Gmail as a Help Desk: Does It Kill Your Customer Service?

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Customer support and relationship matter for every company. Some businesses use Gmail as a help desk while others turn to more advanced software to deal with customer queries. Do you use Gmail as a help desk? Then let’s find out whether it is better than a help desk platform.

What Makes Gmail a Help Desk Solution?

No doubt, email is a universal tool. It performs an integral function in our everyday life and business processes, too. But Gmail, for example, can do much more stuff than you think for your customer service.

Shared Inbox and Collaboration

The helpdesk is a central hub that helps the organization handle their customer’s queries and solve their issues. We can say it is a virtual interaction between the company staff and its customers. Here is where Gmail as a shared inbox works well.

Task Delegation

Gmail was not designed for customer service. On the contrary, it was mainly intended for formal messages, normal support within an organization for sharing information, or fewer customers. But forwarding and adding to email copies enhances real-time task management.

Visualization of Process

One of the main reasons for using Gmail as a help desk is an easy way to organize and filter the data using labels. And it actually works for a small business or a startup until they scale.

Advance the Performance

Besides, you can improve your Gmail as a help desk with multiple extensions. In other words, you receive an extended layer of functionality to manage your customers more efficiently. What’s more, you can apply these tools to improve internal collaboration and get results in performance.

What Happens When Your Business Scales?

Many small businesses and startups stay with Gmail as a help desk for two reasons:

  1. It is an easy and suitable tool. Plus, the customer flow isn’t yet so big.
  2. You don’t want to take risks and keep adjusting Gmail to your business flow. Thus, customer satisfaction keeps falling.
  3. Your budget can allow a help desk but how to move all your data without getting a clean start.
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What Should You Look at While Choosing a Help Desk Platform?

When you run a Google search for a help desk, you’ll get hundreds of options. And each one offers something different but valuable. So when you want to import Gmail emails, what are the aspects to check the future platform?

You can use this as a cheat sheet for evaluating your future customer support tool.

  • Ticketing option. It must offer a clear organization, prioritization, and management of conversations to answer customer questions and fix incoming requests.
  • Knowledge base. The self-service feature is rather a must. Some customers prefer getting the answer without reaching out to the support agent.
  • Self-service options that help your customer to check up on the progress of the request and bring more transparency to a process. That just can’t be underestimated.
  • Omnichannel support. That way you integrate various customer channels into one flow to keep everything in a single place. Basically, your tickets include the contact information, social media, phone numbers, email addresses of your customers.
  • Security matters a lot. You collect customer information and your business data also has to be secured. Make sure that the vendor delivers the user roles to level up the various access to data inside the software.
  • Analytics and reports. You need to measure the effectiveness of your performance and your support agents’ performance too. Here’s meant closed tickets, NLP score from customers, feedback left.

What Is the Most Suitable Option You Should Look at?

Here’s a shortlist of help desk software worth your attention:

  • Freshdesk

Freshdesk helps to manage workload effectively via omnichannel support and ticket routing. Some businesses choose it due to the automatically assigning and escalating tickets. The platform provides easy communication and collaboration among different departments.

  • Intercom

It is one of the conversational Relationship Platforms. Firstly, it was built as a business messenger. It provides easy user onboarding, is reliable and stable. It provides a better user experience and has good email marketing tools. It lacks many ticketing functionalities that are essential for a large enterprise that has a huge customer load. It is a little bit expensive as compared to Zendesk

  • Help Scout

This cloud help desk platform provides email-based customer support and a contact widget. So it is easy to set up and help you to hit the ground running with answering to the customers. Help Scout often is a choice of SMBs or small teams to manage customer success.

  • Zendesk

Multiple companies use it nowadays. It provides numerous options for support teams. Zendesk is known for customizable tools to build customer service portals, knowledge bases, and online communities. This customer support platform makes customer interactions a dynamic and seamless process.

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How to Export Gmail Data?

The truth is that these solutions have some drawbacks too. And one of the most pressing is how to export Gmail emails to a platform. Perhaps, the easiest way is to move your records in a CSV file. Another benefit of this option is that you can check duplicates and remove redundant data.

Sum up

Gmail is a good option to run customer support and it performs quite well. Plus, you can strengthen it by adding some extensions.

However, when your business scales and you get more customers and ticket flow keeps on growing, you need a tool to organize it better. You should automate some tasks to get more efficient team performance. Here’s where help desk tools, like Zendesk or Help Scout, help a lot.

Kelechi Okeke
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