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Not every brand needs its own structures. As we’ve outlined in this space, consolidating your help desk for multiple brands under a single umbrella comes with a wide range of both functional and monetary benefits.

At the same time, simply pooling your resources is not enough to succeed. Different brands have very different requirements, and require a range of varying approaches to ensure that each of your customers gets the help they need when they needed. To help your business succeed, here are 6 crucial considerations for your multi brand help desk approach.

1) Understand Your Range of Services

First, take stock of your brand portfolio and the range of services you offer under that portfolio. Put simply, you cannot establish a multi-brand help desk if you are not aware of every possibility of complaint and comment that may originate from your customers.

In some of the below steps, you will have to build out a very specific set of instructions, processes, and best practices for handling help desk tickets for each of your brands. By achieving an in-depth understanding of your range of services first, you can ensure that every future step is more comprehensive and prevents even minor niches of brands and complaints from falling through the cracks.

2) Know Your Audiences

Intimately connected with each of your brands are their typical, core audiences and customers. And especially if they differ from brand to brand, you will need to gain a comprehensive understanding of exactly who they are, and how they might interact with your software.

You might, for example, have a brand in your portfolio that attracts young adults who are most likely to enter a ticket using a social media network like Facebook. A different brand for older audiences, on the other hand, is probably more likely to attract email and phone-based tickets.

Each of these approaches is equally valid, and deserves to be treated with equal priority. But if you don’t have an in-depth understanding of the audiences engaged with your individual brands, you may accidentally prioritize one over the other. Only a comprehensive analysis of your individual audiences can help you build a platform that addresses concerns equally well for every brand in your business.

3) Establish a Central Help Desk Strategy

The beauty of combining your help desk efforts into a single platform is that a large part of the complaints will be similar in nature, regardless of the brands to which they apply. In addition, the core processes of how these tickets are handled and managed will probably not change from brand to brand.

That’s why you can use your multi brand help desk to the efficiency with which you handle core, basic complaints. But that’s only possible, of course, if you also set in place a strategy with which to handle these complaints. Ideally, representatives of all brands should be involved in planning that strategy to ensure equal representation and accuracy.

4) Allow for Brand-Specific Branches

While the majority of tickets placed will probably be brand-agnostic, that won’t be the case for all of them. To account for the rest, set up a plan that includes brand-specific branches as necessary.

For example, you may receive a complaint dealing specifically with returns for a brand product. Unless you handle returns centrally, you will want this person to talk to the representative most equipped to help them. Brand-specific branches can help you get there, ensuring that every customer gets the help they need–no matter how brand-specific their ticket.

5) Find the Right Software For Your Needs

Operating a single help desk for multiple brands within your business can only be possible if you have the software structure to support it. Most platforms available to businesses of all sizes do allow for relatively smooth operations when it comes to a single brand, but may not be as successful or functional once multiple channels and brands get added to the equation.

Finding a software solution that does allow for the integration of multiple brand entities, however, is central to success. That platform should allow for the build and integration of macros and other types of automation, helping to streamline comments and complaints into either a central workflow or its brand-specific branches.

6) Evaluate Regularly to Improve Operations

Finally, don’t underestimate the importance of making sure that your operations keep running smoothly and even improve over time. Especially if you are implementing a multi brand help desk, you need to make sure that over time, each brand gets the support it needs and no complaints or tickets fall through the cracks.

Set in place benchmarks and regular time periods for evaluation. Then, establish an average of opened and successfully resolved tickets, and evaluate each of your brands against that average. If you find one that is underperforming, it may be time for a closer evaluation of why that is the case, and what you can do to fix it.

There is no doubt that building a single help desk for multiple brands can come with a wide range of benefits and success potential. But these benefits are only possible to achieve if you build it strategically, accommodating both generic tickets and complaints and those that are more specifically directed toward your individual brands.

Using the above steps, you can accomplish that goal. The result will be a help desk platform that is well-equipped to handle your growing business and its multiple brands. You can feel confident, even as your audience increases in size and diversity, that all of them will have an effective outlet to share their thoughts and ask for assistance.