What is a mobile help desk?

Employing skilled customer service agents is the most important part of providing an exceptional customer service experience. But once you have the right people, you need to equip them with the right tools in order for them to realise their potential. Now that 96% of people use mobile phones, part of supplying agents with what they need is giving them a way to do their job from a mobile device.

For agents who use help desk software to do their jobs every day, mobile help desk access is an important feature to make their lives easier.

What is mobile help desk software?

A mobile help desk is a collection of customer service tools that enables agents to do their jobs effectively on a mobile device. In most cases, a mobile help desk consists of a mobile app that brings the features available in your company’s help desk software onto a small screen. A good help desk mobile app will offer the main resources and functionality that agents use on their desktops, but adapt it to make it easier to use in the mobile format.

Three benefits of a mobile help desk

Mobile functionality doesn’t come as standard with every service desk option. But a product that offers a mobile app can provide your agents and, by extension, your customers with some important benefits.

• Agents can work from anywhere

  
  In the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, businesses found themselves scrambling to work out how to give employees access to the tools that they needed to work from home. For businesses using products that already offer mobile access, the issue was less complicated. If you have a help desk that provides support across all device types, agents can tap into all the information they need to do their job effectively on whatever device they have handy.
  They can pull up the company’s knowledge base from anywhere and find the answers that customers need quickly. And when things fall back into some semblance of normality, your agents will be able to use the same mobile app to provide customer support from waiting rooms or their morning bus commute, helping them to get more done.

• Keeps customer data unified

  
  Customer satisfaction so often depends on context. To provide exceptional customer experience, agents don’t just need to know about the customer’s current problem. They need to know all about their relationship with the company. A well designed mobile help desk allows agents to access the most up-to-date customer information from any device they use. They can find which products the customer has, the past issues they’ve been in touch about and their current ticket status.
  And they can update customer data in the mobile service desk in real time to ensure that the next agent who works with the customer also has the most up-to-date information.

• Faster response times

  
  Your agents aren’t always conveniently sitting in front of a computer when a customer request comes in. And one of the biggest customer service trends in recent years is the expectation of faster response times.
  When all of your agents have the option to respond from their phones, they can address issues faster. An agent out for a walk can receive a notification on their smartphone the moment a customer needs help and access the ticketing system to address their requirements – all before they even get back to the house.

The top six features to look for in a mobile help desk

For a customer service desk mobile app to be an effective tool for agents, it needs to offer the right features. Some of the most common ones to prioritise are:

1. An intuitive app

   
   Making the service desk accessible on a mobile device isn’t good enough. It also has to be designed well to make using it easy and intuitive on all screen sizes. If agents on mobile find it difficult to find the right article in your knowledge base, share relevant links with customers or tap into important customer details, it won’t help them do their job better.
   A mobile app is only valuable if it actually makes the mobile experience of a product better.

2. Access to up-to-date customer profiles

   
   A lot of misunderstanding and frustration can be avoided if agents have current, accurate customer information. For example, if an agent recommends a common troubleshooting tip to a customer that doesn’t work, the customer will get in touch again. If the next agent they reach doesn’t know about the last interaction, they may provide the same tip again. It’s easy to imagine how you’d feel as the customer on the end of that call. In fact, most of us don’t have to imagine it, because it’s so common.
   A mobile help desk needs to give agents a way to access customer profiles that are updated in real time, as well as making it easy to access new updates based on each new interaction for the next agent to see.

3. Live chat functionality

   
   A useful help desk mobile app will enable customer interaction on all the main channels that customers like to use. One of the most important on mobile is live chat, as it’s a channel on which speedy responses matter more than most. If agents can respond to live-chat enquiries in real time on their mobile devices, they can help many more customers who are looking for fast, simple answers.

4. Compatibility with multiple device types

   
   Your agents are likely to use a range of mobile device types. For your mobile help desk to work well for all of them, it needs to work just as well on iPhones, Androids and various tablets. If the mobile app provided by the vendor isn’t compatible across device types, it will lock out a portion of your agents.

5. Security

   
   Whenever agents are adding or accessing customer data, security is an important concern. And ensuring that security is strong across device types is a challenge. A service-desk product that provides high-level security features on the desktop should be able to provide the same for their mobile version. Before agents use a service desk on mobile devices, make sure you’re confident that it provides the necessary security.

6. Notifications

   
   To take advantage of the benefit of faster response times, agents need to know when a ticket comes in. Mobile notifications ensure that they’re pinged on their device straight away. This means that even if an agent is doing their laundry or on a Zoom call, as long as their phone’s nearby, they’ll know within seconds that there’s a new customer service enquiry to attend to.

Empower your agents

A well designed and feature-rich mobile help desk gives your capable agents what they need to be even more effective. And it means that more of your customers will get faster responses on the channel of their choice.