Benefits of a Customer Service Ticketing System

Learn how a customer service ticketing system helps increase loyalty, customer retention and satisfaction, & helps differentiate your company & increase profitability.

What's in this article?

Customer service ticketing systems are core features in a cloud-based customer service application. Having a CS ticketing system helps increase loyalty, customer retention and satisfaction. A high-quality, well-managed customer service department and customer support ticketing system will help differentiate your company and increase profitability.

Some companies use only an email inbox or a home-grown software application to take care of their most critical business assets — revenue-generating customers. Regrettably, both options have many drawbacks. Of course, customers prefer to send emails since that is quick and easy. Customers also want to call an organization and speak with a live person, or open a chat from the website or mobile app.

Homegrown customer support ticketing systems always lack features, since there are never enough developer/coding resources to keep them updated to meet the evolving needs of the business. Companies grow and technology gets more complex, so email inboxes and homegrown applications can never scale. Also, these options lack excellent reporting.

The following are many benefits of a customer service ticketing system:

Customer service ticketing systems increase loyalty, satisfaction, and profitability

Using a CS ticketing system can be a very significant differentiator. If customers are very happy, then they will keep buying your products and services and tell their friends about how happy they are. You'll create an enthusiastic group of unpaid evangelists, which is the best marketing an organization could ever hope for. The best way to retain customers is to quickly solve their problems, and technology can make this easier. Many technologies such as knowledge bases, when populated with known customer issues and solutions, can speed ticket resolution process time and rate. During evenings and weekends, when it's not possible to speak with a human, customers may not mind using a website self-service portal to search a well-curated and organized knowledge base.

Ticketing software boosts customer service morale and productivity

It's very difficult working in a customer service department since it can be overly stressful, and it's a complex job with the phones ringing nonstop. It can be very frustrating for your customer service reps, and the industry is plagued with very high turnover, which is costly. Reps also need to know and understand all the company's products and services, which frequently change and in some industries are often rushed out the door to generate revenue. This can be quite a challenge. Frustrated customers want a lot of hand holding, and your reps can end up feeling a lot of pressure. An easy-to-setup-and-use customer support ticketing system will be a valuable and critical tool for the department and will boost morale and productivity.

Easy CS ticket triage

Customer service rep productivity will soar if there are only a few clicks required to log customer support tickets and quickly get all of the information to the support personnel who are most capable of resolving the issue. The common methods of customer contact are email, phone, mobile app, a self-help portal, live chat, online web form or social media. Allowing your customers to use whatever channel they prefer increases customer satisfaction. Conversations in the customer ticketing system should be in a single unified communication thread, collecting all the relevant information and history. A customer support ticketing system eliminates the task of hunting through email inboxes or using a poorly developed homegrown application.

CS tickets generate data, which drive future decision making

When the customer service department can generate actionable KPI metrics, it will help reduce call volume, which is an important customer service best practice. A standard format should be used to categorize all customer support tickets to maximize the benefit of reporting and analytics. When configuring a customer support ticketing system, the categorization scheme should be approved by the VP of customer service, as it's the foundation for reporting analytics that can be used for data-driven decision making. The easy edit of the category scheme is important since products and services continuously change.

Automate customer support workflows

The customer service ticketing system should be so easy to use, so when agents are speaking with customers, they are logging conversations in real time. Phone conversations, emails or any other contact should be logged into customer support tickets, which will make agents more productive. Automated customer support workflows with actions that are automatically triggered help speed the creating and resolution of customer support tickets.

Watch videos about Giva's cloud customer service ticketing system.

Collect problems/resolutions in a consistent format for a knowledge base

A customer support ticketing system can be used to collect problems and resolutions on the fly while servicing customers, and then quickly curated into a knowledge base. Leveraging knowledge base articles for common and unique issues is a key part of any customer service ticketing system. The knowledge base can be used by the entire department to assist in resolving customer support tickets.

Establish ticket priorities and allocate resources

Level 1 reps should be assigned to customer support tickets with less complexity. People with deep product experience should be assigned tickets that match their unique skills. There are several methods by which customer service tickets can be prioritized. The customer service best practices to prioritize tickets is based on the impact the issue has on your customer's revenue. The second most popular way is to prioritize based on how large or a significant the customer is with respect to your company's revenue. Another way to prioritize tickets is based upon the level of service entitlement that the customer pays for, such as gold, silver, or bronze-level support. With a ticket management system, you don't need a bulky spreadsheet to build a ticket priority matrix. See how CS ticketing works.

Reporting and service level management (SLAs)

The best customer support ticketing systems allow assigning Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to each ticket, which are time to respond and time to resolve goals. It's a best practice to get agreement with your customers on a set of respond and resolve SLAs. Providing excellent customer service is based upon mutual communication and expectation setting between service providers and customers. An escalation feature is also very helpful, so if an SLA is breached, then other people are promptly notified.

Deep-dive reporting analytics is an important feature of any customer service ticketing system. Reporting allows supervisors and senior level personnel to carefully monitor the pulse of customer interactions using metrics like customer satisfaction, SLA performance, root cause analysis, call volume and type of customer support tickets, etc.

Actionable information presented on dashboards

Customer Support Ticketing System Dashboard

Group productivity can be enhanced with a custom dashboard that provides a prioritized global view of the most important customer support tickets. With a single uniformed view, reps and supervisors have visibility to "hot" issues so they can make quick decisions.

Root cause analysis decreases customer support ticket volume

Using a ticketing system for root cause analysis helps determine the root cause of tickets so systemic change can be made to eliminate these problems and help decrease call frequency and increase customer satisfaction and retention. The customer support organization can monitor the pulse of customers and be the hub of critical information that's shared with other departments.

Access to a self-service portal for 24/7 support, any time, any day

With a self-service portal, customers create and check on the status of their own customer support tickets. If they are under a deadline, then they may be able to solve their own "how to" questions with a knowledge base. Giving people access to their customer support tickets frees up reps' time. These tools can also help decrease the workload, so reps can focus on high ROI activities, such as curating and maintaining knowledge base articles.

Automatic alerts and updates

Customer ticketing systems help facilitate consistent communications with customized email and text alerts that help reps and customers stay aligned. This helps ease customers' concerns that their support tickets have been overlooked.

Lower cost of supporting customers

Customer service ticketing systems with automation helps companies decrease the costs of providing excellent customer service and can also increase rep job satisfaction and decrease turnover. This ultimately leads to more loyal customers and higher profitability. The use of customer service ticketing systems by nonprofit organizations can help save on operation costs so most of their funds can be used to achieve their mission of delivering social benefits.

Customer service ticketing systems build better products

Ticketing software can find relationships among data to facilitate the troubleshooting process. This also creates time for reps to add more value to the company by focusing on synthesizing insights gained from speaking with customers all day. These insights can help a company enhance current and create completely new products and services based on skillfully listening to feedback from customers. This valuable information is difficult to obtain, even with primary market research, which is expensive.

Customer service ticketing systems allocate highly-specialized resources

Your customer's product or service "how to" questions can be answered by people who are the respective domain experts. Most companies have so many different products and services that no one rep could be an expert. Using "triage" among reps is a good best practice to help customer service teams quickly solve problems together or get them quickly assigned to the appropriate person with the right skills. Working as a team and using a triage approach, the customer service department is the first and primary contact with customers. If they cannot solve the problem, then they escalate it to the next level, which may be a different department.

Customer support ticketing systems can be differentiators

Any company can use customer service technology and automation as a differentiator to gain and keep more customers. Today, the bar is so low for customer service, so people notice when they receive even decent service. They are astounded when they receive excellent service. What can an outstanding customer service ticketing system do for your organization? Learn more how Giva can make your organization a customer service powerhouse.

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