May 23, 2022
Helpdesks are often marketed to design agencies and large companies. But that doesn’t mean they’re only useful if you manage a large team or have thousands of customer support tickets to respond to in a given day.
To extract value from a help desk ticketing system, you simply need a handful of clients and the right set of conditions.
Given the fact that you’ve already got the client box checked, let’s take a look at a few factors that make a helpdesk a worthwhile investment for freelance web designers.
Many freelancer designers live in their inbox, where they have folders within folders and dozens of plugins designed to make their account function as optimally as possible. And, in the beginning, this is arguably the easiest way to handle all client communication.
But there comes a point when managing all aspects of your business from an email account is messy and inefficient. Client requests get lost in unrelated email threads. New website inquiries get buried under important conversations with current design clients. And you wind up spending endless amounts of time scanning subject lines to find a single piece of information, like the website theme you originally selected or the latest customer experience data.
In this case, you need different tools to organize the communication you receive regularly. Gmail inboxes may still be valuable for logging client intake forms and notifying you about newly scheduled meetings, but for website additions, technical issues, and change requests, a help desk ticketing system is a must.
Even if you have a great memory, you can’t remember everything said in a video conference or phone call. But if you’ve ever forgotten about a client request, you know just how stressful it is to miss something. Not only does it put pressure on you to overperform with the current request, but it can also push you to go above and beyond what you might ordinarily do for the agreed price to keep your client happy.
Having a system in place to automatically collect, store, and organize all your support tickets solves these problems by ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. Requests can be made in writing by your clients and stored in an online platform (instead of your head), and all conversations and work related to the support ticket are saved in the same thread. As a result, everything you need to keep projects straight and provide great support services is right where you need it.
Workflows are a necessary part of successful web design businesses, but many spiral out of control and become a major time-suck for web design businesses. The minute a live chat or an email comes in, new events have to be added to calendars, project tasks must be updated on a Kanban board, files need to be saved and shared, and so on.
And if you have multiple clients, this can end up happening multiple times a day.
Eliminating the need for dozens of tools, help desk software automatically accepts client requests and create an ongoing queue for you to respond to and resolve. This makes it easy for you to support your clients, as you can simply work your way down the list to deal with unforeseen issues and new requests.
You don’t have to manually enter information into any other platforms or build integrations to update them in real-time either. You can simply set aside time every day (or week) to deal with support tickets and manage all the details from your helpdesk.
Of course, even without these factors at play, there are quite a few reasons why you might consider adopting help desk software for your freelance web design business. However, if you find yourself battling your inbox, forgetting important tasks, or regularly bouncing from tool to tool to manage customer complaints and requests, it’s definitely time for a change.
