Email support is the most fundamental channel of customer service for most businesses today. Ensuring that all requests are addressed efficiently and effectively can become a seriously formidable task.

And it’s not just a problem for big businesses with thousands of customers. Any team of people who regularly deal with incoming email requests, internal or external to their organisation, can benefit from using email help desk software. Help desk software can be used to help coordinate IT support tickets, respond to finance and admin emails, manage sales emails, organise job applications and more.

What is an email help desk?

According to Techopedia, a help desk solution enables help desk operators to keep track of user requests using a unique identifier, easily find solutions to common queries, prioritise tasks, and more. Email help desks are normally linked up to a shared email address like help@example.com. Customers are encouraged to use this shared email address rather than sending emails directly to an individual staff email address.

Email clients like Gmail or Outlook are not designed for team collaboration and don’t include the tools necessary to provide exceptional email customer service. An email help desk enables you to automate tasks, set up workflows, and clearly monitor incoming and outgoing help desk emails. An email help desk is sometimes referred to as a ‘ticketing’ system, since each new email request results in a unique ‘ticket’ to keep track of the conversation and related work items. It is a very different way to think about email.

There are a lot of different email help desk solutions available. Some popular options for large teams include Zendesk, Freshdesk and Help Scout. SendBoard is an email help desk we built, which is geared towards smaller teams. SendBoard works as a Power-Up in Trello - where teams already collaborate and get work done.

Simple help desk software can streamline your email tasks and provide a clear overview of what’s in progress. Your team will be empowered to respond faster to incoming queries and build customer loyalty through excellent customer service. And although your team will operate like a well-oiled machine, you can still maintain a personal touch. 

Email help desk software provides clear benefits to both team members and customers:

1. Enhance your customer experience

A Walker study found that at the end of 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. You can build a solid backbone for a good customer support system with email help desk software. Customer support is crucial to your business as it helps to retain customers, driving repeat revenue. Most businesses are overly focused on customer acquisition, but the ability to retain customers through excellent customer service can be a significant driver of revenue - 41% of an ecommerce store’s revenue is created by only 8% of its customers; with most of this made up from repeat purchases.

The key here is to optimise and improve the processes and experience across the entire customer journey. Email help desk software will help to ensure that there is always someone on the team available to help or reply to customer queries. Instead of putting all communications, internal and external, on hold when a team member is off sick or on leave, ensure that emails or existing customer threads are handed over easily. Customers shouldn’t have to wait until a team member has returned from their holiday to get a reply to their queries and concerns. With email help desk software, you can consistently offer a quick turnaround for your customers - they will appreciate this more than you think!

2. Save time with workflows and automation

Planning out a standard process for dealing with email requests will help your team to stay organised and work faster. Most help desk software will allow you to configure a series of steps, specific to the type of work you need to deal with. As one step completes, you move onto the next. This type of workflow helps to prevent errors and ensure that requests are always being dealt with by the right people at the right time.

Ever had to copy and paste the same message to multiple customers? Whether it be a standard introduction, a set of instructions or product details, manually copying content around can waste time and lead to errors. Email help desk software has integrated, built-in features like auto-replies, saved replies and workflow automation. These tools will automate actions like sending introductory emails, inserting placeholder text, following up on late requests and more - depending on how you choose to set up the processes. 

Small businesses are often concerned about losing a sense of personalisation for customer service channels when using email help desk software. However, this is not necessarily the case. You can keep your saved replies natural and encourage team members to add a personal touch. 

Instead of wasting valuable time and resources on repetitive tasks, streamline your process so that only areas that are specific to the customer or query need input from the team. This will give your team members more time for actual problem-solving, creative thinking and to build more meaningful relationships with customers. 

Although many help desk tools provide some level of workflow, we built SendBoard as an email help desk in Trello so that we could visualise steps in the email workflow on a Trello board (Kanban style). We’re also able to automate tasks and outgoing emails using Butler - Trello’s built-in automation tool.

3. Share responsibility within your team

It can be stressful knowing that important customer emails are in each team member’s individual email inbox, especially when people can get tied up in meetings or need to take time-off. Email help desk software makes it much easier for teams to share the load and collaborate on tasks and customer communications.

By empowering every team member with a sense of shared responsibility, individuals are encouraged to participate, contribute and share, by taking ownership of their tasks. Moreover, in a shared-responsibility team, a system of accountability is established amongst team members. Managers are no longer solely responsibility for delegating tasks, overseeing quality and managing individual performance - it all becomes a team effort. 

Another benefit of setting up your help desk in Trello, is that Trello is a full blown project management system. Since your team are already collaborating on work in Trello, it’s super quick and easy to mention them in a comment or assign a task about an email. 

4. Break down knowledge silos

Without being aware of it, teams and team members often end up working in silos - whether that be a function of team structure or otherwise. And when a lot of work happens in private email clients like Gmail or outlook, team members have little opportunity to learn from each other or provide input on each other’s work. Email help desk software keeps all correspondence in a central, visible system, making it easy for teams to break down knowledge silos and facilitating cross-sharing.

This is crucial for customer service teams especially, as a study revealed that 70% of customer experience professionals and executives view silo mentality as the biggest obstacle to customer service. By using email help desk software, teams are able to keep track of emails in a central place, in real-time and work together to craft replies that may involve insight from multiple stakeholders or departments.

5. Review and improve

Understanding the life-cycle of a task or project is critical input into being able to optimise processes moving forward. An email help desk promotes transparency across the board with the ability to see who worked on each ticket at each stage of the workflow, how long the process took and what communication happened along the way - from creation to resolution.

Team members can also capture additional information, such as priority, category or organisational information. Having this data allows you to analyse trends in order to optimise your operations and plan new processes. 

Ultimately, help desk software should be a win-win for your team and your customers. No matter how small your business is, help desk software can provide the platform to optimise your email workflows, work collaboratively and efficiently as a team and improve the overall customer experience.