Using Freshdesk – what I’ve learned so far
Principles rather problems
It’s more important to be trying to adhere to principles rather than solving a particular problem (as the problem probably isn’t understood well enough, and will change).
We agreed on three principles.
- Shared: We all work together to give the customer the best experience of the BHF. Customer experience is everyone’s responsibility.
- Speed: We want to provide the fastest route to resolution for the customer.
- Satisfaction: We want the customer to feel satisfied with the resolution, keep the relationship intact and maintaining the reputation of the BHF.
People drive processes
Any new system/product/business area needs someone to act as guide for others and make decisions and develop best practice. Without that people apply their previous ways of working to the new system, and then they don’t gain any of the benefits, and using a new system in an old way just creates drag on a process we’re trying to streamline.
Shifting mindsets
Emails are either replied-to or not replied-to, they have a binary state that doesn’t reflect the complexities of customer service.
Tickets in Freshdesk for Ecommerce Customer Services can exist in any of 224 different states, and some other teams have even more states. This means that each ticket can have a state within Freshdesk that more closely reflects the state of the customer’s enquiry in real life.
To use Freshdesk at it’s best we stop thinking about individual tickets, and instead think in states. So, it’s about asking “for the state of ‘Urgent and waiting on third party’, what’s going on in that state and is there anything I can do to make that state smaller and the ‘Resolved’ state larger?”
Empowering people
Calling them ‘agents’ is an interesting turn of phrase. They are agents of the organisation, representing the BHF. But to be agents they have to have a sense of agency, to be able to assume responsibility for their actions, to feel in control, to believe in their capacity to handle a wide range of tasks or situations. Freshdesk provides this. If software is the encoding of human thought, then Freshdesk is software that embodies this sense of agency.