Ticket management can become overwhelming, especially if your organization doesn’t follow time-efficient ticket management practices to manage your tickets. It can also lead to overflowing ticket inbox, clueless representatives, and frustrated customers.
To ensure that you don’t lose out on customers due to slow response times, you can invest in a robust ticketing system software. A ticket system software comes with all the features that help you streamline your entire ticket management process.
But investing in a ticketing system is not the end of the story. You also have to follow the best practices to get the best results. Keep reading this blog post where we have mentioned the top 6 best practices that will help you manage tickets like a boss.
Contents
Top 6 Practices to Manage Your Tickets Efficiently
Triage
Generally, there are two types of approaches to deal with queueing tickets. The first approach is first come, first serve, where you choose tickets based on chronological order. This approach is practical if your ticketing system software has SLA adherence.
However, when you encounter a bunch of tickets of varying nature, this approach fails. Here, you can use the second approach. It’s called triaging regime, where you separate priority tickets from the lot. This approach involves an employee or a team that goes through every ticket and groups them based on their complexity, issue type, and nature. They can also merge duplicate conversations, delete spam, flag emergencies, and prioritize the inbox.
You can also form teams and train them to resolve a particular kind of issue. These teams will only receive the requests for which they are trained. It will reduce errors and boost the time to resolve a ticket.
Automate As Much as You Can
The scope of automation is much more than eliminating repetitive tasks. It allows you to automate responses to basic questions. It also assigns the ticket to the right person and sends immediate feedback to customers. Automation frees up time for representatives by reducing manual administrative tasks. It helps them to focus more on personal interaction with the customers.
Some ticketing system software comes with a function that enables you to configure automation rules. These rules are of two types:
Event-Based Rules
It starts off a set of activities whenever it detects a predefined event and then sends the notification to the supervisor for the same. For example, when a new ticket comes, it’s assigned to the concerned rep, and notification is sent to the supervisor. The customer also receives an email of acknowledgment.
Time-Based Rules
These rules have conditions and actions that get triggered after a set time interval. For example, if the time consumed after the first response on the ticket exceeds that of SLA. Then it will be sent to the escalation queue immediately, and a new agent will be assigned.
Configure SLA alerts
SLA or service-level agreement is a commitment between a client and the service provider. SLA is essential as it sets the expectations for the quality of service that the customer will receive. In addition, it also helps service providers to deliver consistent services.
Service-level agreements are a common practice when customer support is outsourced. However, we’ll advise you to keep SLAs in place even if you’re not required to honor a service-level agreement. This is because it’s one of the best practices to manage tickets.
SLA sends notification alerts whenever you’re approaching a threshold. For an instance, if your objective is to resolve all the queries within 24 hours, you might need an alert or notification that reminds you about the fact that you’re close to your deadline.
One key thing to note is that the SLAs are internal performance benchmarks. It means that SLAs don’t necessarily indicate your customer expectations. You must not confuse your deadline of resolving tickets with what the customer is expecting. Customers will naturally want their issues to be resolved as quickly as possible.
Empower Your Agents
Empowered support staff can deliver quick ticket resolution. It can also increase your ticket management efficiency. High-performing service teams are 340% more likely to say that their entire team is empowered than underperforming teams.
To empower your agents, you can create a consistent flow of all the incoming incidents. It will give agents a fair idea about the entire process. It will also help them to avoid getting caught off-guard during the process. You can also consider investing in training and the availability of a knowledge base. It will help agents to resolve even complex issues in less time.
Enable Self-Service
Along with empowering your agents, you can also empower your customers by enabling self-service options. Self-service options can save a lot of time and money by eliminating repeated and common tickets. Even customers prefer to solve issues on their own instead of contacting the support team. 70% of customers expect the company’s website to have a self-service option.
There are many options available for enabling self-service. You can post FAQs that include answers to the most common questions. You can also use chatbots to answer repeated queries. If the query is outside the purview of a chatbot, then it could be transferred to the agent. You can also offer a self-service portal. Here, customers can access their information and resolve queries.
Gain Insights from Data
Collecting and reviewing data can help you to identify the areas of improvement. You can track your KPIs like average response time, ticket close rate, average resolution time, no. of unresolved tickets per month, etc. It offers actionable insights that can be worked upon to boost your performance. For example, if the data shows that a particular department has slower response rates, you can allocate more resources.
Conclusion
A speedy, sorted, and streamlined ticket management has become the need of the hour for every business. It’s because businesses are focusing on offering rich customer services. They are doing this through instant responses and quick resolutions. Customers also expect their queries to resolve quickly. Otherwise, it won’t take much for them to switch to competitors.
You can prevent losing these customers by managing your tickets quickly, smartly, and more efficiently. And to achieve that, you can implement the practices mentioned above in your business.
