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Your help desk is there to ensure that customer problems get solved, but that’s not their only task. As the first line of defense against customer dissatisfaction, your help desk agents do everything they can to soothe ruffled feathers and assure your customers that their issues have been heard and are being taken care of.

Unfortunately, customers have heard it all before and often from automated voices that couldn’t possibly mean it. This means that often your best way to show your customers that you care is to literally show them. Online issue tracking software will allow your help desk team to not only quickly manage issues from the service queue, but show customers where their problem is in the solution process. Transparency and access can often more effectively assure customers than any soothing conversation. Here are five great ways that your help desk can use an issue tracker to show customers that you care about their experience:

1. For Problems with Long Solutions

Things that are impossible to fix are actually less stressful for help desk professionals and clients then issues that can be fixed but will take an unusually long time. The length of the fix often depends on the depth of the issue. The longest fixes often involve on-site repair before the work is done, but there are kinds of delays that are just as frustrating for customers. When their problem is a bug in the website or app, programmers will have to write a solution, test, and push it for repairs. Sometimes the issue is a configuration conflict on their end requiring lengthy troubleshooting sessions with your help desk personnel.

An online issue tracker is the perfect way to show your customers that you are on the ball, but aren’t ready to hand them a completed solution yet. While your support technicians use the tracking to continuously work on an extended solution, the client can watch through an online portal to see responsive proof that their issue is being addressed.

2. For Very Fast Solutions

Issue tracking may be comforting for long solutions, but it’s downright impressive when the solution comes in lightning fast. For the problems your team is good at solving, an online issue tracker can show off how streamlined their process is. To do this, send an email to your client the moment their issue is created that links them to a progress dashboard. Through this portal, the client watches as one of your help desk pros processes the issue, implements the solution and turns it in within minutes. By writing the issue tracker page to update responsively, your client will watch the solution form as a nearly live display of customer service and technical competency.

3. Proving Issues Are Active

When an issue takes a long time to solve, especially if a customer has to wait for the help desk to get back to them with a solution, it’s easy for some clients to feel abandoned. They begin to wonder if they haven’t been shuffled to the bottom of the service queue and forgotten. Some even wonder if their issue has been secretly canceled. These dark thoughts stem from a combination of frustration and bad previous experiences and the best way to assuage them is with friendly transparency. With an issue tracker portal, you can prove to your clients not only that their issue was logged, but approximately what is going on with it as well. Clients who fear you have forgotten them can simply check on the recent activity on their issue tracker to see when it was last touched by an employee and what stage their solution is at.

4. Sharing the Solution

Once you have published a summary of the work process, why not share the solution with your client? A good way to cap any issue tracker log is with an explanation of how the problem was solved. This not only creates an interesting and inclusive piece of information for the client, it begins to build a complete documentation of problems and solutions for future help desk functions. Through either a search function or high-end data processing, a handbook, automatic solution suggestions, and best practices data can be harvested from online issue tracking logs closed with a detailed solution. Clients who have taken an interest in the solution process will be naturally interested in how their issue was finally solved, closing a potentially unhappy experience on a positive and educational note.

5. For Recurring Problems

A known perk to a complex online issue tracker is the ability to group issues by customer. This gives both you and them the ability to see what issues they have logged in the past, how long it took to solve them, and the messages sent during the process. From their perspective, this is a record of quality customer service, but from your perspective, it’s a road map to dealing with this customer. With continuous issue tracking, you may be able to help customers with recurring problems identify a local configuration or hardware setting causing the issue or some behavioral cause that can be adapted to eliminate the recurrence. While this is helpful to your team, it can be a big relief for frustrated customers to stop the pattern of repeating problems.

Online issue tracking is a powerful tool for your help desk representatives, but it’s also a wonderful way to involve your customers in the solution process and assure them that their issues are in the hands of attentive professionals. When you give your customers a window into their own issue tracking, you can show them how hard you work for their benefit, proving that you care about their customer experience.