Often a common reason for calling or communicating with your service provider is to seek help or guidance over a product or service. The new Plasma TV is broken, my pc keeps crashing, my Broadband line is down, my PIN number has expired – each an everyday occurrence in need of a speedy resolution.

The typical solution is a ‘help desk’ function designed to resolve customer queries, which are different in nature to regular contact centre queries such as “where is my order?”, “can I cancel my subscription?” or “can change my address?”

In a Help Desk environment, agents need to quickly search to find answers to queries that are often technical by nature in order to quickly respond to customers on the phone, working online or corresponding by email. i-Help Desk is based on a knowledge base (KB) and content management system (CMS) that are linked to the powerful numero interactive response engine. These knowledge sources can be quickly searched by the agent for answers to common questions using ‘Google-like’ free text searches. The sources can contain detailed technical information, pictures, video clips or indeed, any form of data which is relevant to the business situation.

When the customer makes contact, the agent desktop is immediately aware of the customer and their buying history. The agent screen is dynamically populated with the customer data and context sensitive dialogue boxes are invoked to help the agent answer the query. Such dialogue forms may be frequently asked questions on the consumer’s last purchase item, the dynamic display of product information or the dynamic provision ‘how to’ related tasks (for example a returns process may need to be invoked). In fact, whatever information the agent needs to immediately answer the enquiry is provided dynamically. Importantly, the agent does not have to search across multiple applications to find the information.

The key focus of i-Help Desk is contact centre agents who handle Help Desk/technical queries. Importantly, with i-Help Desk, agents can send follow-up messages with embedded product information files from the agent desktop as part of the call resolution. The solution ensures agents can quickly answer enquiries and keep customers happy. Of course, with powerful underlying analytics and management information reporting, i-Help Desk can be used to identify trends in product repair, warranty or reliability to make further customer service improvements.

As well as helping agents, i-Help Desk ensures improved customer journey thanks to efficiency improvements and the convenience of receiving information via their communication channel of choice – making it perfect for all consumer segments.

Help Desk queries can be sometimes be an exclusive role in the contact centre or sometimes these tasks sit alongside the customer services function as just part of the overall contact centre function.

The requirements of a Help Desk application may be sometimes be very different to the customer service role and indeed need sophisticated search techniques to quickly address the technical query. As well as this, such applications need powerful ways to collect and respond to the queries which by their very nature are always highly personal. The underlying numero interactive engine provides an effective way manage such queries which supports the whole customer experience.