Importance of Helpdesk Feedback

According to Salesforce research, 78% of consumers will do business with a brand again after a mistake if its customer service is excellent. This is the power that customer service holds. It helps you earn loyal customers who not only continue repurchasing but also spread positive word-of-mouth.
But often, even after you’ve resolved customer complaints in your helpdesk software, several customers may leave dissatisfied and never do business with you again. This is where the importance of helpdesk feedback comes into play.

Helpdesk feedback is measured on the primary customer service metric – the Customer Effort Score. It determines the effort customers had to put in to do business with you or get an issue resolved.

But does helpdesk feedback only mean running CES surveys? Not really. Helpdesk feedback can be captured to measure different aspects and improve the overall customer service standards of your brand.

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How can customer service feedback improve customer experiences? How exactly can helpdesk feedback be conducive to your brand’s growth? Let’s understand.

Why is Helpdesk Feedback Important?

Let’s understand the primary benefits of helpdesk feedback.

1. Increased Customer Loyalty/Advocacy

As per RightNow Technologies, 86% are likely to repurchase and even pay up to 25% more if they get good experiences with the brand. This proves that great customer experiences are invaluable and help you earn loyal customers.

Collecting customer service feedback effectively and actually addressing the challenges reported shows that the brand values and nurtures the relationship with its customers. This helps tremendously in building customer loyalty and spreading positive word-of-mouth. Moreover, when customers know that excellent customer experiences are a constant with a brand, they are usually more willing to give it second chances even if the brand doesn’t meet customers’ expectations once in a while.

2. Improvement in Product Quality

Customer-centricity and product-centricity go hand-in-hand. A product-centric business that is also customer-centric never creates a product in isolation. Rather, customer feedback is incorporated into the development process right from the inception of the product using the right customer feedback software. For example, while creating a product, brands can use market research surveys to gauge user requirements and market demand.

Similarly, once the product is live or available to the users, you can enable your customers to share transactional feedback on each product or product feature. Now, when you pull a report with complaint trends, you can filter out all product-related tickets in your helpdesk. This way, you can identify the common complaint trends in terms of the product as well as recurring issues. And with this, not only can you identify areas of improvement in your product but also highlight high-priority issues.

3. Improvement in Agent Performance and Productivity

The first step in improving agent productivity in any business is to calculate the Customer Effort Score. The customer effort score is the global CX metric for measuring your customer service standards, i.e. the effort that customers had to put in to do business with you or get an issue resolved.

While a CES survey helps in gauging and improving customer service as a whole, you can use a support ticket customer satisfaction survey template to measure and improve individual performances of agents.

A support ticket satisfaction survey aims at measuring customers’ satisfaction with the resolution received. This means that a ticket being marked resolved doesn’t mean the end of the conversation. Agents can measure their own performance through helpdesk feedback and improve it based on how satisfied the customers were.

For example, when a customer sends a response or resolution to a customer via email, they can actually measure customer satisfaction with email signature surveys. The customer can read the response and then rate how helpful it was with the question in the signature. Now what this does is it gives agents an overview of their own performance where they can see how they did with each customer ticket.

With Zonka Feedback integration with your helpdesk, you can also automate customer service surveys as soon as the ticket is marked or resolved. For example, if a ticket is marked ‘closed’ in Zendesk, an automatic Zendesk feedback form would be sent out to the customer via email or SMS where they can share how satisfied they were with the resolution and also the reason for the rating they chose to give to the agent. This helps agents see for themselves what’s working and what’s not so they can further improve their support strategy.

One of our clients that uses helpdesk feedback surveys at scale also tracks agent ID with each service response. This means that if you want to see why a customer has given a poor satisfaction score, you can directly get in touch with the agent who resolved their issue and unearth problems when they may be easily overlooked. Whereas in your help desk software, you can only view attributes like the number of responses, survey time, etc.

Moreover, agents who rank low when it comes to ticket resolution can also be trained on different aspects depending on the factors leading to a poor agent score.

4. Closed Feedback Loops

Closing the feedback loop means further responding to helpdesk survey responses to better understand your customers’ service experience and ensure that they leave satisfied. Let’s understand this with an example.

Let’s say you integrate your helpdesk software with Zonka Feedback. Now, based on the helpdesk feedback, you can further respond to the customer. For example, if the CES score is high, which means the customer was satisfied with the resolution received, an automatic email would be sent to them requesting them to write a review for you on a third-party platform.

Similarly, if the CES score is low, an automatic follow-up email would be sent, for example, a further resolution, a discount or coupon code as compensation, an apology email, etc.

Now, why is this important?

Often, customer service agents resolve the tickets on their end but the customer may still not be satisfied. Let’s say a customer wants an item they purchased on an e-commerce website replaced. The agent looks into the issue, shares with the customer that they need to courier the item back since return pick-up isn’t available, and then marks the ticket ‘closed’. While the ticket status may currently be ‘resolved’, it isn’t necessarily true that the customer’s issue was resolved.

By closing the feedback loop, you actually address the issues customers may have after they have received service support. This helps brands uncover customer service roadblocks while also communicating to customers that their experiences are important and they are being heard.

5. Improved Customer Experience

As per khoros, 83% of customers feel that they are more loyal to brands or businesses that respond to their complaints efficiently. This means customers are more likely to buy from you if they feel heard. Imagine the impact your customer service practices may have on customers when you not only listen to customer complaints but also ensure that they get the most effective resolution.

When you collect helpdesk feedback, you can exactly gauge how customers perceive your customer service efforts through helpdesk customer satisfaction surveys. And with the feedback received, you can further improve the service standards, be it the overall customer service approach or individual agent performance.

Conclusion

Just like product and brand feedback, customer service feedback is critical too. Helpdesk feedback not only improves the overall customer service standards of your business but also empowers support agents or executives with meaningful data to offer more reliable and efficient solutions to customers.

So, if you aren't already collecting helpdesk feedback, it's high time you do so. All you need is simple integration of an intuitive survey tool with your helpdesk software.

Zonka Feedback, in addition to effortless helpdesk integration, gives you access to readymade templates for different touchpoints so you can get started without any coding knowledge.