The data collected by support agents can have a profound impact on organizational strategy and cross-functional progress toward CX goals. But too often, this crucial data becomes siloed within the support department, and its applications are limited as a result. Below, we're exploring strategies for leveraging a range of resources— from talent to technology—to improve the democratization of help desk data and drive high-impact, CX-forward decisions.
Benefits of help desk data democratization
Support agents are uniquely positioned to identify trends in customer needs, preferences, and behaviors. Access to these insights can help departments across the organization take proactive measures to align their offerings with customer expectations.
Research and development: Help desk data can reveal the limitations of company offerings, highlighting obstacles that prevent products or services from meeting a customer's expectations. When R&D teams have access to this information, they can identify in-demand products, patches, upgrades, and integrations—and prioritize their development.
Sales: When equipped with help desk data, sales agents can zero in on precise customer pain points, leading to more productive conversations with leads. They can also draw on support interaction histories to implement more relevant and personalized cross-selling strategies for current customers. By anticipating customer needs, and developing a more proactive sales approach, agents stand to contribute to organizational revenue increases as high as 30%.
Marketing: An analysis of frequent customer complaints or requests for clarification could reveal a need for greater transparency around subscription plans, pricing, and other key details included in the company's marketing materials.
Leadership: Help desk data can reveal customer sentiments about a company's overall performance and the quality of its offerings, ultimately driving organizational optimization and branding refinement. It can also help business leaders identify teams or individuals that may not be performing as intended, and develop new strategies or training programs in response.
Strategies for help desk data democratization
Among the obstacles executives face in cultivating a data-driven organization, 91.9% view company culture as the most pronounced. This means that for business leaders aiming to improve the democratization and utilization of help desk data, fostering a shift in company mindsets and routines will be crucial. Toward that end, there are several key steps business leaders can take:
Communicate specific goals: Whether a company aims to increase CLVs, or enhance its overall brand reputation, communicating data democratization goals to relevant stakeholders is key. Keeping employees informed about how the democratization strategy will impact their daily routines—and how it will boost business long-term—contributes to a sense of ownership over the transformation, which can increase the odds of success by 70%. Further, early goal-setting makes it easier to measure the success of the initiative as it progresses, and determine whether the most important KPIs and benchmarks are being met.
Ensure data quality: For employees to view help desk data as an integral part of their decision-making process, it's important to ensure the consistent availability and reliability of the data. Through a combination of software tools and stringent data governance policies, organizations can ensure the accuracy, relevance, and timeliness of their data. More than 60% of organizations are already using AI to improve customer service—but its potential applications reach farther. Smart features, like word clouds and sentiment analysis, can help bring extra credibility to soft data by reducing the impacts of human bias.
Implement the right software solutions: Easy-to-integrate software solutions can significantly improve the visibility of help desk data. When the information collected by your support agents can be quickly blended, prepped, and used to generate comprehensive reports and centralized dashboards, employees across functions experience simplified and streamlined data access.
Prepare employees: Employee buy-in is critical to the success of new strategies and software. To encourage employees to access and incorporate help desk data into their daily work routines, some additional training may be needed. Upskilling courses that improve data literacy and prepare teams to utilize relevant software features can be a valuable place to start.
Measure the initiative's success: To determine whether help desk data and analytics are being shared and utilized effectively, it is important to measure the initiative's success periodically. Establishing KPIs or benchmarks for team performance before and after the democratization initiative can be vital to this effort. Ideally, businesses will also collect employee feedback about what is and isn't working with newly implemented systems.
Zoho's solutions for help desk data democratization
Zoho Desk: A contextual, AI-powered help desk solution, Zoho Desk offers a range of features (like sentiment analysis and automation) that bring meaning to data collected during support interactions. Because Desk is easy to integrate with other applications, such as CRM and Analytics, comprehensive data and reports can be generated, analyzed, and shared across departments.
Zoho Analytics: Our end-to-end analytics platform cleans, blends, and preps data from a variety of sources, including your help desk. With Analytics, you can run detailed reports, create powerful visualizations, and share relevant insights with your stakeholders, improving both the accessibility and usability of your data.
Wrapping up
Delivering top-tier CX requires a comprehensive understanding of customer expectations, and how well they're being met by both the company and its offerings. With org-wide access to help desk data, stakeholders across functions can make decisions that account for a wide range of customer behaviors and preferences—from their opinions on product offerings to their preferred modes of communication. All of this contributes to a more detailed customer profile, resulting in a more relevant, personalized, and supportive customer journey.
Zoho offers a suite of intelligent enterprise business software, including an award-winning CRM suite, the industry's only comprehensive analytics and BI platform, and a powerful low-code development ecosystem.
