Ticketing system best practices

Regardless of what ticketing software system you use and how it operates; it’s critical to manage it properly to ensure it’s 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 team’s performance.

Tips and best practices – 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 ‘first-in, first-out’ 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 ‘pick and choose’ 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 isn’t 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 isn’t 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, it’s 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 aren’t 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 team’s 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 today’s 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 they’ve 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 queue 

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. Microsoft’s 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, that’s 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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