What Is, and Why Have, a Customer Service Ticketing System?

Learn why you need a customer service ticketing system & how to set up a customer support department to make happy, "forever" customers!

What's in this article?

What is a customer service ticketing system?

Today, a customer service ticketing system is typically a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application in the cloud which helps organizations maintain and enhance relationships with customers. Giva's customer service ticketing is part of our cloud-based customer service solution, for example. It is a tool to collect and process customer service requests, which are often called "tickets", "cases", or "issues". These tools help your customer service agents resolve consumer problems while maintaining a human touch with them. A customer ticketing system may store a lot of information about consumers so agents can establish rapport. It starts with creating a ticket, but long after the problem is solved, a good customer support ticket system will do much more. For example, sending customer satisfaction surveys after tickets are closed measures your team's performance using reporting analytics and can help with data driven decision making.

What is customer service ticket management?

Customer Support Ticketing System Dashboard

Creating customer support tickets helps carefully track, manage, and resolve problems and issues. The ultimate objective of a customer service ticketing system is to keep consumers happy so they keep buying your products or services.

A good customer support ticketing system will:

Integrate all customer contact points into a single place
Record customer service issues and track progress on tickets
Enable ticket assignment so people with the relevant expertise can quickly respond
Help establish the priority of issues and determine the order addressed
Allow the setting of severity levels for each customer service ticket

Why do I need a customer service ticketing system?

The most important reason to invest in a customer support ticketing system is to keep consumers happy! If they are happy, then they'll keep buying and paying for your products and services. It seems painfully obvious, but apparently, too few business leaders understand this, because excellent customer service these days seems to be rare. When was the last time you had an awesome customer service experience that you wanted to tell a friend about after speaking with your bank, phone or cable company, or an airline?

If consumers keep buying and paying, then an organization can keep paying employees and investing to develop new, exciting, and better products and services. This becomes a virtuous cycle, the flywheel effect, or a positive feedback loop. Forward momentum keeps the feedback loop going strong until something disturbs it.

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

What is the primary purpose of a customer support ticketing system?

If customers are not happy then watch out! Any organization can quickly fall into a death spiral, which is a negative feedback loop. Some young companies take the slow escalator up by earning high customer satisfaction marks, only to take a fast elevator down because they fail to take care of customers as they grow. Everybody should value customers as they value their own paychecks. A paycheck is just consumer money that came out of their pocket and was sent to your company's pocket and then made its way to your pocket. Without happy customers the game is over. We all get to go home, stay home, and find something else to do. In summary, the primary purpose of a customer service ticketing system is to retain customers and make sure they're happy all the time.

Most customer service ticketing software is too difficult to set up and use

Quick Set Up of Customer Support Ticketing System

We've established that it's critically important to care for your customers. So how do you do this? Many people wonder why today's modern customer service ticketing software is not better since the software industry is so mature. Many customer ticketing systems are not easy to use, and they're complex to set up. Unlike the technical people in the IT department, folks working in customer service are typically not tech savvy. They have different skills that are required to work every day with unhappy consumers, so they have some uncommon personality traits, such as infinite patience. They need a customer support ticketing system that's super intuitive to set up without the help of the IT department, and one that's very easy to use every day.

How to set up a customer support department

The first step is to identify a group of people in your organization who have the role of caring for customers and have the right mix of skills personality traits. It doesn't have to be a fancy department with a big budget. All that's required is a team of motivated and great empathetic listeners. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in another person's situation no matter how bad, and be able to feel what they feel. People who can listen with empathy and have excellent oral and written communication skills are the best customer service people. A company can have a high functionality customer support ticketing system, but it's the quality of the people using the ticketing system that makes the difference.

How to make your customers "happy-happy" using a customer ticketing system

We have a saying here at Giva when we talk about our customers...people just like you. We ask each other, "Is this or that customer 'happy-happy'?" We put special emphasis on the word "happy", so we say it twice! A reply might be, "Yes, they're happy-happy...all good", or "No, they're not yet happy-happy...still working on it".

What are the benefits of a customer ticketing system?

Over the long term, to keep customers "happy-happy", your agents using a customer support ticketing system must answer questions and resolve the immediate issues. Also, agents must capture and document how consumers are using your products, including all the ways they want to use them, but are not able to. The customer service ticketing system must capture consumer frustrations and disappointments while using your products. All these nuances are important gold nuggets for the people who build your products.

A customer support ticketing system can help keep customers "forever"

Retaining customers over the long term is critical to thrive. Customer loyalty can be created by excellent customer service experiences. Happy-happy customers tell their friends and colleagues about their experiences, so there's a great opportunity to create product evangelists from customers. All companies should strive to be in the "repeat order taking" business instead of the "sales" business. New customers are great, and the sales team focuses on that goal. However, keeping customers "forever" is the most important job of everybody, and all departments should work together to achieve this goal. It's important to not only document the immediate problem at hand, but also other possible issues behind and related to the problem. An empathetic listener can read between the lines, ask a lot of questions, and add value to the consumer dialogue, which can be useful to enhance and develop new products.

Discover unmet customer needs using a customer ticketing system

Here are some questions to consider:

Are your consumers trying to use your product in a novel way that it's not designed for? What's this use case? Why are they doing this?
What other products could they be using?
Why are they trying to use your product to do this?
Could your product be enhanced to do what they want, and do it well?

All this needs to be discussed and fleshed out with customers and documented in the customer support ticketing system. With this information and great reporting analytics, your company can learn how to quickly evolve your products using primary and direct consumer feedback, which is the gold standard.

Who uses a customer service ticketing system?

Anytime you make a call, send an email, open a chat, or contact a company through social media, you're interacting with a customer service department, and they are probably using a customer support ticketing system. They're going to look you up in their database and open a customer support ticket. They already know information about you, such as what products you purchased, previous times you've contacted them, past issues and their resolutions, and probably even the customer surveys that you completed, etc. A company with a commitment to high customer satisfaction will use all this information, along with an empathetic listener, to help make you "happy-happy"!

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