9 Ticket handling best practices for optimal customer support

“Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.” - Peter Drucker

As your support team tackles ongoing tickets around the clock and new ones keep rolling in, the clock ticks with a language of its own. So when it comes to customer support, speed isn’t just an advantage, it’s the lifeline of exceptional service.

In this blog post, we will explore different ticket handling best practices, where the seconds saved add up to moments of customer satisfaction. Additionally, we will also understand the significance of ticket management and its profound impact on customer relationships.

What is a ticket management system?

A ticketing system is a centralized hub where businesses receive, organize, and process incoming customer queries and work towards efficiently resolving them. A ticketing system:

• Encompasses ticket handling practices that help facilitate, categorize, prioritize, and track support tickets
• Serves as a hub for communication and collaboration within a support team, ensuring a structured approach to issue resolution
• Enables customers to self-serve and independently resolve queries without the need to submit and monitor support tickets

You can discover a seamless support experience with DevRev – a robust platform for tracking, measuring, and addressing all customer requests.

DevRev’s support ticket management empowers software businesses to not only log, categorize, and prioritize support tickets but also facilitate smooth communication and collaboration between different teams, including support, product, and development teams.

Built into DevRev, the online self-service portal takes customer support to the next level with its built-in ticket submission and monitoring feature. Unlike traditional systems, this dynamic solution allows customers to easily submit and track their tickets, resulting in faster and more satisfactory resolutions. This feature aligns perfectly with best practices for ticket handling, ultimately enhancing the overall customer experience. With DevRev’s self-service portal, customers can expect a streamlined and efficient support process.

What are some effective ticket handling best practices?

Let’s explore effective ticketing system best practices that have been proven to elevate customer satisfaction, increase team productivity, and enable comprehensive performance monitoring.

Implement a robust system for logging, categorizing, and prioritizing tickets

A sophisticated ticketing system leverages data-driven insights to analyze customer query patterns, allowing support teams to prioritize tickets and decrease response times. These insights enable continuous refinement, improving overall efficiency in handling customer inquiries. Anticipating potential issues involves identifying recurring problems, bottlenecks, or emerging trends, allowing proactive adjustments to mitigate these challenges before they escalate.

With DevRev, your ticketing system becomes a hub for holistic analysis, ensuring a proactive and strategic approach to customer support and issue resolution.

Foster transparent and proactive communication with customers about their ticket status

In addition to providing real-time updates, proactive communication involves setting clear expectations from the outset. Implementing automated notifications for ticket receipt, assignment, and resolution stages ensures customers are informed at every step. This transparency builds trust and reduces the need for customers to follow up on their support requests.

Prioritize tickets based on urgency and impact on customers or business operations

To ensure that tickets are addressed in a timely and effective manner, it’s crucial to establish a priority structure within the ticketing system. This can include SLA thresholds, customer profiles, and the potential ripple effects on business operations.

• SLA thresholds: Prioritizing tickets by adhering to predefined Service Level Agreement (SLA) to meet agreed-upon response time standards.
• Customer profiles: Taking into account the significance of customers or clients, their historical interactions, and individual needs when determining ticket priority.
• Potential ripple effects: Assessing how resolving a specific ticket might impact broader business operations, allowing for proactive measures to address potential consequences.

With DevRev, you can effortlessly set SLA breach and warning targets for key metrics like first response, next response, and full resolution. This dynamic integration allows for a flexible prioritization approach within the ticketing system.

Ensure swift and accurate assignment of tickets to the right support agents or teams

Implementing an intelligent routing system within the ticketing software ensures tickets are not just assigned based on availability but also on the specific skills and expertise of support agents. This way, issues are directed to agents or teams who can efficiently resolve it, reducing resolution times, and enhancing customer satisfaction.

For instance, auto-routing in DevRev, ensures swift and precise allocation of customer conversations by utilizing admin-defined keywords. When these keywords are detected, the conversation is automatically assigned to the mapped team member or team, streamlining the support process. In cases where no predefined keywords match, the system seamlessly routes the conversation to a default owner.

Leverage automation for routine tasks, optimizing efficiency and response times

Ticketing systems with built-in AI can analyze historical data, predict potential issues, and even suggest resolutions. This not only streamlines routine tasks but also empowers support teams with predictive insights, allowing for a more proactive approach to ticket handling.

For example, DevRev’s conversational AI solutions, like PLuG chatbot, engage with customers when they initiate support via chat. Powered by Turing AI, PLuG not only responds to the initial inquiry but also skillfully routes more detailed requests to a human agent.

Turing AI also extends to the agent’s toolkit, enabling them to access an instant summary of the ongoing conversation. With this capability, agents do not have to go through the entire interaction, allowing them to gain context and respond to customer queries quickly.

Offer online portals allowing customers to submit and monitor their tickets

Self-service portals with AI-driven chatbots can guide customers through resolution, helping them resolve common issues independently. This not only reduces the volume of incoming tickets but also provides customers with immediate assistance 24x7.

Did you know?

Handling a help desk ticket manually costs $22, but automation can resolve 22% of total service desk tickets at nearly no expense.

DevRev’s Turning AI offers chatbots powered by advanced AI algorithms and can provide personalized and proactive support to customers in real-time. It helps automate first-line support, offering advanced search and auto-generated answers for efficient issue resolution. By extracting product insights in minutes and recommending similar tickets, Turing AI streamlines problem-solving and accelerates knowledge base automation.

• Integrate a dynamic knowledge base to boost self-service

A knowledge base is a centralized repository of information that contains answers to frequently asked questions, troubleshooting guides, product manuals, and other useful resources. By providing customers access to this information, they can quickly and accurately self-serve without getting in touch with support.

However, a static knowledge base can quickly become outdated as products and services evolve, and new issues arise. To address this, consider implementing a dynamic knowledge base that leverages machine learning algorithms to continuously update and refine information.

For instance, DevRev’s knowledge base system uses data from customer interactions, support tickets, and other sources to identify trends and patterns, and then suggests improvements to the knowledge base. It also suggests new articles or updates to existing articles based on agents’ interactions with customers. All the agent has to do is review the knowledge base content and hit publish.

• Collect and analyze customer feedback to iterate the ticket handling processes

Implement a robust feedback loop within the ticketing system, allowing customers to provide detailed feedback on their support experiences. You can also utilize sentiment analysis tools to extract nuanced feedback and identify areas of improvement.

Take your feedback loop to the next level with DevRev’s sentiment evaluator. After resolving conversations, the sentiment evaluator conducts immediate and accurate sentiment analysis, categorizing customer sentiment into distinct categories.

With capabilities like sentiment breakdown and cross-platform compatibility, the sentiment evaluator provides valuable insights for customer experience engineers.

By extracting nuanced feedback, you can iteratively upgrade your ticketing system, aligning it with evolving customer expectations and industry standards for a continuously improved customer experience.

• Unify siloed teams and ensure customers receive attention subject matter experts

Escalation protocols should include well-defined criteria for identifying issues that need specialized attention. Moreover, the ticketing system should facilitate collaboration among different teams such as support, sales & marketing, and product & engineering. This ensures a seamless transition when escalating tickets, preventing information gaps, and expediting the resolution of complex issues.

For instance, with digital companies that often receive complicated technical queries from customers, it is essential for support teams to easily coordinate with product teams to understand and resolve the customers’ queries. A comprehensive solution like DevRev, consolidates product, support, and growth platforms, breaking down departmental silos, and unifies teams around the customer. This enables businesses to drive the customer’s voice from the customer-facing teams to the backend teams.

Why is ticket handling important?

Effective ticket handling is a must for excellent customer service, influencing various facets important for success. Ticket handling isn’t just about managing requests; it’s about building an agile, responsive, and customer-centric service environment.

• An efficient ticketing system and adept ticket handling process serve as the bedrock, ensuring a smooth workflow within the customer service team.
• Service requests, categorized and swiftly assigned within the helpdesk, is a testament to the efficiency of a well-structured system.
• A ticketing system in place not only enhances the customer service experience but also empowers the support agents to navigate tasks with precision.

The bottom line: Ticket handling best practices for lasting business success

The true impact of effective ticket handling goes beyond just resolving customer issues. It’s a critical component of creating a customer-centric environment that drives lasting business success. By implementing best practices, organizations not only enhance customer satisfaction but also improve support team efficiency, leading to higher customer loyalty and retention rates.

A well-organized ticketing system within the helpdesk streamlines workflows, ensuring swift categorization of tickets followed by swift assignment to the appropriate agent. Transparent communication is essential, as support teams should provide regular updates to customers on the status of their tickets, including estimated resolution times and necessary follow-up actions. This helps manage customer expectations and prevents misunderstandings.

Utilizing automation, such as automated ticket routing and escalation, can significantly reduce response times, allowing support teams to address urgent issues promptly while less critical issues are handled efficiently. This also helps identify recurring issues, allowing support teams to proactively address the root cause instead of just resolving individual tickets.