Does your customer support still depend on just emails? Are you able to track and sort priority-based customer requests? Do you still follow the multiple-folder structure with complicated color tags to filter your emails? Do you want to get rid of all the mess and streamline your support process? If you’re wondering to pick an alternate method to better your customer support, you’re in the right place. There is a one-stop solution to all your problems i.e., Ticketing Software!
We can all agree on the fact that the piecemeal approach to managing your services is neither efficient nor effective anymore. Gone are the days of handling customer calls and emails one by one and manually maintaining their records. Nowadays, modern businesses are adopting ticketing software at lightning speed.
Ticketing systems offer a simplified solution without hampering the client experience. They allow teams to capture, manage, track and analyze the status of customer issues in an organized and collaborative manner.
In this guide, we are going to take a nosedive into the overall uses, advantages, and features of ticketing software. We are going to address some important questions and look into some important information such as:
- What is a ticketing system?
- How does a ticketing system work?
- Benefits of adopting a ticketing system.
- Does your business need ticketing software?
- Must-have features of the ticketing system.
- 7 Hacks to select the right ticketing software for your business.
- Work with ticketing software experts.
What is a Ticketing System?
A ticketing system helps the support department to become organized and effective. The performance of the support staff directly impacts costs, revenue, customer retention, and the brand image of the company. Ticketing systems are a medium to better support staff. They help you manage incidents from the moment they’re registered through to their resolution phase.
A ticketing system collects and tracks all the customer support interactions from various channels. Regardless of how a customer chooses to reach out to your support staff, that interaction will log into the system. Its efficiency depends on the software you choose. Not all software is the same. Therefore, it is utterly necessary to know everything about the relevant features before making a decision. We will have a deeper understanding of the features in the later sections of this page. But first, let’s understand how a ticketing system works.
How does a Ticketing System work?
Most ticketing systems have automatic processes for incoming tickets. Whenever a customer registers a complaint, the system generates a ticket. It also assigns a ticket number to the customer. Customers can use this ticket number for all further communication. All the interactions between the customer and the support agent remain in one continuous thread.
After the ticket registration, the system assigns it to a relevant agent. It is important to adopt ticketing software that does ticket assignments automatically. This ensures issue prioritization and prevents agents from cherry-picking the tickets. Agents can work on the issue from their end. Most ticketing systems offer the admin to create various workflows. They can alert the customers with updates and resolutions via notifications. If the customers have any questions in the meantime, they can use the ticket to communicate with the assigned agent.
After the issue resolution, either the agent or the customer can close the ticket. For any additional follow-up questions and requests for closed tickets, there has to be an option to reopen the ticket. This saves a lot of time for both the customers and agents. The customers will not have to create a different ticket or contact a new customer representative. Many ticketing systems include inbuilt customer feedback tools.
Benefits of Adopting a Ticketing System
From small to large, all businesses have their support department. The larger the company, the more the customers. The more the customers, the more their queries. This can lead to a higher volume of customer support tickets. This can put more pressure on your service agents and representatives.
In such a situation, there are only two options left. You can either streamline your support process or you can hire more customer representatives. Adding a ticketing system is a great way to overcome this roadblock. Below are some important reasons why you should consider adopting a ticketing system.
1) Efficient Problem Solving
A ticketing system contributes to efficient problem-solving. It helps you speed up your responses. You can achieve this by automating workflows, ticket imports, escalation rules, and so on.
2) Access Support from a Unified Interface
You can help your agents provide better answers by giving them access to previous interactions with the customer. A ticketing software lets you view information from a single interface.
3) Improve Customer Retention
Improve your brand loyalty by providing personalized experiences to your customers. With aligned workflows, you can cut down the resolution time. This way, you can build customer trust and retention.
4) Save Time and Money
Less resolution time simply means that you save money. Manual processes waste a lot of time. The biggest benefit of ticketing systems is that it frees up valuable time for your agents for more important work.
5) Brand Recognition through Personalization
Make your brand recognized by giving your ticketing software a personalized touch. Customize your ticketing software fully to make it a cohesive experience and reinforce the support software as a part of your brand.
Does your Business Need a Ticketing Software?
Using ticketing software just because every other business is using it is not the only reason to adopt it. Small and mid-size businesses usually adopt ticketing software to simplify their support processes. This helps them take the redundancy out of routine tasks and focus on growing the business through fast and responsive customer support.
There is no doubt that online ticketing systems are replacing traditional email support methods. Not only does it help you categorize, prioritize and assign tickets automatically, but it has completely replaced the complex folder structures and the color-coded tag system. But the question remains whether your business needs an online ticketing system or not. Here’s a checklist for you:
- Do your customer requests take more than 24 hours to resolve?
- Do your agents cherry-pick the tickets while manually selecting them.
- Are you having a hard time keeping up with the ticket lifecycle and their SLA rules?
- Your agents often miss deadlines, leading to a pile of unsolved and unacknowledged customer queries.
- It is chaotic for you to manage support over multiple channels.
- You miss incoming emails often leading to more customer complaints.
- Do you find your agents usually stuck answering the same questions again and again?
- It is hard for your customers to contact you as your lines are busy all the time.
- Do you have a hard time getting customer feedback?
- Are all these factors affecting your revenue and brand image?
If you checked even five out of the ten things from the above checklist, you need ticketing software for your business. What next? Let’s quickly start with the kind of features that you should and shouldn’t expect from a ticketing system.
Ticketing Software: Must-have Features
You can build better customer experiences with exhaustive ticketing software features. You can engage your customers across channels with these features and deliver efficiently. Let’s have a look at some of the important, must-have features of ticketing software.
1) Ticket Management
Managing a shared team inbox that processes customer requests, manages tickets and suggestions is the central function of an online ticketing system. An automated, and collaborative online ticketing system software lets you manage these requests effortlessly.
It provides you with a simple, intuitive, and integrated mechanism for managing support tickets. This collaborative feature gives your team accountability, improves transparency, and ensures effective communication. Some of the ticket management features are automatic ticket importing, automatic ticket assignment, ticket notifications, and so on. It also lets you manage unlimited customers effortlessly. This, in turn, helps you scale your customer service.
2) Omnichannel: Support Across all Channels
It is difficult to provide adequate service to all customers by leveraging one support channel. With the help of omnichannel features, you can engage with your customers across channels of their choice from one unified interface. You can set up well-orchestrated workflows across email, phone, social media, and so on.
With omnichannel features, you can leverage multiple channels to respond readily and increase your sales opportunities. It ensures a higher resolution rate by automatically assigning the right ticket to the right agent. An omnichannel tool can help your agents save time and reduce repetitive work. This brings down the overall cost and accelerates your efficiency.
3) Dynamic Timers
Dynamic timers let you configure various timers to measure the time your tickets spend in various states. Pick a ticketing software where SLAs and escalation rules can be set up and modified based on your real-world performance.
It lets you apply due dates, response time, routing workflows, and so on, automatically, based on your service level agreements (SLAs). Also, you can enable automatic hierarchical escalations and enforce issue prioritization. This reduces the overall delay in addressing complaints with the ticketing system.
4) Automation
Automation reduces laborious manual tasks, simplifies your work, and lowers your support costs. An automated ticketing system provides built-in automation functionalities that will do away with all your redundant tasks. You can automate well-orchestrated support workflows, tickets as well as responses.
By automating redundant tasks, it helps you improve efficiency. This way your agents can focus on resolving complex customer issues. You can automate processes like workflows, ticket import and assignment, Service Level Agreements, ticket status updating, notifications, escalations, and many more processes. Automation also reduces the physical interaction of customers with the support agents and technical staff and limits it to just the complex and unusual tickets.
5) Collaborative Issue Management
It is important to enabling collaboration within the team. If your agents cannot collaborate effectively then that might lead to chaotic and unnecessary communication between them.
While selecting a ticketing software look for shared inboxes that lets the agents comment or chat within the tickets. Shared ownership that gets everyone involved is a must for any ticketing system. You can let your agents know and view if someone else is viewing or replying to the ticket through collision detection. This saves potential collisions. Your agents can also merge similar tickets to minimize redundant efforts.
6) Customer Self-Service
Implement self-service features and relieve your agents from answering the same queries again and again. Self-service features help customers find solutions to their problems themselves. Most businesses offer an extensive knowledge base to their customers.
This feature is a necessity and not an option. A customer can simply find answers by searching their queries on the knowledge base portal. This helps customers get instant answers to simple problems without having to wait for agents. You can also get more website traffic by optimizing your knowledge base with SEO-friendly content and presenting your brand as informative and resourceful.
7) Reporting and Analytics
This is an important feature of ticketing software. It helps you understand the behavior of your customers. With various data metrics, you can gain actionable insights. This way you can get a complete view of your support performance. Later with the help of this data, you can evaluate your strategy to designing better customer experiences. You can also use this data to predict the behavior of prospective clients.
You can have information about the progress of the support tickets just by peeking into the ticket report. You can view these reports on customizable dashboards. With this data, you can achieve a well-oiled support workflow. You can use this data to improve your support performance.
8) Ticketing Software Integrations
You might be using a variety of tools to perform various tasks and operations. Most small and mid-size businesses use dedicated tools for CRM, invoicing, marketing, and so on. It is therefore essential to choose a ticketing software that has easy integrations. It should enable you to control these tools effortlessly.
You can choose ticketing software with in-built CRM so that you do not have to use it separately. You can also choose software with ready-to-use integrations.
9) Email Ticketing Software
An email system is the one that automatically converts customer emails to tickets. It lets you compile the tickets and organize them in a single place. You can set up workflows and automated SLA rules. You can also monitor your support process and prevent customer complaints from going unnoticed. With an email ticketing system, you can make your brand voice visible at every touchpoint.
10) Customization
Customization is a must-have feature of ticketing software. It enables you to connect with your targeted audience on a personal level. It lets you scale and personalize your data, based on roles, categories, and preferences.
It also lets you build cohesive brand identity by customizing every inch of your ticketing software. While selecting software, make sure you choose one that is self-configurable. Also, make sure that it does not require writing long lines of code and is a quick process with minimal interaction. Select a ticketing software that enables the designing of custom themes and lets you save them for later use. Personalization has a direct effect on your brand identity, therefore it is important to DO IT RIGHT.
11) Get Up and Running Within Minutes
Last, but not least, select a ticketing software that gets you running within minutes. A simple and intuitive user interface that enables better customer interaction, is a cherry on top. These features are important as it lets you manage unlimited customers and scale your support without having to write a single line of code.
So, these were the must-have features of ticketing software. Now, only the last step remains, that is to select the perfect ticketing system for your business.
7 Hacks to Select the Right Ticketing Software for Your Business
There are multiple ticketing systems out there to choose from. While some have similar capabilities, some will not. The capabilities differ in terms of depth. Many companies offer ticketing software that offers little to no depth in the ticketing software features as compared to the price they charge for it. Hence your decision to select the right ticketing software for your business must depend on these three factors: in-depth software capabilities, price, and services.
For example, the capabilities might exceed what the customer needs but in turn you may have to pay a hefty price for it. Sometimes it also happens that the price is great but it comes at a cost of lacking some of the features that you need. Therefore, you have to be very careful and peculiar about and everything. Following step-by-step hacks may help you make a conscious choice.
1) Know Your Customer Expectations
These days not many customers prefer dialing a support line and waiting hours to get in touch with an agent. These days businesses are fast at resolving issues directly by registering complaints from customers’ Twitter and giving them an extensive knowledge base to solve their queries themselves.
Therefore, it is important to know what customers expect from you. Each industry functions differently. If you are in the retail industry then you must be receiving ample queries every month. On the other hand, the banking industry gets fewer to no queries. Hence, knowing your customer behavior and analyzing what they want from you would be step one of the ticketing software selecting process.
2) Know What Your Team Wants
Once you’ve figured customer expectations, next you need to align your support staff’s goals and needs. Then, assess how you can achieve them using ticketing software.
For example, if your business gets a number of queries over social media, then your team’s goal should be more towards social media support. So, you must make sure that the social media support functions and features in the ticketing software that you choose, align with these needs.
Also, think about your agents. Your support agents will be the ones to use the ticketing software extensively. Select a ticketing software that does not hinder your agents from delivering good support services. The end goal is to increase agent productivity anyway. Make sure your agents get easy access to all the relevant information in one place all the time.
3) Scalability of Your Ticketing Software
The third aspect is scalability. It is one of the core components of the ticketing system. If you are a small or mid-size business looking forward to expanding your company in near future then this aspect is a must to consider. The rise in the business means a rise in customers. This eventually leads to a rise in customer queries and a rise in ticket volume. Hence, robust ticketing software is a must.
Therefore, consider picking ticketing software that is scalable and future-proof. This will also give you an opportunity to rethink your support strategies.
4) Decide the Budget
So now you’re done sketching out these details and you know what you want from your ticketing software. You’ve figured out the agent need; customer need and scalability need. Now the next step would be to draw a budget for your ticketing system.
Decide the budget based on three aspects: Team size, integration tools, and software compatibility. Go for companies that offer size-based solution pricing. Be aware of the hidden charges and limitations of the software that each company offers. Be on the lookout for such pitfalls and find a ticketing software that offers you maximum features at a lower price.
Integrations and software compatibility are yet other aspects to look for. Make sure that the external integrations that you need are compatible with the ticketing software that you choose. Select a ticketing software that fills your integration demands and also make sure that it doesn’t burn a hole in your pocket.
5) Know What Features Do You Want
As discussed in the earlier sections of this article, your ticketing software must have certain essential features. See what various companies have to offer at what price. If you’re getting more features in your decided budget then you’re good to go. Here’s a quick list of features that we think a good helpdesk software must have:
- Basic Ticket Management features
- Collaborative Team Inbox
- Multi-Channel Support
- Self-Service Support
- Analytics and Reporting
- Automation
- Customization
- Email Helpdesk
- Dynamic SLA Features
- Easy Integrations
6) Explore Your Options
Now that you’re equipped with all the necessary information, start searching and making a list of available options. Look through review sites, on community forums, recommendations from experts, and so on. Find out reviews from the people who have had first-hand experience using ticketing software. This might help you eliminate a few from the long list of your options.
7) Sign up for a Trial of the Shortlisted Ticketing System
So, you have the list of ticketing systems that you are considering for your support. Great! The last thing is to do is to put the decision to rest. You can never know how good any software is unless you work with it. Therefore, take a demo or trial for a certain period of time for all the software.
You can start with taking a demo. If the demo suits your needs then you can move forward with taking the trial. Once you sign up for a trial, see if your feature requirement matches the ticketing system. If you are not happy with the trial, strike the software off the list and jump on to the next one. If something impressive comes up, pass it on to your support agents to test it themselves.
Work with Ticketing Software Experts
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