RESOURCE CENTER

What Is a Support Ticketing System and How Can It Improve Customer Service?

Ensure every request reaches a full resolution with your support ticket system.

September 2021 - 5 minutes

A service request is a make-or-break moment for every company. Provide a satisfactory solution, and you not only gain one person’s loyalty, you also benefit from positive reviews they may share with others. If you don't meet their expectations, you may not get a second chance.

A robust service ticket system helps you capture every customer service request, manage it appropriately, and resolve it on time. If your system isn't up to snuff, requests can fall through the cracks, customers may bounce from agent to agent, and you may not address the issue to their satisfaction (or at all).

Every company needs a ticketing system that can successfully resolve service requests — from customer calls to partner needs to internal IT help. Consider if your current system is up to the task.

What is a support ticketing system?

A support ticketing system allows you to efficiently provide service to customers, partners, and internal employees by assigning a ticket (or case number) to every service inquiry. You can use it to track the issue to its resolution whether you are the customer, partner, service agent, manager, or even the CEO.

What are the benefits of a sophisticated support ticket system?

If you're wondering if your current system is good enough, consider if it lets your organization do the following things:

Offer customer support at scale

A huge sale event or a sudden unexpected demand for your products or services leads to an influx of support requests. How do you manage this? A simple email system would quickly become overwhelmed. And what about the customers reaching out by phone, live chat, and social media?

A single ticketing system collects all customer queries and distributes them according to priority and subject matter. For example, queries containing specific keywords route to the appropriate experts. Add artificial intelligence (AI) to the mix, and your ticketing system can resolve the most common and most straightforward questions on its own, perhaps using a customer service chatbot or auto-responder emails. This allows your team to stay focused on the complex tasks that require the human touch and improve the customer experience.

Prevent problems

Customer inquiries can fall through the cracks when they're not appropriately prioritized and sit on Page 2 (or 47) of an agent’s inbox. Issues also arise when support staff go on vacation, move into a different role, or leave the company.

Connected systems prevent these problems with built-in case management. Agents follow tickets through various stages: new, in-progress, closed, and every stage in between. They can pull up a sorted list of cases at any stage to quickly see how long they have been in the queue or determine whether they should follow up with the customer or a manager.

Resolve cases quickly

Service requests may drag out longer than desired. Without a robust ticketing system, agents waste valuable time digging through existing tickets or passing unresolved issues around the team. When customers wait a long time for a resolution, they may question if you care and take their business elsewhere.

Review your metrics

Dashboards and reports allow you to zoom out to see where your team’s strengths are and drill down to find the causes of delays, observe whether your resolution time improves or worsens over time, and see if agent productivity spikes after you give them better tools and customer service training.

Find the right features for your support ticketing system.

Some customer service departments are still working with an outdated or suboptimal support ticket system.

77% of agents say they have the tools and technology they need to do their jobs.

“State of Service,” Salesforce, December 2020.

When it’s time to improve your current system or replace it with an out-of-the-box cloud solution, like Service Cloud case management software, make sure your solution can perform the following tasks.

Manage requests from every channel

Customers, partners, and employees may seek support in many ways — by phone, email, text, various social media and messaging platforms, and internal communication systems. A single platform with omni-channel routing receives each request and immediately routes it to the agent with the right skills and availability to increase first-contact resolution.

Give agents a complete view of the customer

A connected system builds a 360-view of the customer. It integrates with apps and pulls in all available data to help agents deepen relationships as they resolve the current issue.

Automate processes

Show agents next best actions as they guide a ticket toward resolution. Based on the specifics of the issue, the system surfaces each step required to address the customer’s needs. Make sure agents don't miss a thing by requiring completion of each step before they can move on to the next.

Reveal the complete chronology of the case

A chronological timeline displays customer interactions from all channels, including SMS, email, voicemail, and even knowledge articles the customer has viewed. This ensures the current agent has all relevant information at their fingertips and allows for a quick and easy handoff to another fully-informed colleague who can complete the resolution.

Prioritize great service now and always.

The right support ticket system has all the features you need and the ability to scale up quickly as your business grows. Grow your external customer base, increase your team’s productivity, and inspire happy employees with an enhanced service ticket system built on a single platform.