You get a support call escalated to you one minute, your boss tells you to call a different customer the next, and a few minutes later three new tickets hit your inbox, all with totally different issues.
How do you and your team stay organized with your tickets when they’re flying in from everywhere?!
If all customer problems came in through a single channel, such as email, it would make organizing and keeping track of your tickets so much easier. This is common in the B2C (business-to-consumer) world, where agents focus on simple, repetitive issues.
But instead, in the B2B (business-to-business) industry, you’ve got tickets arriving via email, phone, chat, colleagues, and more. It can be overwhelming for even a seasoned support professional.
Don’t worry! Here’s our “Ticket Management for Dummies” guide and why a sophisticated ticket management strategy truly matters to the bottom line of your business.
– Begin by tracking the types of issues you receive – If you’re not monitoring the types of tickets your company handles, start now. This is the first step in creating your ticket management plan. Are you receiving password resets by phone? System reboot requests through email? Bug reports via chat? You won’t know how to address the problems unless you have a clear picture of the issues your team deals with each day.
– Next, evaluate the source of these issues for your company – Obviously, the tickets coming in are from customers, but which ones and what roles? Are they coming in from entry level employees, managers, or executives? Are they spread out among your customer base or do most involve a handful of companies? Learning who is creating the tickets can let you know what areas within your customer base to focus on with your support efforts.
– Choose a ticket management solution that fits your type and source – Once you have data on what kind of tickets you’re getting and who they’re from, it’s time to find the right ticket management technology that matches the needs of your customer base. If you have a high volume of basic tickets from the general population, a B2C ticket management solution may be your choice. If there’s a lot of business contacts in your ticket queue, in particular with manager or above titles, then a B2B ticket management solution is clearly the best option.
– Create automation rules within the solution so tickets reach the right person – Now that you have a solution in place, it’s time to solve those tickets way more efficiently than in the past! The first step is to create ticket automation rules so tickets go immediately to the agents who can solve them the fastest. For example, automation rules can be made so all password resets go to one agent and all tickets for a top customer go straight to an agent that works with them exclusively.
– Put fail safes in place so tickets aren’t missed or forgotten – Nothing is worse than when a customer feels ignored. With the right ticket management technology, this never happens. Avoid letting tickets slip through the cracks by implementing SLAs and reminders directly into your solution. This automatically lets your agents know when you’re about to violate an SLA or when a customer needs a response.
– Define key reporting metrics to evaluate and refine your process – Once your team is all set up and customer relationships are improving, it’s time to take a step back and look at all the data provided by a leading ticket management solution. Looking at information such as average ticket close time, total number of tickets, and agent workload, you’ll be able to make better decisions about your business that will improve both employee morale and customer satisfaction.
We hope this guide helped you get started on the path of managing your tickets more efficiently. Are you a B2B company that’s looking for a ticket management system? Give TeamSupport a chance with our free trial!