Whether you're a small team at a one-month-old startup or a large team working for a corporate giant, resolving customer concerns in a timely manner is critical to everyone's success.
But when the list of customer issues is in the hundreds, how do you organize and prioritize your customer issues?
Well, of all the strategies, best practices and tools to make any customer service team more effective, a support ticketing system happens to be the one that stands out the most.
You can provide a unique identifier for each customer issue by creating a support ticket. But what is a support ticket? A support ticket is a customer issue or request that can be easily organized, assigned, tracked and resolved from a single platform.
In this blog, we'll learn about the definition of a support work ticket and its various types and explore the various ways in which work tickets can be resolved faster.
What is a support ticket?
A support ticket documents all support communications between a customer and the customer service team. A work order can contain valuable information such as the nature of the issue, the source, the date, the time and other relevant customer information.
As we all know, support tickets can make everyone's life easier. Let's take a quick look at how support tickets can be beneficial to the following stakeholders -
For customers: Support tickets provide a personal identity for customer issues. They can use the work order ID as a reference to contact a support agent. This helps them save time by not repeating their concerns to each agent.
For agents: Agents can use the work order ID to track the progress of each work order from start to finish. They can break a complex work order into multiple sub-work orders, escalate the work order to a higher rep, update the status of the work order, and more.
For companies: Companies can learn a lot from support tickets - how their products are performing in the market, common problems customers are facing, etc. By studying support tickets over time, they can make the necessary improvements for future product releases.
What is a support work order system?
A support ticket system is a single platform for managing all customer issues and requests. Work order software works by automatically converting each incoming support communication into a special work order that records support interactions over time.
Ticketing systems enable your customer service agents to better track requests, prioritize urgent tickets and share faster responses for a pleasant customer experience.
Modern customers prefer to contact companies through their preferred communication channels. To achieve this, a multi-channel work order management system captures customer messages through multiple channels such as live chat, email, phone, social media, web forms, and more. So your team doesn't have to use different tools to manage conversations on different channels. All you need is an omnichannel support work order system.
Now, to reduce the number of work orders, the tool gives you the option to create a huge knowledge base or help centre. This way, you can transfer most of your support tickets, including common customer queries about product availability, payment options, returns, shipping, and more. A user-friendly knowledge base will empower your customers and allow you to reduce support costs in the long run.
What types of support tickets are available?
Support work orders go through different stages and take many forms, from the time they are received to the time they are marked as closed. Here are the different types of support tickets you should know about.
1. Opening a ticket
When a customer support work order is opened, the customer's question has not yet been answered, or his issue has not yet been resolved. By default, every new work order in the help desk inbox is "open". It is important to assign open work orders to the relevant agent at the right time so that they can be resolved faster.
2. Escalation Tickets
Sometimes, it is not possible for your base or tier 1 agents to resolve all support work orders on their own. Since they may not have the skills, knowledge or authority required to determine the work order and may need further assistance from a senior representative, escalate the issue ticket. Now, escalated work orders consume more time to decide than other work orders.
3. High-Priority Tickets
Customer service teams must handle hundreds of support requests daily, making it nearly impossible to decide which issues to resolve first. With the support ticket system, you can easily set the ticket priority to "high", "normal", or "low". High-priority work orders create a sense of urgency in your agents because they must be resolved first.
4. Rated Tickets
As the name implies, a rated work order is a support work order that has been rated by the customer. Once an issue ticket is resolved, customers are typically asked questions such as "How would you rate your experience interacting with our support agents today?" The customer can rate their experience on a scale of 1-5, and the customer service manager can see all the tickets in the rating report section.
5. Closed or Resolved Work Orders
When the most appropriate solution is shared with the customer, and the issue is resolved, the support service order is marked as resolved. This is the final stage of the work order lifecycle and reflects the success your team has had in assisting your customers. It is important to note that many companies use the terms "resolved" and "closed" interchangeably.
6. Re-invoicing
Support work orders are reopened when a customer encounters a similar issue or has a follow-up question/request shortly after the work order is closed. Your customers can reopen work orders from their portal or your agents from their help desk dashboard. Periodic reopening may indicate that the agent marked the work order as closed and did not ensure that the customer's issue was resolved entirely.
Tips for Faster Resolution of Support Requests
An extended support ticket queue is not a healthy sign for the agent or the customer. For the agent, it just means more work, and for the customer, it means a delay in response.
So, to avoid this, you should know some practical tips to resolve your support requests quickly. Let's discuss them right away.
1. Use knowledge base to reduce support requests
Monitoring your support tickets over time can open the door to improving the process.
You must identify common problems that your customers encounter regularly and use your knowledge base to address them proactively. As you build and update your knowledge base, make sure your customers know how and where they can find the right answers to basic questions.
According to Social Media Today, 91% of customers say they would use an online knowledge base if available and customized to their search needs.
Encourage your agents to update help articles and guides regularly. For example, if a customer reports a new issue, your agents can address it and update the knowledge base with appropriate problem-solving steps. In the future, this will help your team understand the root causes of problems while preventing them from happening altogether.
2. Prioritize emergency support tickets
When your agents start their daily work, they must make decisions quickly. With hundreds of support requests, they must prioritize their work orders carefully and plan their day accordingly.
For work order prioritization, they need to consider factors such as how many people are affected by the issue. How long will it take to resolve? What are the consequences of leaving it unresolved for a long time?
With the right help desk ticketing system, you can easily mark a support ticket as high or low priority depending on the issue's urgency.
For example, if a customer's account has been compromised, the work order can be marked as high priority, and your team should recover the account as soon as possible.
3. Practice practical support ticket assignment
As an organization, you can't expect a single employee to handle the majority of your ticketing volume. This will lead to inefficient workflows and an unfair ticket allocation system.
So what's the way out?
To resolve work orders faster, you can use a recurring work order distribution feature that ensures work orders are distributed evenly among available agents. Here are more tips on streamlining workflows -
·If you offer multi-channel support, ensure all incoming support requests are directed through your help desk dashboard. This will allow your agents to get all support requests under one roof.
· Create an escalation workflow so your agents know who they should contact in the event of an escalation.
·Train your agents to fill any obvious skill gaps. A well-trained team will be able to collaborate better, share faster responses, and delight customers.
4. Communicate with customers
Most businesses mistakenly assume that their customers already know that problem-solving takes time. When customers come to your company for support, they may not know what to expect.
You need to communicate effectively with your users and provide them with timely updates. For example, if a work order has been escalated to a higher level of representation, let your customers know about the same and the new schedule they can expect.
With an automated ticketing system, you can share automatic notifications and reminders with your customers. This will help them set clear expectations and allow them to track the complete progress of the work order.
5. Monitor key support work order metrics
All successful businesses have one thing in common; they are driven by data, not guesswork.
Customer service teams need a thorough understanding of their phone numbers to enable effective processes. For example, evaluating trends in new support work orders will help you plan your manpower accordingly. If most support requests are received on weekends, you may want to hire temporary staff to resolve work orders more quickly.
Closely monitor key help desk metrics such as new work orders, open work orders, the average time to resolution, first contact resolution, etc., to make informed decisions.
Resolve issues - one support ticket at a time
Support tickets are the lifeblood of any customer-focused business. They help your team manage customer needs and record every minute detail of a customer issue or request.
A robust support ticket system can help you assign a unique identity to countless customer issues and enable your team to collaborate to share a memorable customer experience.
For effective customer service operations, you must identify common customer issues, prioritize urgent work orders, proactively communicate with customers and monitor key help desk metrics. It's time to delight your customers by addressing their concerns - one support ticket at a time.
But when the list of customer issues is in the hundreds, how do you organize and prioritize your customer issues?
Well, of all the strategies, best practices and tools to make any customer service team more effective, a support ticketing system happens to be the one that stands out the most.
You can provide a unique identifier for each customer issue by creating a support ticket. But what is a support ticket? A support ticket is a customer issue or request that can be easily organized, assigned, tracked and resolved from a single platform.
In this blog, we'll learn about the definition of a support work ticket and its various types and explore the various ways in which work tickets can be resolved faster.
Use customer support software which contains an efficient knowledge base, ticketing system and Live chat. Minimal cost to enhance customer experience.| BClinked
Rapid deployment, simple enough but effective customer support system
What is a support ticket?
A support ticket documents all support communications between a customer and the customer service team. A work order can contain valuable information such as the nature of the issue, the source, the date, the time and other relevant customer information.
As we all know, support tickets can make everyone's life easier. Let's take a quick look at how support tickets can be beneficial to the following stakeholders -
For customers: Support tickets provide a personal identity for customer issues. They can use the work order ID as a reference to contact a support agent. This helps them save time by not repeating their concerns to each agent.
For agents: Agents can use the work order ID to track the progress of each work order from start to finish. They can break a complex work order into multiple sub-work orders, escalate the work order to a higher rep, update the status of the work order, and more.
For companies: Companies can learn a lot from support tickets - how their products are performing in the market, common problems customers are facing, etc. By studying support tickets over time, they can make the necessary improvements for future product releases.
What is a support work order system?
A support ticket system is a single platform for managing all customer issues and requests. Work order software works by automatically converting each incoming support communication into a special work order that records support interactions over time.
Ticketing systems enable your customer service agents to better track requests, prioritize urgent tickets and share faster responses for a pleasant customer experience.
Modern customers prefer to contact companies through their preferred communication channels. To achieve this, a multi-channel work order management system captures customer messages through multiple channels such as live chat, email, phone, social media, web forms, and more. So your team doesn't have to use different tools to manage conversations on different channels. All you need is an omnichannel support work order system.
Now, to reduce the number of work orders, the tool gives you the option to create a huge knowledge base or help centre. This way, you can transfer most of your support tickets, including common customer queries about product availability, payment options, returns, shipping, and more. A user-friendly knowledge base will empower your customers and allow you to reduce support costs in the long run.
What types of support tickets are available?
Support work orders go through different stages and take many forms, from the time they are received to the time they are marked as closed. Here are the different types of support tickets you should know about.
1. Opening a ticket
When a customer support work order is opened, the customer's question has not yet been answered, or his issue has not yet been resolved. By default, every new work order in the help desk inbox is "open". It is important to assign open work orders to the relevant agent at the right time so that they can be resolved faster.
2. Escalation Tickets
Sometimes, it is not possible for your base or tier 1 agents to resolve all support work orders on their own. Since they may not have the skills, knowledge or authority required to determine the work order and may need further assistance from a senior representative, escalate the issue ticket. Now, escalated work orders consume more time to decide than other work orders.
3. High-Priority Tickets
Customer service teams must handle hundreds of support requests daily, making it nearly impossible to decide which issues to resolve first. With the support ticket system, you can easily set the ticket priority to "high", "normal", or "low". High-priority work orders create a sense of urgency in your agents because they must be resolved first.
4. Rated Tickets
As the name implies, a rated work order is a support work order that has been rated by the customer. Once an issue ticket is resolved, customers are typically asked questions such as "How would you rate your experience interacting with our support agents today?" The customer can rate their experience on a scale of 1-5, and the customer service manager can see all the tickets in the rating report section.
5. Closed or Resolved Work Orders
When the most appropriate solution is shared with the customer, and the issue is resolved, the support service order is marked as resolved. This is the final stage of the work order lifecycle and reflects the success your team has had in assisting your customers. It is important to note that many companies use the terms "resolved" and "closed" interchangeably.
6. Re-invoicing
Support work orders are reopened when a customer encounters a similar issue or has a follow-up question/request shortly after the work order is closed. Your customers can reopen work orders from their portal or your agents from their help desk dashboard. Periodic reopening may indicate that the agent marked the work order as closed and did not ensure that the customer's issue was resolved entirely.
Tips for Faster Resolution of Support Requests
An extended support ticket queue is not a healthy sign for the agent or the customer. For the agent, it just means more work, and for the customer, it means a delay in response.
So, to avoid this, you should know some practical tips to resolve your support requests quickly. Let's discuss them right away.
1. Use knowledge base to reduce support requests
Monitoring your support tickets over time can open the door to improving the process.
You must identify common problems that your customers encounter regularly and use your knowledge base to address them proactively. As you build and update your knowledge base, make sure your customers know how and where they can find the right answers to basic questions.
According to Social Media Today, 91% of customers say they would use an online knowledge base if available and customized to their search needs.
Encourage your agents to update help articles and guides regularly. For example, if a customer reports a new issue, your agents can address it and update the knowledge base with appropriate problem-solving steps. In the future, this will help your team understand the root causes of problems while preventing them from happening altogether.
2. Prioritize emergency support tickets
When your agents start their daily work, they must make decisions quickly. With hundreds of support requests, they must prioritize their work orders carefully and plan their day accordingly.
For work order prioritization, they need to consider factors such as how many people are affected by the issue. How long will it take to resolve? What are the consequences of leaving it unresolved for a long time?
With the right help desk ticketing system, you can easily mark a support ticket as high or low priority depending on the issue's urgency.
For example, if a customer's account has been compromised, the work order can be marked as high priority, and your team should recover the account as soon as possible.
3. Practice practical support ticket assignment
As an organization, you can't expect a single employee to handle the majority of your ticketing volume. This will lead to inefficient workflows and an unfair ticket allocation system.
So what's the way out?
To resolve work orders faster, you can use a recurring work order distribution feature that ensures work orders are distributed evenly among available agents. Here are more tips on streamlining workflows -
·If you offer multi-channel support, ensure all incoming support requests are directed through your help desk dashboard. This will allow your agents to get all support requests under one roof.
· Create an escalation workflow so your agents know who they should contact in the event of an escalation.
·Train your agents to fill any obvious skill gaps. A well-trained team will be able to collaborate better, share faster responses, and delight customers.
4. Communicate with customers
Most businesses mistakenly assume that their customers already know that problem-solving takes time. When customers come to your company for support, they may not know what to expect.
You need to communicate effectively with your users and provide them with timely updates. For example, if a work order has been escalated to a higher level of representation, let your customers know about the same and the new schedule they can expect.
With an automated ticketing system, you can share automatic notifications and reminders with your customers. This will help them set clear expectations and allow them to track the complete progress of the work order.
5. Monitor key support work order metrics
All successful businesses have one thing in common; they are driven by data, not guesswork.
Customer service teams need a thorough understanding of their phone numbers to enable effective processes. For example, evaluating trends in new support work orders will help you plan your manpower accordingly. If most support requests are received on weekends, you may want to hire temporary staff to resolve work orders more quickly.
Closely monitor key help desk metrics such as new work orders, open work orders, the average time to resolution, first contact resolution, etc., to make informed decisions.
Resolve issues - one support ticket at a time
Support tickets are the lifeblood of any customer-focused business. They help your team manage customer needs and record every minute detail of a customer issue or request.
A robust support ticket system can help you assign a unique identity to countless customer issues and enable your team to collaborate to share a memorable customer experience.
For effective customer service operations, you must identify common customer issues, prioritize urgent work orders, proactively communicate with customers and monitor key help desk metrics. It's time to delight your customers by addressing their concerns - one support ticket at a time.
Use customer support software which contains an efficient knowledge base, ticketing system and Live chat. Minimal cost to enhance customer experience.| BClinked
Rapid deployment, simple enough but effective customer support system