The overwhelming popularity of the social media is giving sleepless nights to many businesses.
A disgruntled customer can easily cause considerable damage to a brand using Twitter, Facebook or other forms of social media.
The focus is thus on keeping the customers happy and ensuring that they enjoy quality support and after-sale services.
There is a saying that “better customer service starts with better communication.” This is one of the things that businesses around the world irrespective of their size are working on better customer services.
Setting up a help desk solution is human resource intensive something which small businesses find difficult to afford.
Thus the need of the hour is a smart solution that caters to the needs of the customers and yet it remains cost effective. Cloud Based Help Desk Solutions fit the bill perfectly and are being adopted at a brisk pace.
Overview of Cloud Based Help Desk Solutions
The first help desk for most business is actually the first desk itself. The person manning this system would offer all possible help to the customers and answer all their queries. With expansion businesses opt for a more detailed setup.
A conventional help desk application would reside in-house or a client network or server.
Here the business would have to invest huge sums of money on maintenance, operation and care. Managing the entire show is the responsibility of the business. This can add up to the costs seriously and eat a chunk of the operational costs for any business.
Cloud Based Help Desk Solutions on the other hand resides on third-party servers. They are easily accessible through the Internet and thus can be accessed from anywhere in the world.
The service providers are responsible for its maintenance and timely upgrades. This solution is highly scalable and can be implemented in large businesses and SMBs with equal ease.
Advantages of Cloud Based Help Desk Solutions
Cost Savings
The biggest advantage of cloud-based help desk solutions is lower operational costs. You won’t have to incur huge expanses on setting up this system as is the case with traditional solutions.
The maintenance and upgrades will also be taken care of by the service providers and hence you can cut costs substantially.
These solutions work under the SaaS (Software as a Service) model and thus you usually pay for your usage and this ensures maximum ROI especially for SMBs.
Easily Accessible Data
Another important advantage of these solutions is the amount of data and intelligence they offer you on your customers' satisfaction and your support team’s performance.
You will be able to set goals and milestones and keep tab on them. Since these systems are cloud based they allow you measure your organization’s performance against standard benchmarks or even against others in your industry.
All this data is available to you in your fingertips in real time and you can access it on your smartphones and tablets.
Better Customer Service
Cloud computing platform have presented innumerable creative possibilities to business to cater to their customers. Businesses have just started exploring these solutions and many of them are implementing them in their own unique way.
The cloud based solutions are mobile friendly and hence allows businesses to serve customers on their tablets and smartphones. This helps build a strong bridge between the customer and the business.
Extended Collaboration
Cloud based solutions allow extended collaboration between different verticals of a business.
They also improve the collaboration between the help desk personnel and the customers thus paving the way for better communication.
Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter can easily be integrated into these solutions and specialize user groups can be created. Customers can also be allowed to interact between themselves and this can play a significant role in brand promotion.
Reduces Complexity
Cloud based solutions simplify things and reduce the complexity of managing your IT infrastructure. Gone are the days when you would need a team of technical geeks to manage a help desk solution.
You thus gain more control over the solutions and little or no training is required to get used to these solutions.
The systems management and application maintenance are simplified in these solutions. It allows for easy migration of your existing helpdesk solution to the cloud and it can also be integrated with other business applications without the need to invest on additional hardware or software.
More Customization
Cloud based systems are modular in nature and thus you will be able easily customize the frontend and backend to meet your business objectives.
You can simply add, remove, and rearrange links on the dashboard to achieve a solution that is custom made for you. In the backend you can use fast filtering solutions that help different departments in the organization access information that is relevant to them and save quality time.
Future of Cloud Based Solution
Business are increasingly going beyond the borders of desktop and today we are in a multi-device world. Inter-device portability is defining how IT systems succeed and this is where could solutions are emerging as the winner.
In such an environment standalone or server based solutions fail to meet end needs of the business. Cloud based help desk solutions help in centralization of data thanks to large number of applications that are easily available.
These solutions allow business to identify and troubleshoot problems easily thus earning the trust of the customers and adding to the brand value.
Time is running out for traditional help desk solutions as they fail to meet the changing needs and aspirations of the customers. It is time businesses migrate to smarter solutions on the cloud.