A helpdesk that knows the customer

At eight o'clock there are 34 new emails in the shared inbox. Some are questions, some are replies to yesterday, and two are a complaint from the same customer sent to two colleagues. Who picks up what? You agree it in a chat, or you hope it works out.

Then a customer calls. He wants to know why his question from last week has not been answered. You look him up in the helpdesk and find the ticket. But you cannot see that a new deal was signed with him last week, that his onboarding is running, or that the account manager is visiting him tomorrow. That lives in another system.

It goes wrong the other way too. The account manager sits down with the customer to discuss an expansion, and the customer brings up three open tickets the account manager knows nothing about. That meeting goes differently than planned.

The problem is not that support does a poor job. The problem is that the helpdesk and the CRM each have their own version of the customer. So someone copies data across, or nobody does and the gap grows.

In Lumo tickets are part of the CRM. A ticket hangs on the person and the organization, just like deals, email and activities. Whoever opens the customer sees everything. Sales sees open tickets on the organization record. Support sees the open deals and the onboarding project. And on the Today screen of everyone who looks after customers, there is Tickets close to SLA.

Read more about helpdesk and ticketing, or the guide on how to set up a helpdesk for a B2B customer base.

A support team usually steers on five things. Time to first response. Time to resolution. The share of tickets that stay within target. Satisfaction after solving. And the backlog: how many tickets are open, and how old they are.

In Lumo you set a target per priority under Response targets, for first response and for resolution. The clock runs within your business hours and skips holidays. At 75 percent of the target the ticket gets a warning. Missed targets count towards customer health per organization, together with open tickets and satisfaction.

For daily steering you use saved views: everything pending for more than three days, everything without an owner, everything urgent. Which numbers matter in B2B support and how to pick targets per priority is in the guide on how to set up a helpdesk.

Picture a distributor of technical parts with an inside team of four who also handle customer questions. This is an example, not a customer. Around sixty questions come in each day, half by email and the rest through chat and phone.

Before, everything went to a shared mailbox. Whoever read it first picked it up. Twice a week two colleagues replied to the same email, and a question that came in on Friday afternoon was sometimes only seen on Tuesday.

In Lumo the team gets two mailboxes: service and billing. New tickets are spread across whoever is in that day. Response targets are four business hours for a first reply on urgent and one business day on normal. Business hours run from eight to five, with public holidays filled in.

They write twelve macros for questions about delivery times, returns and invoices. The chat runs from nine to four, and outside those hours the widget shows a message with the expected reply time. After a month the team has written eight articles on the questions that come back most.

On Tuesday Tom from the inside team sees a ticket from a customer whose health is At risk. On the organization record he sees an open deal for a large order. He sets the ticket to high priority and leaves a note for the account manager, who calls the customer that afternoon.