In business, it only makes sense to get every edge you can over the competition. That means not only using every tool at your disposal, but getting every bit of utility you can out of those tools. For businesses making use of service desk software, that includes leveraging your service desk data for use in your marketing strategy.
What Is a Service Desk?
In case you’re not familiar, here is a quick primer on service desks. A service desk is a piece of software that serves as a point of contact for customers and employees should technical or service issues arise at a company. While similar to a service call center, a service desk is more powerful and offers a wider range of support than a call center.
For example, a service desk could handle not just incidents and tech support but service requests, problem management, and more. One of the major strengths of a service desk is its ability to integrate with your already-existing processes. The ultimate goal of service desk software is to offer a comprehensive support structure for both customers and employees alike.
Why Your Data Matters?
As you might expect, service desk software generates a large amount of data from interactions with customers and employees. Every request, ticket, resolution, and piece of customer feedback can be used to help businesses better understand their customers. Like any other data, this can be analyzed to identify weak points, opportunities to improve, and more. It’s also a veritable treasure trove for sales and marketing, when used correctly. Service desk data can help identify things like customer pain points, emerging trends, and future needs. The more data you can gather and analyze, the more powerful it becomes.
Data-Driven Sales: A Formula for Brand Success
Data-driven sales aren’t the wave of the future: they’re here now, and practically a necessity for remaining competitive in today’s market. The more a brand bases its sales and marketing efforts on hard data instead of intuition, guesswork, or wishful thinking, the more solid the ground it’s standing on. A data-driven approach allows for improved customer engagement, sustained growth, higher conversion rates, and more.
We’ve already touched on how you can use customer data in your sales and marketing, but here’s another example; by analyzing service desk data, you can identify common themes and pain points in the feedback you get from customers. Once you’ve identified the most prominent trouble spots, you can tailor your marketing campaigns to directly address those pain points. The reverse is also true: by finding out what your customers love best about your products or services, you can capitalize on that and customize your messaging to make the most of it.
Data-driven sales also means you have a faster reaction time when it comes to refining your messaging, adjusting your targeting, or otherwise fine-tuning your sales strategy.
What Data Does a Service Desk Provide?
So now that we know how useful service desk data can be, let’s talk about what kind of data it collects. For purposes of this discussion, we’ll keep it to the most actionable types:
- Incident type and frequency. Being able to identify the most common and pernicious issues helps businesses address problems before they get out of hand.
- Customer satisfaction scores. By analyzing surveys and feedback forms, businesses can get real insight into how their customers feel, and work on possible shortcomings.
- Resolution times. How quickly are your customers seeing their issues resolved? Fast resolution times make a big difference in customer satisfaction, so anything you can do to get those numbers down is key.
- Service level agreement (SLA) compliance. By monitoring your SLA performance, you can make sure your team is meeting customer expectations.
- Support channel effectiveness. One powerful way to use service desk data is to compare and contrast the effectiveness of phone, email, chat, social media, and other support channels to find out how customers prefer to interact and where you should direct more resources.
Choosing the Right Software
It likely goes without saying that not all service desk software is created equal. To get the kind of benefits listed here, you’ll need a software suite with strong data analytics and reporting capabilities — after all, all the data in the world isn’t worth much if there isn’t a practical means of sorting and analyzing it. You can’t craft meaningful strategies from a mass of disorganized data.
That means your software should have the ability to sort, filter, and categorize data efficiently. Ideally, it should also have predictive analytics, so you can get ahead of potential issues and respond proactively. The best way to make sure you get the right service desk system for the job is to do some comparison shopping.
How to Use Your Service Desk Data?
Now let’s talk at the granular level about how you can use your service desk system to drive your sales and marketing strategy.
- Identify pain points. This one has been mentioned already, but it’s worth saying again: by analyzing the kinds of tickets you get most often, you can root out recurring problems facing your customers and do something about them — which means greater customer satisfaction in the long run.
- Define your ideal customer profile. Service system data can also provide insight into who your customers are at a granular level, letting you build an ideal customer profile and develop targeted marketing that more accurately reflects their needs.
- Segment your audience for personalization. Personalization is practically a must for broad marketing success, and leveraging service desk data can help you sort out buyers by demographic, geography, and more — so you can more easily create personalize product recommendations and other materials.
- Reference positive and negative feedback. This is one of the oldest customer tricks in the book, but it bears mentioning: by incorporating the customer feedback (positive and negative) that you get from your service system data, you can more accurately address complaints and build on your successes.
- Create case studies. The best thing about data? It’s not hearsay or intuition: it’s hard numbers. You can use the real-world examples of how your team has solved problems and leverage them into marketing tools: success stories and testimonials based on solid data.
- Identify new markets. Analyzing trends isn’t just for identifying common problems, though — it’s also a way to discover previously untapped markets by looking at inquiries and seeing if customers want a product or service you’re not currently providing.
- Replicate customer interactions. Finally, looking at the tone of your customer interactions can help you fine-tune your marketing voice to your customers. This helps build a sense of familiarity and trust, and increases the likelihood your customers will engage with your marketing messages.
Key Considerations
While adopting this approach, it’s important to keep a few things in mind. First, it’s vital to make sure you use good quality data and accurate information — nothing inconsistent, incomplete, or out-of-date. You should also do your best to make sure data flows seamlessly across departments and avoid “data silos.” Finally, remember to always put your customers’ privacy first, and use your data ethically. It’s crucial to not only earn your customers’ trust, but also to be worthy of it.
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