Perhaps your current ticket management system can no longer stand up to the number of tickets your agents receive on a daily basis. Maybe you are currently exploring the option of implementing a better ticket triaging system using machine learning in place of hiring more agents.
No matter what your motivation, shopping for support software is a big decision. You want to make your customers happy with quality service, real-time support, and easy-to-use productivity tools for your agents; a system that provides an opportunity to grow your business and take on new challenges.
Above all, you want a solution with long-term returns that can deliver world-class customer service without burdening your agents. In that case, an AI-based automated customer support platform might be the answer — that is, a smart solution that quickly analyzes and routes issues so your agents can do their best work, while your customers can get answers in record time.
With so many prospects and options in the market, it’s important to know your exact needs before committing to one system over another. Below are six key characteristics of an effective ticket management system, all of which place customer satisfaction at the top of the priority list.
An effective ticket management system:
- Quickly responds to customers across every channel. Customers are no longer bound to an 800-number when they need support. Today, customers often have the option to fill out a complaint form, send an email, start a conversation in a live chat box, or even comment using Twitter or Facebook. Effective ticket management will integrate all these platforms to meet customers where they are, and respond in kind. The best options will even convert social posts, direct messages, and chats into tickets so that agents remember to follow up, and the solution is documented immediately after the issue has conversation has ended.
- Never lets a support ticket fall through the cracks. One of the reasons to consider a somewhat automated solution in the first place is to ensure that no piece of customer communication is ever left unattended. Effective support software will track every ticket from reception to completion, and then log the data to improve future communications. This saves agents from wasting time searching for missing tickets and prevents issues arising from unanswered complaints.
- Enables a company to scale support and grow the business. You don’t have the budget or time to hire and train a growing fleet of customer support agents. Instead, you want to rely on customer support software that will efficiently sort, classify, and flag incoming items depending on the issue. This type of capability frees up your existing agents to do more high-level problem solving and simultaneously scales your support solutions as the business grows. Smart ticket management systems can even improve the exchange of data between sales and support teams, offering new opportunities to collaborate and prevent future issues.
- Reduces support requests by creating knowledge base articles. Another key benefit of AI-based support software is increased awareness of common problems. Automated solutions help agents leverage knowledge bases in an agile way and build and improve upon content. The right solution on recurring issues, questions, or support topics, which can then be channeled into online FAQ pages, articles on industry trends, product tutorials, and approachable how-tos. When customers can locate these resources on your website, they have the chance to help themselves before reaching out to customer service. Just make sure this information is easy to locate and communicated clearly.
- Enables ticket triage. When tickets come in, ticket management software will read the text, classify the tickets, and route them to the appropriate agent — effectively triaging your incoming tickets based on topic and priority. Especially sophisticated systems will learn to recognize the subtle patterns in tickets’ context, then direct both the ticket and the best resolution to the appropriate agent’s queue.
- Enables you to prioritize by urgency and route by skill. One of the benefits of an automated ticket support platform is the ability to distinguish tickets with pressing matters from those with everyday support issues. An effective system can classify support tickets in order to enable reporting on issue types, urgency, and skills required based on how the tickets are routed. This type of automation can cut down on time-intensive, manual routing practices by finding patterns in past interactions, channel preferences, market segmentation, and more. This opportunity for improved curation accuracy is vital as your business evolves.
When exploring your options for customer service management systems, the above considerations can help you find a system that can solve your current issues, streamline your customer service communications, and grow with your business.
