Step 1: Select an email address for support

It is possible to use your personal email address when you start out to answer customer support, but it may not be the best way to provide great service.

Some helpful tips when it comes to your support email address:

  • Support email is the address people will use to contact your company for customer service. Ideally, this should be an easy address that everyone can find. Fill in any help desk software with your support email address so that when someone needs assistance they can easily send you a message from a website instead of calling or sending mail to the business’
  • Test your setting several times to ensure you are getting emails delivered. It can be frustrating when it seems like everything is going well only to receive an email from a sender saying their mail wasn’t received.
  • Make it easy and clear on your website for customers to find contact information at all times.
  • Sometimes you have to use your support email as the “from” email for your outgoing messages. When you do, customers who reply will have all their responses saved and organized.

Step 2: set up canned responses

What is a canned response?

These are pre-determined responses to common customer questions. These answers can be efficient for customer service agents to use and increase customer satisfaction. Canned responses can be organized in different categories so that they’re always easy to locate, and if used properly, these response templates can save time for an agent while serving customers faster too.

What are some advantages of using canned responses?

An agent can save time by inserting a canned response to common inquiries instead of repeatedly answering the same question. Merge fields make personalizing answers easy and increase customer support agent productivity. When using canned responses, customers will receive better answers since they are helpful yet concise, and it frees up an agent’s time if they are doing all customer service.

What are the disadvantages of canned responses?

If you are typically pressed for time, or if your replies become careless, this may create an inaccurate response that does not resolve the concern of the customer.

When should a canned response be created?

If you find yourself repeating the same responses more than twice, it might be worth creating a canned response.

Step 3: Add your team members

Add the customer support team to your help desk software.

Determine who needs to be added. Will you answer customer questions, or will someone else on the team? If a team member is answering questions in your place, make sure they have an account for visibility. Can you use fake names to solve this, or should you just do it with your real name?

Give the customer support team time to practice before they speak with customers.

Before you launch your new help desk software to everyone on staff, make sure that the agents have had time to learn how it works and practice communicating with customers. Share the passwords for logging in to the help desk account, but do not allow anyone else access unless they are providing day-to-day customer support.

Make sure the support staff is ready to:

Access a list of all open tickets for customer service, respond to certain tickets when necessary, close certain tickets based on the information provided by customers, assign other employees with handling specified requests through your ticketing system, and view reports on which services need attention.