page and pen down your draft. Or you could just shoot an email and have your help desk convert it to a k-base article for you. Either way, remember to keep that knowledge base updated and ready before the holidays.

Marry the tools you use most often
It’d be great if your support integrates with your CRM, right? Or your invoicing software, or your bug tracking software or your email marketing software, perhaps? Jumping between a plethora of tools can be annoying even during a regular workday. You sure don’t want to do that during your day off. Run a quick check to see if your help desk is connected with your CRM, invoicing application, email campaign tool, bug tracking system and pretty much anything else you might want to tie it to.

If it can be done from your inbox, do it!
It’s Christmas after all. You don’t want to open up that laptop unless you really need to. In fact, you probably don’t even want to fire up the browser in your phone. If you can get it done with a couple of lines through email, why go anywhere else. But check if your help desk pipes your emails, formats them the way you need and sends it out to customers right away. Better still, if your help desk lets you control it through email commands, you can probably strike gold this holiday season!