Owning a business has so much to it. Undoubtedly, at the end of the day, the revenues are cherishable, but the process of earning these revenues is hectic. You need to take so many things into account to make sure things go smoothly and you gain a lot of satisfied and happy customers.
Making your customers happy is not an easy task. Besides, you need to offer the best products or services at competitive prices and take care of customer service. Great customer service used to come with additional costs, but not anymore. With the help of a good ticketing system, you can ensure all the queries of your consumers are resolved at the earliest. Ticketing systems are vital for businesses of all kinds.
A good ticketing system handles high volumes of consumer requests received from different communication channels. Though, organisations are still not serious about using this effective tool for their consumer service department. It usually happens when they are not aware of why it should be used in the first place, and the benefits it offers.
In this article, we’re breaking it down for business owners to understand the importance of an online ticketing system. We’re highlighting some major benefits that a business gets to obtain by implementing this system.
With no further ado, let’s get started.
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Key Benefits of Implementing a Ticketing System
You may be doing fine with the customer requests through emails, and base level communication software. Give it a thought, what would you do when the volume increases? Hire more people to handle more requests? Does this mean you are planning to invest more resources? How will your revenue increase then?
No human can match the functionality and ability of an online ticketing system. Find more impressive reasons for using an online ticketing system.
All Interactions in One Thread
A ticketing software helps consolidate every interaction with the customer into one thread. In today’s world when there are multiple communication channels available, keeping track of things may become difficult at times. A ticketing system is designed in such a way so that it can handle everything at one place. You will have a unified thread for all communications on one app.
This is why businesses that offer support and products/services through multiple channels opt for a ticketing system. It enables your business to give the freedom of interacting through their favourite channel, to your consumers. Moreover, they can also change platforms while their issues are being catered to.
One ticket will be raised for one customer, and even if the customer interacts with different reps at different times, the entire thread will be saved in one place. This is how an online ticketing system is helping businesses save a lot of their energy and time.
Enhanced Communications with the Consumers
As we discussed, all the interactions are available in one shared location for the entire customer service team to check. A ticket management system makes things easy for both the agent and the customer. They get to communicate better with each other, and will not have to ask for the same information again. A ticket is raised for a customer query and is being emailed to them in their inbox.
They can access the complaint ticket from their inbox and continue interactions with the person responsible for handling their request. In some instances, another agent has to take the query up, and it becomes easy for them to understand. They will have the chat history available to know the discussion and recommend based on where they left the last time.
Furthermore, this helps your business to offer personalised and custom experience to their consumer’s every time they approach you.
Delighting Customers
When you have repeat customers, your business will work wonders in the long run. The major aim of an online ticket software is to make sure that your business has satisfied customers every time they make a purchase. Such software makes the life of customer service reps and the customer itself, easy. Consumers are always after getting their issues resolved at the earliest.
The maximum they wait for a customer service agent to respond is 4-5 hours, and not more than that. They don’t have the patience to wait for a longer time period. An online system helps trach tickets as soon as they are received. Additionally, with it you can update your consumers about the status of their request. Furthermore, if customers get delayed responses, they get frustrated and may not return.
With the help of a platform, you can maintain consistency in customer support, and this is appreciated by the customers. You can reach out to them at the earliest possible and work with them to get it solved. With the right technology, your life gets easy.
Prioritise Requests
With too many requests to handle, you may miss out prioritising which one to deal with first. Fortunately, the online ticket system has the ability of helping prioritise the important requests over less important ones. Though every customer request is important, you need to set them in order to be able to clear them off one by one. For instance, your team should know that it is critical to fix a downed network first and they can reset the password for someone later as well.
The kind of software you plan to buy for your business will make the prioritisation levels vary. You can also set priorities manually, and set rules for some kinds of tickets to get increased in priority itself. This is where your customer support team comes into the picture. They can leverage their experience to decide the potential priority requests that your business may receive.
Some super high priority requests are required to be sent to the senior management as well to keep in loop. Such provisions can be made as well with an online ticket system. The entire team can track a ticket to know the status of a particular ticket and that someone is working on the request.
Avoiding Duplicate Replies
When you have a team to handle customer requests, it often happens that two reps reply to the same query. To avoid such mishaps, you will need an online ticket system. While handling customer requests there are several instances when a customer receives more than one response that too different from your team. This is not only embarrassing for your business, but also makes a customer lose trust in you.
An online ticketing system has a feature that alerts the entire team that someone is already responding to a raised ticket. This way you can ensure that there are no duplicate replies, and that the entire team is on the same page.
Lack of a system will make you lose track of the status of a ticket and also all of its responses. The right system will help maintain transparency throughout. Get one implemented in your business operations and obtain the maximum benefits. The resources in your team will track requests and manage their tasks accordingly.
Keep Customers and Agents Updated
As discussed earlier, customers don’t have much patience to wait for a long time to get their tickets resolved. Though, if they receive status of the query raised, they have the peace of mind that it is being worked on. You need to regularly update your customers as well as the customer service reps about the different stages of a raised ticket.
A ticket after being raised goes through a lifecycle before it is resolved. If customers don’t get a response they start bombarding your customer care team with emails, phone calls and messages. Hence, you should let them know you are already on it. Doing so manually is quite hectic.
Use an online ticketing system to make sure things go smoothly and your reps as well as customers receive updates. Until the ticket is closed, the system will keep your resources on their toes. Agents will get a notification when a new ticket is raised. In the same way, customers get notifications if additional information is required from their end, or when a ticket is closed.
Knowledge Base Helps Reduce Tickets
Consumers often face small issues that don’t require any human intervention. For example, if your customer is looking for information on how to place an order, or about the return policy, they can easily gather this information from the knowledge base. Meaning there is no need to contact a customer service agent.
A ticketing system also works like a self-service support portal that helps reduce the volume of tickets. It has a knowledge base that helps consumers gather basic information about the product and service your business offers.
You will have to build the knowledge base. It means, you can make it as effective and rich as possible. Include case studies, video tutorials, how to articles, and other relevant information. You can also allow your support resources to put on content that they think would be suitable for the knowledge base.
Resolve Tickets Rapidly Through Internal Communication
Delighting customers is a task that needs consideration of the entire team. It is teamwork and so it should be ensured that everyone is on the same page. There is a very famous proverb, “Customer service is not just a department, instead it’s an entire company”. Having said that, a major question arises, how will you make sure that all the departments work together with ease?
A ticketing system helps resolve this issue with internal collaboration features. It has a dashboard where your customer service reps can communicate with each other. If required, they can tag members from the other departments, when they need their expertise on a ticket.
Moreover, internal notes can be used to resolve complex tickets. The notes on the system will be visible only to the reps and not to the customers. For instance, to give updates on the new product launches to a customer, a concern from the product team can be tagged to the ticket.
Automated Processes and Workload Management
The ticketing system offers automation opportunities. The software first gathers all the support re quest from different sources and then automates the ticket creation.
A ticket gets created every time a customer raises a query. The tickets are then distributed and assigned to a support channel of their choice. Automation also makes it easy to prioritise the tickets according to particular set rules and define order in which the tickets are addressed to ensure an efficient and timely resolution.
Operated from Anywhere
With a centralised system, your team can work on the tickets from any part of the world. Such systems are usually cloud based, and so can be operated from anywhere and also from any device. It means, the reps will not have to switch their systems on to check the status of tickets. They can do so from their mobile devices as well.
You will not have to worry about resolving customer queries. With ease of operating from anywhere, no matter the location from where they are working, they can work on tickets. All customer queries will be resolved at the earliest.
Enabling remote access on the system is a great decision. This way, if a manager wants to check the updates of a ticket, he can do so even when the concerned person is not available.
Automating Manual Tasks
Manual management of all customer queries can result in slowing down the process. Furthermore, it will not allow the reps to focus on other tasks that require their attention. One of the great advantages of using a ticketing system is automation of manual tasks. It not only helps streamline workflows, but also helps avoid all human errors that can otherwise occur due to manual work.
The team can save automated response templates for messages and emails as well. Hence, when customers enquire about common issues, the reps will not have to get involved. All they need to do is to edit the template to personalise it and send it over.
The Bottom Line
For organisations that operate in the modern world, customer satisfaction is the key to success. They can achieve this primary goal with the help of an online ticketing system. Several features of such a tool include internal collaboration, automated ticket assignment, feedback surveys, etc. are highly beneficial. If you want for a similar tool for your business, make an informed choice. With an overwhelming choice available, pick one that is suitable for your business. Stay ahead of the competitions and let your reps focus on complex requests!
