What is a help desk? How do you improve this process?

What is a help desk workflow process? For many customers, it can be a focus of disappointment. It’s very common for people to be dissatisfied with the service they receive at help desk centers.

Slow responses, problem resolution difficulties, and lengthy delays between return calls or emails are the most common complaints.

But how do you solve this problem and promote improvements in customer service in your business?

The truth is that, in addition to some simple steps, the key to help desk improvement is in the knowledge management.

But before we show you how to implement this in your company, let’s understand more specifically about what a help desk is and then how to design this process more efficiently.

Also see in our blog: What is Service Desk management? – Know its benefits

What is a help desk workflow process and how do you optimize it?

A help desk is customer service, which can be both internal and external. It aims to take calls regarding troubleshooting, answer questions and forward technical assistance, among other things.

It’s used a lot by information technology companies, software vendors and service providers (SaaS), telecommunications, internet and pay-TV, are also employed in the post-sales of other companies of the most diverse branches.

According to data released by the Harvard Business Review, 81% of consumers prefer to solve their problems alone, through tutorials or by searching the company’s website, before talking to customer service.

This means that any questions that come to them are increasingly complex. The simple problems have already been solved by the customers themselves.

How do you promote good customer service, that’s agile and without waiting queues in your help desk, if the conversations tend to be getting longer and the problems more difficult to solve?

The solution is to design a process for your attendant’s to continuously increase their knowledge of how to solve problems.

For this, once they figure out how to solve a complex call, it should quickly be available in a database that all callers can consult.

Let’s see how to do this by analyzing a process flow designed especially for this purpose.

Optimizing a help desk workflow process

It’s not enough to only know what a help desk workflow process is. It’s necessary to design an adequate process for the management and dissemination of knowledge. This will lead to quicker resolutions of client problems.

For this, the process needs 3 actors, as follows. The user, support level 1 and support level 2, each of them represented in a different lane of the pool.

Upon receiving a user’s call, the Level 1 support desk responds promptly if they know how to resolve the problem. They may also check the knowledge database to find a solution.

If they can’t find the solution, they escalate the call to a Level 2 Support Clerk. This person is more experienced and will find a solution to the problem. Once they find it, they send the solution back to Level 1, who checks if it caters to the user. If so, the solution is implemented.

The user tests the solution and if it works the process terminates. Otherwise the process returns to the level 1 support attendant.

But, an important detail: before closing the process, whenever your team discovers a new solution, the level 2 support attendant should update the knowledge database with this new procedure. This way, when there are similar occurrences, level 1 support can already solve the call without the need for escalation.

Therefore, having an always up-to-date knowledge database will reduce response time, reduce the need for escalation to the second level of support, make the conversations shorter, and leave users waiting less time in any queues.

If you want to know this process and the ITIL incident management process more thoroughly, access these two posts from our blog:

• Check out the details of the ITIL Service Desk Process Workflow
• Step by step ITIL incident management

With HEFLO, a free, cloud-based BPMN process automation and modeling software,  Just register on the platform and access the process library and you can check out these and many other ready-to-use process diagrams.