Help Desk Automation: A Recipe for Better Supports

These days, many of us are being asked to do more with less, no matter what type of business we work in. For example, if you work in ecommerce, consumers are buying online in greater volumes than ever before. Sales are up, which is great for the business, but it also puts extraordinary pressure on those teams who are supporting more orders and more customers with the same (or even fewer) resources.

That’s where help desk automation can come in handy. When done well, automation can give customers a better experience and reduce the stress on your team. You can automate just about anything, from internal tracking and organization to sending automatic replies or notifications, giving your team more time to concentrate on what’s important: taking care of your customers.

In this post, we’ll take a deeper look at help desk automation, exploring what it is and how it can benefit you and your customers. We’ll also provide some automation examples and show how you can use Help Scout to automate your support processes.

What is help desk automation??

Help desk automation is a method of streamlining customer service work through the use of workflows or AI-powered tools. 

Most (if not all) help desks out there have a way to automate tasks that don’t need human intervention. For instance, when an email arrives in your queue, automation can scan through things like the email address of the sender, the subject line, or keywords in the body to automatically take an action. Instead of the human doing the task, automation handles it. 

The benefits of help desk automation

Many of the messages support teams receive are important and/or urgent. But in a crowded help desk queue, your team can easily get tied up dealing with less urgent questions while those important emails slip further down in your inbox. It’s also common for folks to get bogged down by administrative tasks like conversation tagging or routing tasks to the right team, cutting into the time they have available for working through the queue.

Automating certain parts of your support process can prevent these types of bottlenecks, giving your team time to work on more complex issues or conversations that could benefit from their expertise. 

Here are a few ways that help desk automation might benefit your team:

• Faster response times — When administrative work is automated, team members are able to prioritize customer interactions, helping reduce response time and increase satisfaction.

• Reduced mistakes — Automation ensures that all tasks get completed and no conversation falls through the cracks. 

• Improved morale — Automating busy work can relieve the pressure on your support team, reducing cognitive load over time.

• Increased productivity — Removing emails from the queue with automation helps your team focus on only the tasks that require human touch.

• Reduced support costs — The larger your queue grows, the more people are needed to manage it. Automation can almost act as another member of your team, managing easier tasks without adding to your bottom line.