What is a helpdesk?
A helpdesk is a centralised workspace where customer service teams manage all customer inquiries and conversations across multiple channels.
Think of it as your command center for every customer question, complaint, or request that comes through email, web chat, SMS, WhatsApp, and social media. Instead of juggling separate inboxes and losing track of conversations, your customer service agents can use a helpdesk to track and organise each customer interaction in a single interface.
Whereas traditional helpdesks just organise and resolve tickets, modern helpdesk tools are built on a B2C data foundation that gives customer support teams complete customer context and connects every support interaction to your marketing efforts.
For example, when a customer reaches out about an order, your team instantly sees their purchase history, recent marketing messages, and customer profile without asking a single question. This means faster resolutions, more personalised responses, and the ability to turn support moments into revenue opportunities.
What does a helpdesk do?
Customer support used to be simple: answer the phone, solve the problem, hang up. Now, customers reach out through email, start chats on your website, send texts, and slide into your DMs. Without a centralised system, support teams end up playing whack-a-mole across different tools, leading to missed messages, slow responses, and frustrated customers.
A helpdesk organises the chaos. It captures every inbound message, regardless of channel, and converts it into a trackable ticket with a clear status. This allows support teams to prioritise urgent issues, collaborate on complex problems, and make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
But the real value comes from what happens next. Today’s helpdesks do more than just organise tickets—they connect to your customer data to provide context that transforms generic support into personalised service. When someone reaches out about a delayed order, for example, agents see exactly what they ordered, when, and how they’ve interacted with your brand before.
Key features of a helpdesk
A helpdesk that drives results needs these components:
- Unified inbox across all channels: Email, web chat, SMS, WhatsApp, and social media messages appear in one workspace. Your team manages everything from a single screen instead of switching between different tools and missing important conversations.
- Complete customer context: Every ticket automatically pulls in the customer’s order history, past support interactions, recent marketing activity, and more. Agents can resolve issues faster because they have the full story, not just the current complaint.
- AI-powered automation: Smart routing sends tickets to the right agent based on skills and availability. AI also handles spam filtering and can even resolve simple questions automatically before escalating to humans.
Benefits of using a helpdesk
A modern helpdesk that leverages the same customer data and is built in the same platform as the marketing function unlocks several benefits for your customer support team:
- Greater team efficiency: AI handles routine tasks like ticket tagging and spam filtering, while unified data means human agents spend less time searching for customer information between different tools and more time solving problems.
- More personalised, satisfying support: With complete customer context at their fingertips, agents are able to interact with customers in ways that feel more personal and empathetic, while customers don’t have to repeat themselves.
- Support as a revenue driver: A helpdesk that connects marketing and customer service data and functionality empowers you to use support moments to drive revenue, like automatically triggering personalised offers after resolving issues or identifying up-sell opportunities during support conversations.
A helpdesk doesn’t just solve problems. It strengthens customer relationships and drives business growth through every interaction. Get started with Klaviyo Helpdesk* to transform your customer support experience.
*Klaviyo Helpdesk supports two-way conversations in any language, as long as both the customer and agent use the same language. Klaviyo does not translate messages between languages. The Helpdesk interface will appear in the language you’ve selected in your Klaviyo account settings.