If you offer customer support at your business, you’re going to have support tickets being opened on the daily. In fact, the average company is dealing with thousands of support tickets a month, which can be difficult to manage. Businesses need a system to organize, assign and categorize them. An efficient ticketing management system can save time, money, employee burnout and employee turnover.
In this blog post, we’re going to talk about how ticketing management can benefit your business as well as optimize your support ticket workflow. Let’s get into it.
What is a customer support ticket?
A customer support ticket is an interaction between a customer and a customer support agent. Support tickets allow you to record, track and resolve issues that arise with customers when using your products. Some examples of support tickets include:
- Requests for technical support
- Requests for help setting up an account
- Password issues
- Website failures
- Asking for clarification during onboarding
Essentially, any issue your customers are having can end up in a support ticket. When a support ticket is created, they will typically contain:
- User information about who requested support, including their name, the plan they are on, and, in the case of a software like Fullview, recordings of their previous user sessions in your app.
- The agent the ticket is assigned to
- The nature of the problem
- The time the ticket was created
Other software can enhance your customer support tickets. For example, newer solutions like Fullview for Zendesk or Fullview for Intercom can create a list of all recent user session recordings. That way, you can watch them and immediately understand the issue giving you a comprehensive view.
To complete support tickets and resolve them efficiently and effectively, you’ll need a customer support ticket workflow.
What is a customer support ticketing workflow?
A customer support ticket workflow is part of the larger category of help desk software and encompasses all the steps that customer support agents must take to complete a ticket. Without an efficient workflow, your team won’t be able to organize and prioritize support tickets. A support ticket workflow should:
- Improve productivity
- Increase collaboration between departments
- Improve the overall customer experience
The customer experience should be your top priority, and a support ticket workflow will help you achieve it.
The benefits of a good ticketing workflow
There are a number of benefits to nailing your customer support ticketing workflow. Here are the biggest ones:
- Increased productivity
- Less agent burnout
- Improved metrics like CSAT
- Happier users and better retention
Increased productivity
A good support ticket workflow will increase your team’s productivity. Tickets will be organized and assigned properly, so that they’re completed efficiently. This will make the lives of your support agents easier, and help them better assist customers.
A workflow that’s optimized streamlines the support ticket process to keep everyone involved happy.
Less agent burnout
Data shows that 74% of customer support call center employees are at risk for burnout. This is due to a variety of reasons, but one of them is dealing with tickets.
Organizing tickets is tedious, and doing so everyday can cause agents to burn out, resulting in more turnover. An optimized support ticket workflow can take stress off agents, thus leading to less burnout.
Improved metrics
A good support ticket workflow will also improve your metrics. Through a ticket workflow, you’ll be able to easily look back on previous tickets, improve your procedures and gather data. Optimizing your ticketing workflow will improve:
- Time-to-resolution
- Ticket backlog
- Average resolution time
Essentially, a good support ticket workflow will improve all time-related metrics because it increases efficiency and decreases time spent on tickets.
Happier users
When users are having an issue, they’re already frustrated. They don’t want to have to explain the issue over and over to multiple agents. Customers generally expect their problem to be solved the first time they reach out by the first agent they speak to. So, it’s crucial that tickets are assigned to the appropriate person right away.
Support agents operate at different support levels, so you don’t want a technical support ticket sent to a level 1 agent. This will result in poorer CSAT scores. An optimized support ticket workflow will ensure tickets are sent to the right agents initially to solve issues quickly.
How do I create a support ticket workflow?
The good news is that creating a support ticket workflow doesn’t have to be complicated. With the implementation of the right customer support ticketing software, you’ll have an optimized system in no time.
When you’re choosing a support ticketing system, it’s important to consider the integrations it allows. For example, Zendesk and Intercom have great features, a vast ecosystem, and integrate with solutions like Fullview so you can record and watch user sessions in your app, quickly understand user issues and get more context into every support ticket.
When you’re creating your ticketing workflow, you should:
- Define your goals
- Understand user pain points and expectations
- Choose the right help desk software
- Train your agents and other employees on policies, procedures and how to use your chosen help desk software.
- Create a customer support training manual with escalation criteria and other important information.
- Create automation rules for workflows and implement them in the software you have chosen to use (each of them have slightly different setups, so you'll have to consult their documentation and tutorials once you've decided which one to use)
- Set up chatbots (Zendesk and Intercom both have this feature and setup is a breeze)
- Create a knowledge database customers can reference to lessen level 0 and 1 support tickets
- Test your system before implementing
Software like Intercom allows you to have a support ticket system dashboard with all of your information in one place. This is going to save you time, energy and potentially unhappy customers down the line.
Another kind of software to look into is multichannel support software, which allows you to corral all your support requests in one place — irrespective of whether you've received them on social media, your help desk software, email or somewhere else entirely.
The steps of a support ticket workflow
Once you’re ready to launch your support ticket system, it’s important to understand the workflow. There are several steps involved in the workflow that will make the process run smoothly.
Creating the ticket
The first step is to create the ticket after the customer sends in a request. This can be done manually by an agent, or it can be automated with help desk software. Programs like Zendesk and Intercom are extremely helpful in the ticket creation process.
Taking action
The next step in the support ticket workflow is assigning the ticket to the correct agent. Typically, there will be agents at different support levels with different skills. Tickets should be routed to the appropriate team so they can get to work immediately and solve the issue.
Monitor and escalate
If a ticket cannot be solved by the agent it was assigned to, you'll need to escalate it. The longer a ticket takes to be resolved, the more frustrated customers can get. So, it’s important to monitor tickets in your support ticket workflow and escalate when necessary.
Ticket escalation means sending the ticket to a higher level agent, or a manager. Escalation is used to help get to a quick resolution, keeping customers happy.
Close the ticket and optimize workflow
Closing tickets quickly allows agents to move on to others and keeps the entire system well-oiled and functional. Support tickets systems not only keep track of tickets when they’re active, but they will show how long it took for a ticket to be closed. They will also show the percentage of tickets that have been reopened, and the percentage of closed tickets. This is valuable data that can show how well your team is performing.
Next, we’re going to talk about tips for optimizing your ticketing workflow.
Tips for optimizing your ticketing workflow
Cutting down your time-to-resolution and keeping your customers happy depends in large part on optimizing your ticketing workflow. Here are 3 tips to do just that.
Automate ticket routing
According to data, 29% of customer service agent duties can be automated. Ticket routing is one of them. Automating ticket routing is going to save your agents time that could be better spent working on and closing tickets.
The automated ticket routing process is when tickets are automatically assigned to the appropriate agent. With help desk software like Intercom, tickets can be routed and accessed easily from the dashboard. And with Intercom's integration with Fullview, you can attach even more information to each support ticket for complete context, including recordings of user sessions in your app and recordings of previous agent-customer calls. This is also possible with Zendesk.
Automate level 0 and 1 support tickets
For level 0 and 1 support tickets, a live agent isn’t usually necessary. They can be resolved with knowledge centers, chatbots and other kinds of automation. When considering automation, it’s important to note that there are pros and cons of automation in customer support. When done correctly, automation can be a very helpful customer support tool.
Once you’ve automated levels 0 and 1, agents are free to focus on higher level support tickets that actually need human intervention. Here are some examples of automated messages you can send to communicate quicker with customers and lessen support burdens.
Consider other technologies
Consider using other technologies like cobrowsing, session replays and console logs to give you instant context into all support tickets so you can solve them faster without much back and forth. What takes up a lot of time with tickets is communicating with the customer to understand the issue and explain a solution.
Some solutions, like Fullview, have integrations with ticketing software like Intercom and Zendesk and pin relevant user sessions right to the particular ticket in your support software so you can quickly review them to understand the issue you are being asked to help with.
Conclusion
To sum it up, optimizing your support ticket workflow is crucial to running efficiently. Utilizing helpdesk software and tools like Fullview will ensure tickets are routed properly and customers issues are being resolved as fast as possible.
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