Are you constantly wondering how your business can retain more customers? It all starts with maintaining high customer service standards, providing a better customer experience and addressing issues before they start affecting customer satisfaction. Having the right help desk ticketing system can help you achieve this.
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Customers are more loyal to organizations that pay attention to them and continue to look after their needs even after the initial sale is done. But ensuring high customer service standards at all times is no easy task. By keeping your contact with customers organized and streamlined, help desk ticketing software helps ensure customer satisfaction at every step.
But how does it work? Let’s look at some key help desk systems features that can level up your customer service operations.
Article Roadmap
- What Is a Help Desk Ticketing System?
- Basic Features and Functionality
- Advanced Features and Functionality
- Primary Benefits
- Software Selection Process
- Next Steps
What Is a Help Desk Ticketing System?
A help desk ticketing system is a tool that converts support requests raised by customers into trackable tickets. It records, organizes, categorizes and tracks support tickets from submission to resolution, ensuring a streamlined customer service workflow.
A report by Salesforce shows that 91% of consumers are more willing to make a purchase from a company after a positive customer service experience. So, if customer loyalty is what you are after, the right ticketing system can be a great investment.
Basic Features and Functionality
Let’s look at some of the primary benefits of help desk software.
Ticket Tracking
Ticket tracking is one of the most basic features of ticketing systems. Tickets are the foundation of any modern help desk system, so a streamlined system for tracking and managing them is critical.
Ticket tracking allows you to track tickets from submission to resolution. They can also search, sort and filter tickets using custom tags and priority settings.
Ticket Categorization
A well-organized system for categorizing and sorting tickets is essential for ticket management. Tickets need to be sorted by type, priority level and other relevant criteria. This is not only helpful in keeping things organized but also enables agents to prioritize or fast-track tickets as required. Ticket categorization also allows you to search for individual tickets, preventing lost tickets and neglected customers.
Ticketing systems can automatically sort and categorize tickets as they come. Custom tags can help you create a sorting system that is relevant and customizable to your organization.
Automatic Ticket Routing
Ticketing systems can automatically route incoming tickets through the appropriate channels and assign them to an agent with the relevant skills to tackle them. They use predetermined criteria, like ticket type, priority level, agent skill level, customer time zone and assigned agent, to determine how and where to route the ticket.
Ticket History
Detailed ticket histories help agents and supervisors keep track of individual tickets and view all actions taken on them. Ticket histories are important for archival and auditing purposes. For example, if, in the future, a certain ticket needs to be pulled up to check whether an agent responded to it appropriately, ticket histories provide detailed and accurate records for quality assurance.
Ticket Collaboration Tools
85% of employees surveyed by Harvard Business Review said that collaboration tools should be a major area of focus for employers. Collaboration tools let agents share tickets and work on them together, or split tickets to speed up issue resolution.
If faced with two tickets for the same or similar issues, agents can merge tickets to save time and resources. Linked tickets help multiple agents work on different parts of a ticket simultaneously without having to wait for the other person to finish and send it on.
Agent Productivity
Human agents are the driving force behind any help desk system. However, according to Zendesk’s CX Trends Report, less than 30% of agents feel that their organizations empower them to do their jobs well. Focusing on empowering agents and improving agent productivity is crucial for the success of your customer service operations.
To help you achieve this, ticketing platforms provide centralized agent dashboards, allowing agents to view their tickets all in one place and manage their projects better. time tracking and performance management tools help supervisors monitor agent productivity and offer incentives where necessary.
Live Chat
Live chat is a real-time support tool that helps eliminate long wait times, a major cause of customer dissatisfaction. Browser-based chats with customizable widgets, automated chat routing and chat queues can help you attend to customers’ needs more quickly, improving their experience. It can be AI-based (chat bots) or human-managed.
Zendesk’s CX Trends Report also found that 65% of consumers expect AI tools to improve customer service and save time; however, 60% report frequent disappointment with AI tools.
While live chat can be a very useful tool, it’s important to create a balance between human-driven and bot-based support tools, ensuring your customers get the best and most personalized experience possible. Bringing together human agents with AI technology could be the path to creating what McKinsey calls the superhuman agent.
Email Ticket Management
According to Salesforce, email is the second most preferred customer support channel. A solid email support system should be a top priority for organizations looking to maximize customer satisfaction.
Ticketing systems typically offer a range of email management features, like converting support queries submitted through email into trackable tickets. They also offer customizable email templates and signatures to make it easier for agents to send and respond to emails, as well as email forwarding and scheduling to make sure concerns are addressed in a timely way.
Call Center Management
Call centers have long been the backbone of customer service. The Salesforce report mentioned above found that phone calls are the most popular customer support channel.
With call center management tools like automated call response and interactive voice response (IVR), help desk ticketing software can help you run an efficient phone support system. The software automatically answers, filters and categorizes calls, and facilitates collaborative issue resolution through call conferencing, call recording, transcription, call monitoring and call barging.
Omni-channel Ticketing Support
Customers these days interact with companies on a host of different platforms. It’s not surprising that they expect to get customer support through multiple channels as well.
Help desk software offers the ability to convert all customer emails, chat conversations, community or forum posts, and phone call transcripts into tickets. That way, there’s no confusion for your agents about who to reply to and how. Tickets are easy to track and route through the appropriate channels, resulting in more timely resolutions.
Advanced Features and Functionality
In addition to these basic features, help desk ticketing software can also offer more advanced features to help you maintain an efficient help desk.
Advanced AI Tools
In a case study, McKinsey found that using AI tools for customer service operations, led to a 20% reduction in cost-to-serve and an improvement in both customer and employee experience.
In addition to basic AI tools that route and categorize your tickets, advanced AI can actually provide your agents with suggested responses and analyze your customers’ needs with sentiment analysis. These can be used to streamline ticket prioritization as well as to guide your agents through more difficult interactions.
Self-service Tools
Self-service tools are an emerging trend in customer service, with Zendesk’s CX data showing 89% of customers preferring to find their own solutions to problems instead of going through customer support. Additionally, McKinsey found that self-service tools helped reduce ticket volumes for 65% of business leaders.
Common tools include self-service support options like knowledge bases and community forums, as well as the ability to create native Android and iOS apps. These help reduce the burden on your support agents while simultaneously appealing to more customers’ preferences.
Third-party Integrations
Having an all-in-one solution for your CRM needs is ideal, but, usually, one platform can’t do everything you need. Being able to integrate your ticketing software with other platforms you use helps you build out your support system to ensure all your operating needs are met.
Integrating your help desk ticketing software with other CRM and collaborative software you use not only simplifies your various CRM workflows, but also ensures a more cohesive and consistent customer experience.
Performance Analytics
It’s hard to generate good strategies without a strong, data-backed foundation. Help desk ticketing software automatically tracks a range of different KPIs and generates reports based on them. You can use these insights to identify areas of improvement as well as create informed strategies for growth.
Custom dashboards provide data visualizations in a way that is easy to understand and interpret. You can get both pre-built reports as well as customize your own reports based on which KPIs are relevant to you, and schedule them to be generated at specific times, like at the end of each quarter.
Security and Compliance
Consumers are more sensitive to data privacy concerns than ever before. According to a report by Cisco in 2022, 82% of consumers care enough about data privacy to take action. A company’s commitment to protecting consumer data can have a major influence on customers’ loyalty and purchasing decisions.
It’s an especially important concern for customer support, because help desk systems deal with sensitive customer information, like names, emails and phone numbers. Help desk ticketing software has data encryption abilities, as well as tools for data masking and redaction. It also helps you stay in compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Primary Benefits
Let’s look at some of the primary benefits of ticketing software.
Faster Issue Resolution
If you’ve ever been at the receiving end of slow customer service, you know it can seriously affect your perception of a company’s reliability. Ticketing systems streamline issue resolution, preventing unnecessary delays and getting customers what they need faster.
These tools also comes with automation, saving not only time but also resources. You can easily automate repetitive processes like ticket allocation, categorization and priority assignment to avoid unnecessary delays, redundant replies and miscommunication.
Improved Productivity
Systematized ticketing workflows consisting of trackable tickets, automatic allocation, ticket histories and multi-channel ticketing can greatly improve productivity and simplify issue resolution.
Additionally, collaborative tools encourage team work and further boost productivity. For even better collaboration, you can integrate your help desk software with project management apps like Asana and Microsoft Teams.
Better Insights
Ticket management tools come with reporting and analytics features, giving you the ability to monitor agent performance at both individual and team levels and set adjustable KPIs.
KPIs like the number of tickets resolved, average resolution times and customer satisfaction ratings tell you how well an agent is performing, while communication transcripts and recording can give you detailed insight into how they interact with your clients.
Intuitive dashboards and graphs display the data in a way that’s easy to understand and interpret. These actionable insights not only help your organization maintain a consistent level of quality, but they also contribute to solid workforce management and help you strategize for future growth.
Software Selection Process
So, how do you decide on the best ticket management software for your organization? While these features give you a good idea of what to look for in a ticket management platform, every company’s needs are different.
The best starting point for your search is to get a sense of your specific company’s needs. Where does your current customer support fall short? Which features would help you address those issues? What volume of tickets will you generally deal with?
If you’re struggling with this step, try using our requirements template to get a clearer sense of what you need, so you can really narrow down your options.
Next Steps
Great customer support goes a long way in ensuring customer retention, brand loyalty and overall success. Ticketing software is a great tool to add to your help desk arsenal, helping you serve your customers more attentively than ever.
If you’re still unsure about the right solution for your needs, take a look at our software comparison report. You can use it to compare leading help desk platforms side by side to see which one is best for you.
What are some ticketing system features that your organization can’t do without? Let us know in the comments below!
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