Four Ways to Improve Your IT Help Desk Service through Empathy

Customer Service is the key to improving your relationship with your customers.

Among modern businesses, customer service has become a non-optional feature. From call centers to chat support, a strong help desk gives your customers a way to report problems with your product or service and ask for help. While it would be great if they only called in to congratulate you on doing a great job, most of the time your help desk handles unhappy and frustrated clients who just want your product to work for them the way they’d hoped.  In order to understand where they’re coming from, not take their negative emotions personally, and leave them hanging up with a smile, your support team needs more than just technical know-how to solve the problems. They need empathy. This singular ability will allow your help desk to relate to clients and assist them through the emotional hurdles of technical troubles. Here are four ways training your help desk techs can drastically improve your IT help desk’s customer service ratings:

1 Patience with Frustrate Customers

People rely on technology to make their lives easier, and the sudden interruption of that ease is upsetting. most people try to fix the problem for themselves before calling your help desk, meaning that they have already faced the frustration of being incapable of finding their own solution. All too often, this negativity can create an unpleasant loop between a support tech and customer, leaving everyone grumpy even if the technical problem is solved quickly. When your technicians are leveraging their empathy, they will remember to relate to the customer, understand where their frustration is coming from, and help to ease it with stories and jokes while they find the technical solution.

2 Intuitive Troubleshooting

Quite often, technical issues are caused by a local problem with a computer configuration or patterns of use. By listening empathically to how the customer describes their experience of the technical trouble, your help desk team will be able to see the problem from the customer’s point of view. This can give them a unique and unusually in-depth insight into the troubleshooting process, allowing them to work more cooperatively with the client to find solutions because they understand where the client is coming from. Often, problems are caused by customer misunderstanding or environmental factors like unreliable internet connections, and these situations can be gently explained and solved.

3 Predictive Prevention

One way a help desk can go above and beyond the call to fix customer problems is to help customers prevent problems in the future. Some clients end up calling for support over and over with the same or similar issues, often getting increasingly upset in the process. When this happens, more often than not the trouble is either on the customer end or somehow involved in their connection to the product. Leveraging empathy can help your technicians connect to clients and hunt down the true cause of their repeated problems. Whether it’s a faulty cable or a client behavior, systematic empathy enables your technicians to solve these technical issues once and for all, creating grateful clients who see an end to their continuous struggles.

4 Conversion Opportunities

In most situations, it’s not a great idea to sell during customer support calls, but sometimes a call for assistance comes from a customer that is clearly ready to upgrade their services or try something new. With empathy, your technicians will be able to detect these subtle emotional clues and offer the customer what they really want. When customers express frustration at the limitations of their first-tier service or current products, what they need isn’t a standard technical solution, it’s a gentle up-sell. Used in exactly the right moments, customers will be relieved and delighted to find that your product or services can still suit their needs, accepting that what they want goes beyond the basic package.

In any circumstance between two humans, even in the no-nonsense business world, empathy is a powerful tool. It helps you to connect with your customers, understand what they want, and provide concierge just-in-time services that permanently raise your reputation for superb customer service. For more helpful tips on improving your help desk customer service, contact us today!