Why Open Source Help Desk System is Important for your Website?
Customer support is integral to any business. Happy and satisfied customers convert into loyal customers, and loyal customers open the scope of improved sales and ROI.
So making customers happy and satisfied is necessary. How can you make your customers happier? The solution is simple, but it needs effort from your side. Being for them at any time is the key solution. When a customer purchases or subscribes to a product or service from your company, they often need help to get used to the product and services.
Even before they buy the product or service, they sometimes need an expert assistant to share their requirements for choosing the perfect product that totally fits into their requirements. Ideal customer support begins with presale assistance and continues till the customer stops using the product or services.
How can you make your customer support more effective?
Usually, customers raise queries and concerns through email, phone calls, chat, social media platforms, and so on. These queries from multiple platforms need to be gathered in a single place for their efficient management.
If there is no single platform for handling tickets from multiple resources, you may miss some emails and queries through chat. A missed query may be a message for urgent help required for your loyal customer.
Skipping queries will make your loyal customers unhappy, and they may switch from your brand to some other brand or to your competitor. Hence, treating each and every customer is important and necessary.
Satisfying the existing customers is one of the best methods to attract new customers. How? If existing customers are happy, they will recommend your products and services to other people. Even though there are excellent marketing strategies available nowadays, people trust word of mouth more than any other social media or advertising.
In accordance with the expansion of your business, you may be required to handle more customers. Increased customers will result in an increased number of tickets. You might have hired more in-house agents to deal with customers or you may be outsourcing to manage tickets.
But, it will be a bit challenging if multiple agents handle the customer service at the same time without a proper system. The same email may be opened and taken care of by multiple agents at the same time, and they may get confused about each other who dealt with which query. There can be so many confusing situations and it may affect the agents’ performance, thereby bringing down the quality of your customer service.
How can you make it in a systematic way?
The best way is to adopt a help desk system! You can find many help desk systems and plugins in the market with unique feature sets.
There are so many benefits of using a helpdesk system that they are extremely favorable to agents. An ideal help desk system streamlines by accepting tickets from various resources, assigning them to an agent, and provides proper alerts and notifications to handle the tickets effectively. Also, you can integrate knowledge base articles to reduce the tickets, and keep track of all tickets and agent details in a single platform.
Some help desk systems also generate analysis reports to measure the performance of the overall customer support system as well as agents. As these systems gather all agents and tickets in a single platform, the admin can track how many tickets received, the number of solved tickets by an agent, the pending tickets, solved ones, etc.
Tracking the performance will always help to understand where your position is in the market, the reason for reduced and improved sales, and will get an insight into the areas that need improvements.
But, is there any way to get a third-party help desk system that completely satisfies your business requirements? If you get a perfect one that suits your business domain and environment, would it be compatible with your website platform?
If the help desk system does not provide all features you require, there is no use in adopting it on your website. Hence, it is better to use tailor-made systems. But, is that budget-friendly if you go for a complete custom made system by consulting a developer?
The right solution is to go for an open-source help desk system!
What is an open-source help desk system?
Open source help desk system is a customer support system that is built in a collaborative public manner and released under a license in which the copyright owner grants the rights to use, change, and tweak the software according to the requirements of the user. The main advantage of an open-source help desk system is, they are highly customizable for any business environment.
Why Open source help desk system is important for your website?
As we have already discussed the benefits of help desk systems, you might have got an idea now.
Since you can download the source code, you can tweak the system to include the required specifications seamlessly. You can either use the system the way it is and can add new features when new requirements arise as and when needed.
When you consider having a custom help desk system with the required set of features, choosing an open-source help desk system and tweaking it based on your business domain will be the right choice.
Which is the best open source help desk system in the market?
I would recommend Open Source HelpDesk & Customer Support Ticketing System – Simple & Flexible as it is wrapped with all the important features required for a customer support help desk system which is open for any kind of customization.
You could be a blogger, entrepreneur, eCommerce store owner, or focusing on any business domain, this superior help desk system will help you to make it fit into your work environment.
The key features of this open-source help desk systems are as follows.
Works well on any website platform
No need to worry about the compatibility issues that may happen with your website platform such as WordPress, Shopify, Wix, etc. The expert team of this help desk system will be there to make it fit into any platform without compromising the performance.
Exceptional ticket management system
Ticket management is an unavoidable specification in any help desk system. This open-source help desk system is released from the family of WSDesk, one of the top-notch ticketing plugins for WordPress websites. Hence it already contains features such as exceptional ticket management, advanced features for agents, various triggers and notifications, IMAP and Google OAuth integrations, and many more.
Open for third-party integrations
It is important to add third-party tools and extensions to improve the customer support experience. You will require to add a live chat, option to charge for support, and integrate your social media platforms, etc. For any kind of integrations, you can discuss it with the developer team and configure it in your system.
Extreme customization
Customization can be simple or complex based on your domain, profession, and other business requirements. You can apply any kind of customization to make the help desk system in the way you wish. If you need a total revamp on the system that needs complex coding, their team is also open for that as well.
Single platform for ticket handling
You can receive queries from different email IDs from customers by converting them as tickets using IMAP services. And if you require to convert a chat in your live chat to tickets and pass it to the system, they will help you out to configure that as well. This platform can be made as a single platform to manage all tickets that receive from multiple channels.
Expert assistance and consultation
The expert team of the Open Source HelpDesk & Customer Support Ticketing System is available 24/7 to solve any kind of issues you may encounter. If there are any technical glitches, bugs, any other data breach issues, etc., you can contact them immediately.
If you want to set up knowledge base articles that integrate with your helpdesk system in order to reduce the number of tickets you receive, you can configure it accordingly with the help of them. These knowledge base articles will be listed to customers when they try to raise a ticket with a similar topic. This will make the customers proactive on approaching issues as well as reduce the tickets.
Interesting pricing plans
According to your requirements and the number of tickets you receive in a day, you can choose a subscription plan. They have basically 3 plans such as Starter, Pro, and Ultimate. The plan starts at $79 per month.
If you need a managed hosting plan to completely focus on your business without concentrating on the support system, you can choose their managed hosting plan. Your data will be secured in their hands and no need to worry about frequent system upgrades and maintenance.
Wrap up
This awesome open source help desk system will help you to boost your sales and uplift the quality of your customer services with customized features. Happy and satisfied customers are always an asset to every business.
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