Handling thousands of customer queries can be hard and time-consuming for the support team of a growing company. Using a ticketing system helps a lot to manage customers’ queries. We should optimize the workflow of our ticketing systems to enhance the performance of our support teams.
Therefore, improve your support ticketing routines to reduce your customer service staff work.
What is a ticketing system workflow?
A ticketing system workflow is the process performed by support agents to resolve ticket issues. A proper workflow in a help desk will result in increased productivity and allow agents to work together smoother. Moreover, it helps in reducing staff workload and enhancing 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 and there’s no chance they’ll be passed over.
- Improves customer opinion of the quality of service you provide.
- Boosts the performance of your customer support.
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.
1. Integrate service level agreements (SLAs)
You should incorporate time tracking and service level agreements (SLAs) into the workflow of your support system.
With specific goals and service standards, 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.
2. Implement automated ticket assignment
Allowing support agents to manually pick the tickets on which they want to work or putting that responsibility on managers reduces the stability of your workflow. Therefore, using automated ticket assignment can help a support team not to 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.
Also, automatically assigning tickets to agents saves managers or leads a lot of time. Besides, they can also manually assign tickets directly to agents if needed 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 actions on a ticket when it satisfies certain conditions. The system automatically creates a ticket and assigns it to an agent. Also, it triggers an email of acknowledgement to be sent to the requester. Receiving acknowledgement satisfies the customers and the auto-send saves the agent time.
Benefits of automated ticket assignment to your workflow:
- Since a help desk keeps track of the availability of agents, it can avoid assigning tickets to an unavailable agent.
- It improves response time.
- It prevents agents from cherry-picking tickets.
- Emails for acknowledgement and feedback are automatically sent, reducing customers’ wait time and agents’ work.
Refer to this article for more information about Ticket Automation.
3. Frame a ticket escalation structure
Generally, customer service can require teamwork to resolve customer issues effectively. Sometimes, you need other agents to step in when assigned agents are unavailable or unable to handle a problem.
For a well-balanced help desk workflow, you need to have a solid ticket escalation framework in place.
Ticket escalations occur for two reasons: due to a lack of knowledge or skills, or due to tickets requiring a manager’s attention or approval. While these escalations may be required sometimes, the goal is to handle as many tickets as possible without escalation.
To make your escalation procedure better for tickets:
- Train your workforce to fill knowledge gaps and improve their skills.
- 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.
4. 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. So, all your technical people being able to answer every issue from memory 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. Thus, you can improve the workflow process for your support system.
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 or change in the knowledge base.
5. Organize your ticketing process
To achieve a streamlined workflow for the ticketing system, you should organize it.
Each member of the team can participate. 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. This ensures the most important tasks receive prompt attention. If too many are assigned to one agent, they can be manually redistributed.
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 raises. You can also use tags to categorize customers and mark the high-priority tickets. In addition, 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 fixed. Agents can select a relationship between tickets, like parent-child, etc., 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. In addition, you can include internal notes that only other agents will see. They can be reminders to other agents or some points to note 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. So, having canned responses to copy from can save your agents time. To learn more, refer to this blog on canned responses.
Conclusion
In summary, set realistic SLAs and automate manual operations to optimize the workflow of your ticketing system. 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 the best 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.
