What is Ticketing System & Why Do You Need One?

Introduction

Delight your customers by offering them the greatest experience of their life.

Wondering how?

Allow me to enlighten you – with the help of a ticketing system.

It allows you to properly analyze the issues and offer quick solutions to your customers.

But wait, that’s not it.

There is much more to it than only offering quick solutions.

In this article, I will cover all the aspects that you need to know about the ticketing system.

Let’s dig in by starting with the basics.

What is Ticketing System?

A ticketing system is a help desk software used to offer faster resolutions to your customers. It enhances your support by helping you to be more organized and productive. A ticketing system can help support teams to track, manage, process, and tackle queries more effectively. All in all, it is a cost-effective option with a positive impact that helps you to retain your customers and enhance the brand reputation.

When do You Need a Ticketing System?

When You Are Not Able to Provide Support on Multiple Platforms

Gone are the days when calls were the only way through which customers used to connect with the customer service department.

Nowadays, customers want you to offer them your service on each and every platform that they use.

Thus, businesses have to be proactive when it comes to offering their support on multiple platforms.

This is where the ticketing system comes in.

This ticketing software is loaded with features that help you to keep up with the increasing demand for customer service.

When the demand is about providing support on multiple platforms it has a feature called “omnichannel support”, that can be used as a 360-degree solution.

Why 360-degree?

Because it lets you keep an eye out on all the platforms that your customers are using to raise queries.

It then guides all those customer-generated queries to your ticketing system so that your customer service team can offer a quick resolution.

When You Are Not Able to Keep Up with the Increasing Volumes of Customer Queries

Customers are reaching out to businesses more than ever.

Some businesses are dumbfounded by the sudden increase in the demand for customer service.

But, don’t worry.

When facing such trouble, the ticketing system can work as a miracle for you.

It can not only help you to improve your support but can also enhance the customer experience.

A ticketing system consists of features such as automation, self-service, etc. that can ease a lot of workload from your customer service team.

You must be wondering how?

Let me explain it to you with an example,

As there are hundreds of similar queries generated by customers every day, imagine how much time can get consumed to answer them.

But with automation, you do not have to work on those similar queries manually, you can just automate the process and you are done.

This way you can handle the increasing volumes of customer queries with ease and can also save a lot of time.

When You Are Not Able to Track the Performance of Your Support Department

It is important for a customer service department to always be on their A-game to offer customers the best service possible as your agents are the ones with whom your customers interact whenever they have any sort of issues.

So, how to know whether your customer service department is living up to the expectations of your customers or not?

To solve this issue, the ticketing system can track the previous performances of a particular agent.

It can help you determine how much time the agent has taken to find a solution, how many tickets he/she has closed, etc.

It provides you with a better understanding of how your customer service department is performing.

This way, you can analyze what are the necessary measures that need to be taken in order to enhance your customer service.

When Your Customer Service Department is Finding it Difficult to Collaborate Effectively

When there is teamwork and collaboration great things can be achieved.

But what if your customer service department finds it difficult to collaborate?

Your customers will not get a timely response to their queries, due to which their satisfaction can take a hit.

Not only this, but they would think twice before engaging with you again, which is not a good sign for your business.

Apart from high-quality products/services, customers nowadays also prioritize high-quality customer service.

What does the ticketing system bring to the table?

Sometimes, service agents are going to need the help of other departments as well.

In such scenarios, the ticketing system helps you to unify your support with internal teams to find quicker solutions. Your agents can also chat within the ticket and add comments whenever needed.

This way, it helps your customer service departments work seamlessly with other departments and enhance collaboration.

Ticketing System Helps Everyone

What Ticketing Does for You

A ticketing system simply makes your work easy.

It automatically assigns priority to the tickets, so that you can focus on solving the issue rather than wasting your time on setting the priorities.

You can just forget about the ticket until it is time to work on it.

Ultimately, it helps you to manage your time more efficiently and focus more on the actual issues.

As you do not have to focus on multiple things at once, you just have to focus on high-priority tickets.

A ticket system makes your life easier by taking certain decisions on your behalf.

What Ticketing Does for Your Team

Usually, there are a lot of representatives in the customer service department.

Managing them all and assigning them tasks can get hectic if you are not using a suitable ticketing system.

But, when you are using an effective ticketing system, you can find out:

• How many queries are generated on a daily basis?
• Which queries need immediate attention?
• Which agent is assigned a lot of queries?
• Which agent is not assigned enough queries?

Similarly, you can get insights into many more helpful factors that can help you handle queries more efficiently.

It also helps to improve the productivity of your team by providing such invaluable insights.

How Does the Ticketing System Work?

Ticketing system software can do wonders for the customer service department by easing their workload and making a complex process of customer service easier and faster.

Let us see a scenario-based example to better understand the workflow of how the ticketing system works:

Stage 1: Brook (customer) has not received his refund yet, so he reached out to the customer service team via email.

Stage 2: The ticketing system identifies Brook’s query and generates a ticket and assigns it to the billing support agent, Mike.

Stage 3: Brook gets notified that Mike will look after the issue.

Stage 4: Mike needs to know Brook’s order number, so he replies via the ticketing system, which automatically sends an email to Brook.

Stage 5: Brook replies with the order number through email to Mike.

Stage 6: Mike has to escalate the ticket further to invite the billing manager, Clint, for assistance.

Stage 7: Clint accepts the invite to the ticket, in order to speed up the process he views all the conversations between Brook and Mike.

Stage 8: Clint finds out that Brook’s payment has already been processed and will get credited to the account in the next 2-3 working days.

Stage 9: Clint replies to Brook and Mike with the solution through the ticketing system.

Stage 10: Brook gets notified. He replies via email with “Thank you”.

Stage 11: Clint closes the query as “Resolved”

In this example, when Brook (customer) has reached out to the support team via email even then the customer agent, Mike, gets notified on the ticketing system.

Similarly, you can customize the whole process of customer service for effective engagement with the customers.

You can also set up predefined answers so that if some basic queries or the most frequently asked queries are raised, agents can respond quickly with just a click.

Features of a Ticketing System

One-Page Ticketing

The ticketing system offers a one-page ticketing feature that gathers all the queries from multiple platforms in one place.

So that customer service agents can view all the tickets at once and resolve them faster.

What it does is, helps customer service agents save their time and simplify the process of resolving tickets for them.

Let me explain to you how,

One-page ticketing feature displays information such as:

• The history of the customers, and from which platform they reached out to you.
• The customer service agent that handled their queries in the past
• The kinds of queries the customers have the most
• How much time is taken on average to resolve the queries

To get all this information in seconds on one page is something extraordinary. It is possible only with a good ticketing system.

Advanced Ticket Filtering

Time is important for everyone, but when you have deadlines to complete certain tasks, time becomes a totally new entity.

It does not just remain important, it becomes precious or invaluable.

For customer service agents, who are always on a deadline to resolve queries as soon as possible, time is very precious.

So, a feature that helps them to get their hands on the customer’s queries quickly would not be less than a boon for them.

Advanced ticket filtering is one such feature, it allows service agents to filter their way through the tickets according to their requirements.

They can group, sort, and filter the customer’s queries using the filter combinations to get easy and quick access to the tickets.

For example,

Among hundreds of tickets, if agents want to prioritize the newly generated ones they can just use the filter “new tickets” or else if they want to prioritize high-priority tickets then they can use the filter “high-priority tickets”.

When agents use this filter, the ticketing system will only display the tickets as per the filter the agent has selected.

Provide Omnichannel Support

Offering your support on multiple channels has become more important than ever.

By offering your customers omnichannel support, you provide them the flexibility to reach out to you via whichever platform they are comfortable with.

With the help of a ticketing system, you can offer your customers a unified experience across all channels.

According to a survey, 62% of companies do not respond to customer emails.

Even missing out on one email can be considered a lost opportunity to interact with the customers, but missing out on 62% is insane.

Businesses have to take immediate action in order to handle such situations with ease.

This is where omnichannel can help them, your agents do not have to check their email every now and then to check whether the queries are generated or not.

Because if the customer raises a query it would automatically get converted into an actionable ticket and your agents can view it in the ticketing system.

The omnichannel channel feature can cover all the areas such as email, web forms, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Your agents can cover all the queries without losing a sweat with the omnichannel support feature.

Parent-Child Tickets

So many times it has happened that customer service agents have to involve other departments as well to solve a particular query.

When such a situation arises, the whole process of solving customer queries gets a lot more complex and time-consuming.

Customer experience can get hampered in between the process, as they have to wait for a longer time to get a proper solution.

Sometimes after going through all this, customers are not offered a proper solution, which is quite frustrating.

It might even raise questions about your brand, which is not good for your business.

To tackle such kinds of problems effortlessly, the ticketing system consists of a feature called “parent-child tickets”.

This feature allows the customer service agent to split the ticket into smaller sub-tickets/child tickets and make the complex query easier and faster to resolve.

By doing this you can make sure that other team members can also work on the queries at the same time.

This will make the complex process easier for everyone.

As customers can get their solutions on time and the service agents can involve with other team members effectively without any hassle.

Smart Ticket Assignment

If you are not using a proper ticketing system, ticket assignments can get hectic.

When I think of a situation as similar to finding a suitable agent for thousands of queries.

It reminds me of finding a needle in a haystack.

It is quite similar. Don’t you agree?

But, the smart ticket assignment feature can make your life easy.

It automatically captures all the incoming tickets and auto-assigns them to the most relevant agent based on the set parameters.

This way, the ticketing system makes sure that the tickets are handled by the best agent, who can find a quick and correct solution for the tickets.

Thus, with the smart ticket assigning feature, the most hectic and time-consuming task of assigning tickets becomes the easiest and most effectively manageable task.

Efficient Knowledge Base

Nowadays, when the demand for customer service is increasing, it becomes a no-brainer for businesses to deploy an efficient knowledge base.

Customers prefer using a knowledge base over other modes of customer service.

They want businesses to offer self-service so that they can solve their queries on their own.

Industry research has shown, 45% of companies offering web/mobile self-service reported both an increase in their website traffic, and a reduction in their phone inquiries.

This stat shows how important it is for companies to offer self-service to their customers, besides it is a solution that is available 24/7.

When you deploy an efficient knowledge base, in a way you are offering your customers 24/7 customer service.

On top of that, it is easily accessible from anywhere in the world.

You can even change the articles of your knowledge base according to the requirement of your customers.

For example,

You have an article that offers information about setting up your product. But what customers want is to know about the usage of your product.

In such a situation, you can make changes to your knowledge base and add one more descriptive article about the usage of your product.

Thus, the knowledge base can be the best option to consider to enhance your customer service.

Chat Within the Ticket

How important is collaboration when it comes to customer service?

Very much important.

But in reality, collaboration takes a backseat as customer service agents are so caught up in finding a solution they often forget to collaborate.

Collaboration with other team members or their seniors might get them closer to finding a quick solution.

But as I said they are so caught up, they totally forget about collaboration.

That is why the ticketing system has a feature that helps them to collaborate easily with others by chatting within the ticket.

The agents do not have to go an extra mile to connect to the other team members, no more balancing between internal CC, BCC, forwards, and replies.

Whenever they need any kind of help, they can just add other team members to the chat and ask them for help.

Automated Ticket Status

Automated ticketing status might seem like a simple feature but it has a significant impact on the effectiveness of the team.

The process from the moment a query is raised until it gets closed is very long.

You have to merge the tickets, assign them to the agents, find a solution for them, etc.

Among all this chaos, it might get difficult to keep a track of these queries.

This is where you can use automated ticket status to label each ticket and process them accordingly.

For example,

Scenario 1: If the ticket is a high-priority new ticket, your agents will get the idea that even if the ticket is recently generated they have to find a quick solution.

Scenario 2: If the ticket is a low-priority new ticket, your agents will know that they can focus on this ticket afterward when they are done with the high-priority tickets.

Thus, it might not seem important but the automated ticket status feature plays a vital role in enhancing the effectiveness of the team.

Benefits of a Ticketing System

Resolve Tickets Faster

With all the features that a ticketing system brings to the table, your agents can make sure they resolve the tickets faster.

The ticketing system software is a power-packed tool for any business that wants to enhance its customer support.

Its features offer help to customer service agents in many ways:

• Features that can be used for collaboration – chat within the ticket, parent-child ticket, etc.
• Features that can be used for simplifying the process – advanced ticket filtering, auto-ticket assigning, etc.
• Features that can be used for improving productivity – using automation, using canned responses, etc.
• Features that can be used for enhancing the customer experience – omnichannel support, self-service, etc.

Similarly, there are many more benefits that the ticketing system offers which makes the life of the customer service department easy.

Boost the Team Collaboration

Sometimes the queries just do not require the involvement of a customer service agent, they might also need the involvement of other departments as well.

When a technical query is raised by the customers, a technical person is needed.

Similarly, when there is an issue related to shipping the product, it might need the involvement of a shipping department.

To put it in simple words, sometimes the service agent would not be enough to offer suitable solutions, and the queries might need another department’s involvement as well.

That is when a ticketing system can help the most. Let us see how the ticketing system offers seamless collaboration.

So, when the service agent is having a conversation with the customer and feels like he/she needs the help of a technical person, he/she can just add the technical person to the chat.

By following this simple step, the technical person will be able to see all the conversations that the customer and the service agent had.

After analyzing the query properly, the technical person can offer the most suitable solutions to the customer.

Thus, the ticketing system can offer seamless collaboration between team members without disrupting the customer experience.

Increases the Service Team’s Productivity with Automation

With all the features that the ticketing system brings in, automation stands out.

It makes the process of customer service a lot faster and easier.

The tasks that consumed a lot of time and effort can be automated to save the invaluable time of the agents.

Features like auto-ticket assigning, automatic ticket priority setting, etc. allow the agents to improve their productivity.

Customer service agents can enhance their productivity by 4X with the help of automation.

The use of automation also means there are fewer chances for human error, which can help you improve customer satisfaction.

Improves Communication with Customers

All the interaction between the customer and the service agent is limited to one page which makes it easy for them to communicate with each other.

In addition to the current issue of the customer, the service agents can also look at the past record of the customer.

It can give them a brief about the customer’s past queries, their conversations, etc.

This can benefit the customer service agent in improving their interaction with the customer as now they know a few details about their customers.

Thus, the agent will be able to deliver a consistent experience to that customer.

In case there is the need to transfer the query to other agents, they can easily get on board with all the previous information available at their fingertips.

Enhances Customer Experience

Customers can make or break a business.

You as a business for sure would want the customers to be on your side.

So, for this to happen you must keep in mind to offer them the best service that satisfies their needs.

In order to do so, you must build a strategy that is customer-centric, that focuses on offering them the greatest experience of their life.

The experience which makes sure that they would come back to you again and again.

So, what better than the ticketing system to live up to the expectations of the customers.

The software offers numerous features through which you can offer the best service to them.

A feature such as omnichannel support helps your business to cover all the channels that your customers prefer to reach out to you.

To offer lightning-fast resolutions your customer service agents can use features such as ticket prioritization, canned responses, and automation.

All these features help your customer service team to provide your customer with the greatest experience possible.

Make sure to deploy a ticketing system to streamline your customer service process and enhance your customer experience.

Why DeskXpand is the Best-Suite Ticketing System for Your Business?

Let your brand revolutionize the process of customer support with DeskXpand, a perfect help desk software that your customer service team needs. Its power-packed features can help your business to provide your customer with the greatest of experiences. DeskXpand is a one-stop solution and a perfect fit for all kinds of businesses that want to enhance their customer service.

What are you waiting for? Try it out yourself.

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