Some modern customer support staples are almost guaranteed to make that side of your business more straightforward and efficient — tools that help your agents manage customer demand and keep track of long-term support inquiries.
Of all the strategies, systems, and instruments that can make life easier on a support team, support tickets and support ticket systems are two of the most prominent and practical.
In this article, let's review a brief overview of what support tickets are and how ticket systems put them to use.
A support ticket is a document that records interactions between a customer and a customer support team. When a customer submits a query, a ticket is created and shared between the customer and the support rep. The ticket logs their communication on a thread that can be used as a reference by each party.
Support tickets are incredibly helpful to customers, support teams, and companies alike. For customers, a support ticket is an efficient, individualized way to connect with support reps and get their issues ironed out. They can explain their entire problem, then add more details as the case continues. This saves them from repeating important information, especially if they have to work with multiple agents on the same ticket.
For customer support reps, tickets provide a trackable inventory of the customers they need to assist. Support reps may be working with over 30 customers per day, so it helps to have a system to digitize support communication and make processes like logging and updating customer information simpler and more accessible.
And for companies, resolved tickets are valuable reference points for identifying problems with its products and figuring out what it could be doing better. Customer support teams often relay common tickets to product managers, who can address these issues for future product or service releases. The information from support tickets can also provide the basis for knowledge base articles to help customers troubleshoot common roadblocks without help from support reps.
As companies grow, they often deal with an increasing volume of support tickets from multiple channels. Such a high number of requests can often be overwhelming, and handling all of them manually may even be borderline impossible. That's where support ticket systems come into play.
A support ticket system is a type of software that enables businesses to store, organize, and manage their service inquiries in a single, centralized location. Since tickets can come through a diverse array of channels — from tweets to chats to phone calls — support ticket systems usually send all of a company's customer interactions to the same thread or inbox.
Support ticket systems improve efficiency in customer support. They allow support reps to easily manage multiple cases at once by collecting tickets in a centralized location and prioritizing them by their urgency.
And, by consolidating all support correspondence to one location, reps can easily pass tickets between one another while keeping track of their individual contributions. These systems also store all of a company's resolved tickets, allowing support reps to search and reference any previous cases similar to the ones they may be dealing with.
If your company is growing, chances are your number of customer support inquiries are going to grow with it. As your support request volume increases, handling customer support without a ticketing system is only going to get harder.
New business opportunities are going to come with new business challenges, and handling customer support is going to be a big one. A support ticketing system can only help your cause.
And, as your company continues to scale up, you should look into customer support tools that can help accommodate an even higher volume of customer support inquiries like help desks.
As a business owner, keeping your customers loyal and happy always has to be one of your first priorities. Equipping your support team with the right tools to make that happen at any volume is the best way to approach that challenge.
If you're not using tools like support ticketing systems, you may be holding your business back. At the very least, it's worth it to explore one of these systems as an option for helping your customer support team be the best it can be.
For more customer service tools, read about these customer service bots.