Key Takeaways

• Help desks are crucial for addressing technical and customer service issues, and their role has expanded to enhance productivity and customer satisfaction through automation and personalized care.
• While automation speeds up service and manages high volumes of requests, it's important to balance it with personalization to meet customer expectations and maintain empathy in interactions. Brainfish uses AI to merge these two aspects effectively.
• Brainfish enhances help desks by providing precise, context-specific answers, maintaining brand personality, and offering support in multiple languages, making interactions feel more personal and efficient.

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Whether you are a small business struggling with email setup or an individual grappling with an online shopping glitch, the frustration of not getting the help you need when you need it is a feeling we all know too well. 

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Everyone - from business owners to everyday consumers - expects quick, straightforward support that solves problems without a fuss.

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At the core of fulfilling these expectations is the help desk. But just having a help desk isn't going to solve everything. To scale it in a way that wins over customers, you need to provide a seamless blend of automated efficiency and personalized care. 

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This combination of technology and personal attention is changing your help desk into a dynamic resource, adept at keeping both customers and businesses content and functioning effortlessly.

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In this article, you will learn what help desk automation looks like and how you can use Brainfish to deliver automated, personalized help desk solutions. 

What is a Business Help Desk?

A Business Help Desk addresses and resolves various technical and customer service-related issues. It serves as the primary point of contact where employees and customers can seek assistance for a range of problems - from technical glitches in software to guidance on product usage.

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But, the role of the Business Help Desk has expanded. It's no longer just about fixing immediate problems. By integrating with advanced tools like ticketing systems, automated response technologies, and even AI-driven support, help desks are used to manage a large volume of queries efficiently.

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Today, the purpose of a help desk is to facilitate seamless operations and positive customer experiences at the same time. Help desks aims to:

1. Minimize Disruptions: By quickly resolving technical issues, businesses can ensure operations are not adversely affected.
2. Enhance Productivity: By automating support, human support agents can focus on complex tasks.
3. Improve Customer Satisfaction: By offering timely and accurate support to customer inquiries, businesses can improve their overall experience with the company.
4. Inform Business Strategy: By gathering and analyzing feedback from interactions, businesses can shape business strategies, product development, and customer service policies.

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But, working at a help desk can be stressful, largely due to the nature of the job. Factors like high volume of queries, complex problem-solving, demanding customers, juggling multiple tasks, and keeping up with technology contribute to it. 

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This is when we turn to automation.  

What is Help Desk Automation?

It refers to using technology to streamline and improve the processes of a help desk. This involves automatically handling common service requests and issues without the need for direct human intervention. 

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This approach typically involves an online portal or a digital assistant where users can access FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and knowledge bases. 

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Automation speeds up the resolution process by instantly handling routine inquiries and providing round-the-clock service. It can also be set to collect valuable data on common issues and user behavior, providing insights that can be used to improve products, services, and customer support strategies.

The Downside of Automation

Not everything that glitters is gold. Automation is a dual-edged sword, as Bill Gates wisely points out. 

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"The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency." —Bill Gates

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Improper use of automation leads to a lack of personalization in customer interactions – they lack the empathy and understanding that customers seek. 

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For one, automation doesn’t pick up nuances that a human support agent can. Second, it falters with complex or unusual problems, leaving customers stranded if their issues don't fit into predefined categories. Finally, automation adopts a one-size-fits-all approach, which falls short of customer expectations.

Difference Between Personalization and Automation

At Brainfish, our approach to customer support is designed to close this gap using AI.

The Delicate Balance: How Brainfish Merges Automation with Personalization in Support 

Personalization is not just about addressing customers by their names or sending birthday emails. It’s about creating deeply relevant and engaging experiences tailored to individual behaviors, preferences, and needs in real-time. 

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Brainfish leverages AI and machine learning to provide automated responses that are not only efficient but also carefully tailored to each customer’s unique situation and preferences. 

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Here’s what we do at Brainfish:

1. Provide Precise, Context-Specific Answers 

When customers have questions, the answers are usually not simple. Any automated system could match the keyword and show the right help article if there were. But often, the answer is spread out over many documents. 

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Our AI can handle these tough questions. It looks through all help documents, puts pieces of information together, and gives a complete answer just for that question.

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Below, you can see how the AI has assembled an answer spread over two documents. 

2. Focus on Familiarity

Being user-centric is about aligning support with what users already know and trust: the simplicity of a search bar, the resourcefulness of a help center, and the dependability of a widget on your company's website. 

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At Brainfish, we are bridging the gap between automation and personalization by tailoring support to these familiar channels, ensuring your users face no extra stress in learning new systems when they need help. The goal is to provide a frictionless support experience, particularly when users are most in need and potentially anxious.

3. Keep Your Brand Personality Alive

Automation doesn’t have to mean sacrificing your brand’s personality. We understand the importance of a consistent, positive experience for your customers, across your channels. 

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With Brainfish, you can fully customize your interface to reflect your brand, from themes and colors to logos and fonts. You can even personalize the help center responses. 

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4. Speak Your Users Language

Recognizing the diversity in our globalized world, Brainfish offers support in more than 19 languages. It automatically adjusts to the user's browser language, providing a more personalized experience. This means users can ask questions and receive responses in their language, making their interaction with our platform feel more tailored and personal.

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5. Adapt and Enhance

Brainfish's AI is like an acquaintance turning into a friend - it gets better as it learns from users. Here's how we keep improving it: We regularly check its answers for accuracy and helpfulness using the Search Analytics Dashboard. If we find something off, we fix it by adding new questions or updating our info using the Article Co-Pilot feature. 

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We also have team sessions to keep everyone sharp and improve our AI. And, of course, we listen to what customers say to keep making the AI smarter and more helpful.

See the Impact of Personalization on Automation

Your brand needs to blend personalization with automation's efficiency to stand out.  If you're looking to incorporate this in your customer support, we invite you to book a demo with Brainfish and experience firsthand how our AI can transform your help desk.