Regardless of what ticketing software system you use and how it operates; itโs critical to manage it properly to ensure itโs helping, not hindering your customer service team. Thus, enabling them to support customers in a quick, efficient, and professional manner. Here are 12 service desk ticketing system best practices and tips you can adopt. By using these, you can enhance your customer support, increase customer satisfaction, and improve your support teamโs performance.

Tips and best practices โ Ticketing system
1. Ensure proper agent training
The effectiveness of your ticket management system largely depends on how well your agents are able to manage the tool. If you are just starting out with ticketing software, proper onboarding and training is essential. Why? To ensure agents can effectively leverage the tool and all of its features. Thus, being able to provide a seamless service experience to customers.
2. Decide how you will prioritize tickets
Depending on the size/type of your business; you might choose to prioritize tickets based either on the order they arrive or urgency. The โfirst-in, first-outโ method is generally preferred by smaller support teams. It can help optimize workflow, provide faster response times, and prevent ticket backlog. However, it lacks flexibility unlike the โpick and chooseโ approach. This approach allows agents to give more attention to customers with tougher or more urgent problems.
3. Use all the automation capabilities
Different ticket management platforms offer varying automation options. Whatever automation capabilities are available with the ticketing software of your choice use them to their full potential. For instance, manage your ticket queue efficiently, eliminate human errors, and ensure tickets are always distributed to the right departments/individuals. In fact, without an automated way to sort and route tickets appropriately; it will take longer to reach proper agents, resulting in longer wait times for customers.

4. Ensure your team isnโt overloaded
Work overload inevitably leads to increased stress, job burnout, poor agent performance. As a result, slower ticket response times, and decreased customer satisfaction. A large volume of backlogged tickets might indicate that your ticket management system needs improvement. Or perhaps your support team isnโt big enough to handle the current workload. As a result, you may need to expand your team by hiring additional manpower.
5. Make the right use of ticket tagging
Another ticketing system best practice is tagging functionality. However, very often, this feature is being underutilized by support teams. Tags are extremely helpful in adding more context to tickets and can greatly assist agents in; identifying and organizing support requests, as well as understanding what drives customer trends. They also help in managing and customizing the workflows of your agents. To get the maximum out of tagging, itโs important to keep tags clear, accurate, well-structured, and consistent.

6. Set and monitor ticket statuses
Any ticket management software allows tracking the progress of tickets and viewing ticket updates on a centralized dashboard. Make sure each ticket is always assigned the right status. Failing to do so may result in a number of issues. For example, tickets going unanswered, priorities arenโt set properly, requests getting lost or neglected, or agents duplicating efforts. That can be confusing for your team members and frustrating for customers.

7. Create canned messages and templates
Drafting individual replies to each ticket is time-consuming and impractical. Create a catalog of templates and canned responses for common queries and situations. It will increase your teamโs efficiency and enable them to provide more customer resolutions in less amount of time. Consumers highly value personalized experience. 63% expect personalization as a standard of service. Thus, the canned responses should be used wisely and customized to recognize each particular customer and their specific problem.

8. Implement Service-Level Agreements (SLAs)
Most of todayโs ticketing software systems come equipped with service-level agreement (SLA) tracking and management capabilities. SLAs lay out an agreement between you and your customers. This function defines response and resolution times customers can expect. Moreover, it helps agents to deliver service targets. Setting SLAs ensures that your customer service team answers each ticket/request. Therefore, handled within a reasonable timeframe. So, customers never wait for too long.

9. Keep records of past tickets
Having an easily accessible library of previous tickets might be helpful for your support team. A lot of times agents receive tickets for issues that theyโve already solved in the past. Thus, being able to refer to those cases can make it easier to handle requests faster. In addition, keeping track of past tickets enables you to spot common problems. You can address these by giving them a higher priority.
10. Enable self-service to cut down ticket queueย
Answering the same questions over and over again is a waste of time and effort for your support team. One of the best practices for a ticketing system to reduce your ticket queue and weed out unnecessary requests by enabling self-service. If your ticket management software provides self-service capabilities; make sure your customers are empowered to address easy-to-solve problems without having to contact your support team directly. Microsoftโs survey actually found that 90% of global consumers expect brands and organizations to offer an online portal for self-service.

11. Track and reward agent performance
Robust ticket management systems usually provide a wide range of reporting and analytics tools. It allows tracking various service metrics such as; ticket volume, number of backlogged tickets, ticket resolution time, first contact resolution, etc. Furthermore, you can also monitor agent performance to see how effective each agent is when responding to and resolving tickets. Thus, being able to identify top-performing agents and reward them accordingly, as well as spot those who need extra coaching/training.

12. Empower your support agents
According to the report by Salesforce; 65% of high-performing service teams say their agents are completely empowered to make customers happy, thatโs 3.4x more than underperformers. Ensure your agents always have easy access to all the customer/product information and tools. They need to resolve tickets quickly and efficiently, thus they need to have the authorization to make their own decisions.
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Frequently asked questions
How can you utilize ticket tagging inside help desk software?
Tags are extremely helpful in adding more context to tickets and can greatly assist agents in; identifying and organizing support requests, as well as understanding what drives customer trends. They also help in managing and customizing the workflows of your agents. To get the maximum out of tagging, itโs important to keep tags clear, accurate, well-structured, and consistent.
Why should you use canned messages in help desk software?
Canned messages will increase your teamโs efficiency and enable them to provide more customer resolutions in less amount of time.
How can you track and reward agent performance?
Robust ticket management systems usually provide a wide range of reporting and analytics tools. It allows tracking various service metrics such as; ticket volume, number of backlogged tickets, ticket resolution time, first contact resolution, etc.
Tidio's chat solution offers surprisingly effective ticketing features, according to reviews. It may not be a dedicated ticketing software, but it offers sufficient features, a great design, and efficient ticketing despite not being the primary focus. With Tidio's ticketing system, users can have a universal inbox, organize tickets with tags, sort tickets with Priorities, switch between ticket owners, and transfer tickets. However, the price for paid plans may not be worth it, and there is a lack of advanced features. Overall, Tidio offers an easy and fast registration process and a well-designed application.
Help desk software is crucial for businesses of all sizes and industries to track and solve customer issues effectively. To improve the performance and quality of customer support, implementing IT help desk best practices is essential. These include selecting the right help desk software, having a single point of contact, automating processes, incorporating Service Level Agreements, creating dedicated support teams, offering a self-service portal, building a comprehensive knowledge base, tracking key metrics, setting up third-party integrations, providing employee training, collecting customer feedback, and taking care of the help desk team.
Ticket management is a process for managing customer problems and requests, commonly used in business. Important principles include treating each ticket and customer individually, designing the help desk based on user experience, using existing best practices, and prioritizing transparency in client communication. LiveAgent's software allows for automatic tracking and conversion of all customer problems into tickets for better management. Proper ticket management is crucial for efficient and productive customer service, including best practices such as agent training, ticket prioritization, automation capabilities, and tracking agent performance. Ticket management systems improve response times, reduce churn, improve productivity, and increase customer satisfaction.
Videos - Ticketing Software Deep Dive
This video discusses the importance of ticketing software in managing customer communication and queries, as well as the benefits of using different features within the live agent dashboard. It also covers topics such as free support ticketing software, free helpdesk ticketing system, Tidio ticketing review, and ticket management systems. Proper ticket management is crucial for efficient and productive customer service, including Best practices such as agent training, ticket prioritization, automation capabilities, and tracking agent performance.