Did you know that 56% of people worldwide have stopped using a company because of bad customer service?
Now, imagine the ramifications of having hundreds of irate customers in your backed-up support ticket queue.
Statistics like that make it essential for your business to have excellent ticket management. But what if you have an overwhelming ticket backlog? How can you possibly fix it?
Keep reading to find out how you can conquer your support ticket queue.
1. Create a Clear Customer Support Workflow
A clear workflow gets everyone on the same page. Without it, every representative could solve issues as they see fit. The resulting disorganization can reflect badly on your business.
A clear workflow also speeds up the ticket resolution process. When you create a standardized workflow, you’re going to design it with efficiency in mind. When all your representatives are using this efficient workflow, you’ll find tickets have faster resolution times.
2. Use Skill-Based Ticket Routing
This technique matches a customer’s ticket with a group of representatives who are best equipped to handle the customer’s specific issue. This can either be automated or done manually (though automation is obviously faster).
Skill-based ticket routing ensures that the customer’s issue is being addressed by someone knowledgeable on the subject.
This technique also means your representatives don’t need to know how to solve every customer issue. This also can save your business time and money in the training process.
3. Provide a Historical View of the Ticket
Nothing is more frustrating to customers than having to repeat their problem to multiple representatives. This can happen when your representatives can’t access the customer’s communication history with customer support.
Help desk ticketing systems can track information like this by saving all communication between a customer and representatives in a ticket. This information keeps the resolution process moving forward and prevents customer frustration.
4. Make Customer Support 24/7
When customer support is only available for a limited amount of time in a single time zone, a ticket backlog can develop overnight because there’s no one to chip away at the queue.
Having 24/7 customer support means there’s always someone moving tickets along so that representatives working the busy hours aren’t overwhelmed.
5. Automate What You Can
Help desk ticketing systems are great at automating a variety of processes.
They can automate ticket prioritization so that the most urgent issues are taken care of first. They also allow you to create “canned responses.” These are message templates your representative can quickly send to a customer.
Ticketing systems can also automate responses, like when a ticket is first created or when a customer hasn’t received an update in a few hours.
6. Create a Knowledge Base
This can work wonders for reducing your support ticket volume. Using a help desk ticketing system, your representatives can begin to identify what are the most frequently asked questions. You can create a knowledge base using this information that’s relevant to your customers.
The knowledge base can prevent customers from needing to contact customer support. It also ensures that your representatives aren’t wasting their time answering simple questions.
Instead, they can focus on more complex issues that customers wouldn’t be able to figure out on their own.
7. Create an Online Forum
An online forum is similar to creating a knowledge base, except that your customers will mainly be the ones answering each other’s questions.
While it is helpful to have customers answering each other’s questions, it’s still a good idea to have a representative step in and answer questions if no one can provide a good answer or if a query has sat unanswered for a while.
8. Support Your Customers Proactively
Depending on what your business is, your representatives can schedule calls with your customers. During these calls, the customer can ask any questions they might have about the product or service your business provided (or is providing) them.
This proactive approach has two benefits.
First, it prevents a support ticket queue build-up by preemptively answering customer questions.
Second, it provides the customer with a high-quality customer service experience that can leave them more likely to recommend your business to friends and colleagues.
9. Utilize Your Data
If you’re using a help desk ticketing system, you most likely have access to data about your representative’s performance. Things like average response time and average resolution time are picked up by the system, giving you insight into potential issues.
You can use this information to identify which areas your business could stand to improve in. You can then provide additional training in certain areas to improve the overall performance of your representative team.
10. Provide Quality Training From the Start
While providing supplemental training can be helpful, you might not have as much of a need for it if you focus on your representatives’ initial training.
A well-trained representative can process tickets faster, provide high-quality customer service, and save you time when they don’t need to go through any additional training.
Improve Your Ticket Management
By keeping all these tips in mind, you’ll be able to improve your ticket management and provide higher-quality service to your customers.
Many of the tips are achieved by using a help desk ticketing system. If you don’t already have one, you should look into Tikit. This ticketing system is integrated into Microsoft Teams, making it the perfect fit if your business already uses that communication platform.
Request a demo today and see how it could help your business!
