Consistent Customer Service: the Ticketing System

The growing number of channels customers now have at their disposal, while often convenient for the customer, can make it difficult to provide customers with consistent service. For years, many companies only allowed their customers to create support requests via web forms, which often forced customers to fill in required fields such as their account number or service plan. This helped ensure the responding support agent had all the necessary context to provide support but was not always a great experience for the customer. Some prefer the immediacy of a phone call or brevity of a Tweet. Now agents are forced to respond to support requests that come in a variety of formats, many of which lack the requisite contextual data.

Furthermore, the different formats can’t “speak” to each other, so if a customer emails a complaint to a company, then publically Tweets the complaint, it’s entirely possible that two separate agents will respond to the customer without either one realizing it. Additionally, that data is never captured for further use, making it impossible for support agents to reference previous service issues with that customer.

A ticketing system allows customers to contact a company via their preferred channel, but also ensures support agents are setup for success with a consistent view into the customers—including contextual data and previous support requests—all within a highly organized system that tracks all of this relevant data over time, allowing support teams to learn and improve the support they provide.

A support ticket system allows support teams to streamline customer communications in a single ticket, all within an organized workflow. This leads to quicker resolution of individual support requests. And if the same customer reaches out again, the support agent will automatically have access to important information about that customer, including when they last requested support, what the issue was, how it was resolved, and even how long the customer had to wait for a resolution.

A support ticket system also enables the collection of data which can be used to improve a company’s support team as a whole. The reason for this is a support ticket system allows for an issue tracking system, which gives visibility to into the big picture of a support team. So if a specific issue is constantly being raised by multiple customers, the support team can be made aware of the issue and take actions like bug tracking the problem for engineers or providing an efficient self-service solution with help desk software.

Any company that does not use a support ticket system should begin doing so immediately. Until that happens:

• Customer support requests created via channels the company isn’t tracking will go unnoticed.
• Customer data will go untracked, making it difficult to provide efficient or customized support. In fact, every time a customer contacts a company, from the company’s point of view, it will seem like their first interaction with the customer. That’s not how relationships are built!
• Bug tracking will be mostly impossible.