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If you needed your brakes fixed on your car, you would need to seek the services of a mechanic. Would you go to the big mechanic franchise that had a fairly good industry reputation but high prices? Would you go to the guy that has a bad reputation,

who will do the work in his garage for a low price but the job might be below your expectations? Or would you go to the new start-up company full of young mechanics trying to make a name for themselves where you don’t really know what the job or price will turn out like?

Companies have a similar dilemma when choosing their IT help desk software  because there really is no end of options available to them. They can choose the big IT corporations who charge large fees for an often impersonal service that might not be efficient for their company. They can choose the cheapest options with often bad results, just to save a few bucks, or they can take a plunge and try something new.

What a company needs to do is to build trust because customers are willing to pay more for services, including help desks, providing they can trust that the work will be completed and the resolutions delivered on time.

7 Ways To Win Customer Trust

Callback before closing any tickets.

An agent should always confirm with the user that the issue is resolved before the ticket is closed. Nothing gets a service desk a bad reputation quite like closing customers tickets before the issue is completely over. A customer will certainly give negative feedback if they are frustrated about an IT issue that is ongoing, and all of a sudden they get an email to say “The issue has now been fixed. Please leave us your feedback.” When the agent or specialist team has fixed an issue, give the user a quick call to ask if everything is now working as they expected.

Regular reporting.

Don’t try and hide any statistics or figures that might be disappointing for your service desk, because they will come into the open eventually. Schedule a regular meeting with you clients and discuss what is working well and what is not going so well. Have the metrics prepared and customer feedback available so you can discuss what is going wrong and what you are doing very well. Customers will trust that you have the ability to turn things around if you discuss it

Efficient training

If the agents on your help desk are skilled and polite, your customers will have a lot more faith in their ability to provide a good service. With a help desk, the biggest asset is its staff and they are the first point of contact for your customer. Try to have as many native speakers as possible as this does help with language barriers, although with outsourcing it can be difficult. Ensure your employees are well trained, courteous and polite. With training, remember that we can’t always be masters at every single task or application, but we should know how to find the appropriate system if we need to.

Motivating help desk agent to deliver best customer service is something that needs to be considered as integral part of training.

Develop a good knowledge base

Having the appropriate knowledge available to help desk agents can mean the difference between waiting on the phone for an hour, and finishing the call successfully after just 5 minutes. The knowledge database needs to be accurate, regularly updated as the systems and service levels change, easy to understand and efficient. A knowledge article does not need to contain all the information in the world; just what the agent needs to know to fix the issue.

Use the best software

With software, you usually get what you pay for. If your help desk has the best software on the market, you are going to be providing your customers a better service and one they can trust. If your software in unreliable, it usually means that you are as well.

Before select any help desk tool know the help desk software cost for your business.

Schedule your availability effectively

Nobody wants to be waiting in a call queue for hours on end for the help desk to pick up the phone. Effective scheduling of breaks and vacations will mean that you minimize the risks of not having enough agents to pick up the phone. If the customers know that somebody will answer the phone next time they call, they will feel as though they are in a position of trust.

Good management

The agents on a help desk can only do so much. A manager of a help desk will have a lot of responsibilities in order to ensure that the service is run correctly and the customers are being delivered the best service. A manager should have lots of contact with the customers and they should feel safe in the knowledge that the manager can do what needs to be done in a time of crisis. Good management is the key to earning trust.

Additional learn how to improve customer service using appropriate help desk software.