Introduction

Vtiger CRM’s help desk management process is designed to provide post-sale services. After you have closed a deal, you must offer your customers assistance in using your products or services. When you are available to address and solve their problems, your chances of retaining them increase, resulting in business growth. 

Vtiger CRM’s customer service app is called Help Desk. It contains tools that help you register customer queries, speak to your customers, and resolve their issues. 

The help desk management process consists of the following steps:

1. Setting up customer service policies
2. Capturing customer complaints
3. Assisting customers
4. Collecting feedback
5. Analyzing team performance  

Let us look at the tools Vtiger CRM offers to accomplish each process step.

Setting up Customer Service Policies

In Vtiger CRM, you can set up different policies that your customer service team must adhere to while resolving customer issues. 

• SLA Policies: Generally, a Service Level Agreement or SLA defines the level of service a customer expects from your company. Using SLAs in Vtiger CRM, you can prioritize customer issues and define deadlines to resolve them. For example, you can define an SLA that says a customer complaint of Urgent priority must be resolved within two hours. Also, violated SLAs can be escalated to higher-level managers.

• Business Hours: These are the working hours of your customer service team. You can configure business hours for your entire team or individual team members. A customer service representative’s case response time, SLAs, etc. are generated using their business hours. Also, a service rep’s appointment schedules depend on their business hours.

• Assignment Rules: Assignment rules save you from the hassle of manually assigning cases to your customer service team. It automatically assigns cases to customer service reps using either Round Robin or Least Loaded method. The Round Robin method assigns cases in the order service reps are listed and selected. The Least Loaded method assigns cases to service reps having the least number of open cases. 

After you set up customer service policies, you are ready to serve your customers.

Capturing Customer Complaints: Cases

The Cases module stores customer complaints (issues) in case records. You can categorize and prioritize cases so that managing them becomes easy.

Now, how do you create cases? Vtiger CRM offers a myriad of channels through which customers can contact you and register their issues. Whether you add a case manually or automatically depends on the channel. 

Automated case creation

Below are the ways you can create a case automatically.

• Webforms: A webform is an interactive HTML form on your website that is used to capture information. You can set up a webform to create cases. The data that users fill out in the webform gets stored in the CRM as a case record. 

• Mailroom: Bring complaints or queries that customers write to your customer service email address into Vtiger CRM by setting up -
  • Mailroom rules in Vtiger CRM
  • Auto-forwarding in your email service 

Auto-forwarding redirects your emails to the CRM using your mailroom address. Mailroom then creates a case record from the forwarded emails, based on the rules you set up.

• Customer Portal: Customers can create cases by themselves from the Customer Portal. You can give your customers access to the portal from their contact records in the CRM. When they submit a case, Vtiger CRM automatically creates a case record.

Manual case creation

Listed below are the ways in which you can create cases manually.

• Phone Calls: Vtiger CRM integrates with several phone service providers like Twilio, Plivo, Knowlarity, etc. All you need to do is set up a telephone gateway in the CRM and share your customer service number with your customers. When they call you, you can instantly log their complaints as a case during the call. 

• Live Chat: The Live Chat option is available through the Vtiger Live Chat extension that you must install in the CRM. Through the extension, you can get the source code and enable a Live Chat widget on your website. Your customers can reach out to customer service reps using the widget. Service reps can record their issues by creating a case.

Also, Vtiger CRM integrates with Facebook to capture customer issues. If you have a Facebook Business Account, you can redirect the messages originating from Facebook Messenger to Live Chat, and create cases from customer queries.

Assisting Customers

To assist your customers in using your products or services, you can offer them documentation such as user manuals, release notes, etc. You can publish the documentation on the Help Center, which is an online portal. The CRM automatically generates the link to the Help Center when you set it up.

Below are the types of documentation you can create.

• Articles: You can write articles to generate long-form help content. The Articles module is available on Vtiger CRM when you install the Help Center add-on (paid). After you publish an article, you can get the number of views, the readers’ reviews, and ratings on it.

• FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions or FAQ contain short-form content. You can put questions that your customers commonly ask about your products, services, business, etc. into FAQ along with the answers. Customers can see the published FAQ on the Help Center and Customer Portal.

Sometimes you might need to talk to your customers while resolving their queries. Vtiger CRM offers you multiple tools to connect with your customers.

• Appointment Pages: A ready-made schedule of your day, week, or month is available through appointment pages. As a customer service representative,  you can share an appointment page link with your customers. They will pick an open slot from your schedule to speak to you. Booked slots are hidden from an appointment page.

• Google Meet: This is another way of getting in touch with your customers. All you must do is create a Google Meet event on the CRM and add your contacts as invitees. Vtiger CRM sends them an invitation containing the meeting link and timing. Google Meet events are shown on Google Calendar. 

• Internal Tickets: Internal tickets provide indirect support to your customers. For instance, while assisting a customer, you may need help from another team or person in your company. In such situations, you can raise an internal ticket to them. 

Collecting Feedback

Customer feedback is necessary to improve customer experiences and grow your business. After resolving a customer’s query, you might want to collect their feedback about your products, services, or support. 

• Surveys: Surveys is a multi-purpose feature using which you can collect feedback, ratings, votes, and opinions. You can create and send different question types such as multiple-choice, checkboxes, Net Promoter Score (NPS), etc. Individual customer responses are recorded on the CRM.

Analyzing Team Performance

The help desk management process also involves analyzing the customer service team’s performance and finding improvement areas. Vtiger CRM provides multiple tools for the same. 

• Help Desk Insights: Charts and graphs under Help Desk Insights show information like the average first response on a case, unresolved cases,  violated cases, etc. This information gives you insights into the customer service team’s performance related to cases. 
• Chat Insights: Using Chat Insights, you can get details about your team’s chat conversations with your customers. Information is available in charts and metrics such as the average response time, chat rating and duration, number of missed conversations, etc. 
• Calculus: Calculus is an AI-powered tool that analyzes email and phone call conversations that customer-facing teams have with customers. After the analysis, it generates reviews, ratings, and other suggestions to improve the conversations’ quality.