Handling thousands of customer queries can be difficult and time-consuming for the support team of a growing company. Using a ticketing system helps a lot to manage customers’ queries. Even though implementing such a system is a terrific place to start, we should also optimize the workflow of the ticketing system to enhance support team performance. Therefore, improve your support ticketing routines to keep your customer service staff operating smoothly.
What is a ticketing system workflow?
A ticketing system workflow is the process performed by support agents to resolve ticket issues. A proper workflow and incorporation of the help desk will result in increased productivity, team collaboration, reduced staff workload, and outstanding customer service.
Benefits of optimized ticketing system workflow
- Saves time in organizing and assigning tickets.
- Reduces the ticket resolution time since tickets are assigned to a specific person to respond and not lost in a “someone else will pick it up” mentality.
- Improves customer perception of the quality of service you provide.
- Boosts the support team performance.
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Tips to optimize your ticketing system workflow
Let’s have a look at some tips for improving your help desk’s workflow after you have it set up.
Integrate service level agreements (SLAs)
You should incorporate time tracking and service level agreements (SLAs) into the workflow of your support system.
Having specific objectives and service standards to satisfy, an SLA encourages agents to maintain accountability.
An SLA:
- Sets the turnaround time to fix customer issues.
- Describes the roles of agents.
- Proscribes the statuses of tickets.
- Provides greater visibility of standards.
In all, SLAs provide a smoother workflow for the support team and aid in resolving customer issues on time.
Implement automated ticket assignment
Allowing support agents to manually pick the tickets on which they want to work or putting that responsibility on supervisors reduces the stability of your workflow. Therefore, using automated ticket assignment can help a support team to not let issues slip between the cracks. Auto assignment rules route incoming tickets to a specific team or group in the organization based on a set of ticket properties like keywords. It then uses round-robin logic to distribute tickets evenly among the agents in the proper group. Automatically assigning tickets to agents saves supervisors or coordinators a lot of time, though they can still assign tickets directly to agents and add themselves or others to the watchers list to keep an eye on a ticket’s status.
In an automated ticket assignment system, set event triggers perform a set of actions on a ticket when satisfying certain conditions. When creating a ticket, it assigns automatically, triggering an email of acknowledgement to send to the ticket creator, satisfying them and saving agents time.
Benefits of automated ticket assignment to your workflow:
- Since a help desk keeps track of and checks the availability of agents before making an assignment, it avoids assigning tickets to an unavailable agent, which would slow the response time.
- It prevents agents from cherry-picking the tickets.
- Emails for acknowledgement and feedback are automatically sent, reducing customers’ waiting time and saving agents from having to send them manually.
Frame a ticket escalation structure
Generally, customer service requires teamwork to resolve customer issues effectively. Sometimes, you need other agents to step in when some agents are unavailable or unable to handle a problem.
For a well-balanced help desk workflow, you specifically need to have a solid ticket escalation framework in place.
Ticket escalations occur for two reasons: due to a lack of knowledge or abilities, or due to tickets requiring a manager’s attention or approval. While these escalations may be required in some circumstances, the ultimate objective should be to handle as many tickets as feasible without resorting to escalation.
To make your escalation procedure better for tickets:
- Train your workforce to fill knowledge gaps and improve their abilities.
- Review your escalated tickets regularly to find out what those knowledge gaps are.
- Encourage regular contact and knowledge sharing among the various tiers of your customer service personnel, so that fewer tickets need escalating.
Prepare and update your internal knowledge base
Sometimes your support members may forget the solution to fix a customer issue or may receive an issue for the first time. Since every company has a lot of processes and things that could go wrong or be misunderstood, all your technical people having the answer to every issue is impossible.
A well-maintained knowledge base helps support team members quickly resolve customer queries. You need to develop an internal knowledge base so that answers are always accessible to your team if you want to improve the workflow process for your support.
Tips:
- Provide easy access for your agents to the knowledge base.
- Make it easy to search for and obtain relevant articles or guides.
- Get regular feedback from your agents on what to add to the knowledge base and what they found to be wrong or outdated.
Organize your ticketing process
To achieve a streamlined workflow for the ticketing system, you should organize it.
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Now, organization is something everyone on the team can participate in. Using the following help desk features will keep your support process running smoothly.
Set ticket priorities
To resolve tickets based on priority, agents should set every ticket status to low, normal, high, or critical. Therefore, this ensures the most important tasks receive prompt attention.
Add labels and tags
You can group similar tickets and separate the important ones using labels. When a group of similar requests reaches a certain volume, its priority can be raised. You can also use tags to categorize customers, flagging those of high priority, and you can use them in your SLA.
Ticket linking
Sometimes a customer’s reply has multiple queries, and various teams need to respond. So, agents can split a ticket, creating a new ticket from the reply. This way, every aspect of a customer’s issue is addressed by the necessary team. Agents can select a relationship between tickets, like parent-child, related, or no association, to keep them organized.
Add attachments and notes
In a ticketing system, you can add attachments of files such as Excel sheets, Word documents, and images while responding to a ticket. Additionally, you can include internal notes that only other agents will see. They can be reminders to other agents or guidance on handling a specific issue. This way, all relevant information stays in one place.
Use canned responses
Canned responses are prewritten pieces of text used to reply to questions regularly asked by customers. Therefore, having an easily accessible document with canned responses can save your agents time. To explore more about canned responses, refer to this blog on canned responses.
Conclusion
In summary, set realistic SLAs and automate manual operations to optimize your ticketing system’s workflow. Establish an internal knowledge base and use help desk features to stay organized. Streamline your help desk operations and make sure your employees have everything they need to provide exceptional customer service.
Try using BoldDesk, which provides all the benefits described in this blog for your customer support. With BoldDesk, optimizing your workflow is simple.
For any questions, please get in touch with us through our support system (built with BoldDesk, of course). You can also post your comments in the comments section.
