Power your help desk with Microsoft Office 365

A well-managed internal help desk ensures smooth day-to-day operations for your company and is an essential resource for your employees.

Unfortunately, the internal help desk is one of the most often overlooked parts of an organization, even

though productivity is lost anytime your people are unable to work. This can even have a ripple effect – when one person is delayed in completing a task, it can cause delays for others who are waiting on that piece of work to be complete.

Collaboration and communication are the foundations for outstanding internal customer support, and both can be greatly enhanced with O365 – the only unified communications platform built from the ground up specifically for multi-channel collaboration.

A help desk powered by Office 365 can take advantage of:

1. Multi-modal communication. Internal employees can simply send an IM to the help desk for quick handling of small tasks. If the issue is more complex and requires greater collaboration, the support agent and the employee can escalate to a call, or even look at the same screen with the “present screen” capability.
    
2. Presence. Both the internal customer and the support agent are able to see each other’s status (available, away, busy, or offline), improving the ability to collaborate with co-workers, subject matter experts, or other agents at a mutually convenient time.
    
3. Dynamic interactions. Presence and multi-channel communications together makes Office 365 a true collaboration tool, reducing resolution time and improving the effectiveness of your help desk. Help desk staff have the ability to seamlessly add available resources to the conversation, such as a subject matter expert or a level two agent. A simple IM chat between the agent and the customer can easily become a multi-channel conference between three or more individuals, all within the Skype for Business client – facilitating real-time collaboration and leading to the fastest resolution of help desk tickets.

Extending Office 365 Functionality

The powerful functionality of an Office 365 help desks can be extended with third-party software, the best of which will be natively integrated via Skype for Business APIs. For example, enhancing your help desk with contact center software can add:

1. Intelligent routing. The best contact center solutions have the power to leverage available data in order to intelligently route conversations to the right support agent based on the nature of their request, the skills of the agent, and the rules you’ve defined. Without intelligent ACD functionality, support requests would have to be manually routed from the queue to the agents, leading to an unwanted increase in handling time and a net decrease in agent utilization that can ultimately result in lower CSat scores. In addition, native contact center solutions can use presence information in Skype for Business in order to intelligently route a ticket to an agent who not only has the appropriate skillset to resolve the issue, and also is available to respond to the inquiry.
    
2. Self-help chat bots. A native contact center platform adds further capabilities to the chat bot through intelligent routing and the ability to leverage historical data from past interactions. In the Skype for Business chat window, internal customers have the ability to IM the chat bot, which automatically responds with advice or troubleshooting tips based on rules that are defined in the call flow editor. Self-help chat bots are great for your help desk because they can decrease the workload on your support staff.
    
3. Reporting. Historical and real-time data is available to empower your workforce to make the appropriate changes when needed. A collaborative contact center is driven by data: measuring organizing it to make it easy for management to see actionable opportunities for improvement. With help desk enabled by Office 365, meeting or exceeding service goals gets a lot easier. Proactive notifications are available for key performance indicators as well, making sure that you’re aware when certain criteria have been met.

Treating your help desk as a crucial component and enabling the fastest, smoothest response using a true collaboration platform can be a game changer for every organization.

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