Many consumer experience trends show customers have higher expectations from customer support teams. They expect exceptional experience, faster resolution, and quick responses. To meet and exceed these expectations and ensure stronger connections, you need to know how to create better customer support tickets to help your customers resolve their problems as quickly as possible.
Tips for Creating Better Customer Support Tickets
To diagnose and fix problems, your customer support team requires detailed information to reproduce the same error a customer received and ultimately help them resolve the issue. Therefore, the more specific a customer is when detailing a problem, the faster your customer support team can resolve their issue.
An excellent and informative customer support ticket should answer several questions. Here are several questions your support team should ask and answer when handling support tickets:
1. What Have They Tried Already to Fix Their Issue?
When creating customer support tickets, one crucial step is to ask the customer to detail any actions to correct or circumvent the problem. For instance, when dealing with software or apps, ask the customer whether they tried to close their browser? Did they restart their computer? Did they change their password? Or did they run a virus scan?
Getting a detailed description of what they have already done to fix their issue prevents any redundant actions, such as asking them to perform a virus scan when they’ve already done it. Eliminating redundant actions can also result in faster resolution because it reduces the list of potential causes of problems by directing the customer down the right path to resolution.
2. How Can You Prioritize Customer Tickets?
Angus Yang notes, “prioritize your time on customers that will have the biggest impact in the future.”
All customer support tickets should be answered quickly and accurately because most of your customers’ experience depends on the type of service they receive and how fast they get help. Unfortunately, this significantly increases pressure on your customer support agents because they need to answer loads of customer tickets in time without losing authenticity.
For support teams, the criteria for prioritization can vary based on the subject matter, technicality of the issue, and many other things. Here are three strategies that can help you prioritize your support tickets better:
- Employ FIFO or the “pick & choose” approach. Based on the size of your support team and the volume of tickets, you can determine whether to apply the FIFO method or pick customer tickets based on urgency or technicality. Typically, the FIFO method is based on chronology. However, if your team is small and has loads of unresolved tickets to handle, prioritize the tickets based on urgency.
- Customer category. For every brand, all customers should be equal. However, when prioritizing customer tickets, the priority is to help paid customers before customer support agents move on to non-paying customers. Often, companies also have another vital customer category above paying and non-paying customers: VIP customers. The priority will keep shifting based on which customer category has many unanswered tickets. Under this prioritization strategy, your support team can still consider the problem’s urgency. Often, prioritization shifts accordingly.
- Optimize the reassign process. Often, support teams get tickets with problems they can’t resolve. Here, your reassign process should be well-optimized. If you’re using manual means to forward such support tickets to other teams, such as your tech support team, then there’ll be gaps, and some tickets might go unanswered. The best way to handle this issue is to leverage an automated reassigning process with keyword tags. With an automated reassigning process, you only need to use keyword tags such as “technical issues” and send customer tickets with such tags to your tech support team. This strategy saves time and also reduces wait times.
3. What Workflow Allow for a Quick Diagnosis and Fix?
We’ve talked about ways you and your team can create better customer tickets and how you can respond to customers’ queries faster. Now, it’s time to organize all your procedures and processes into workflows that can help you diagnose and fix customer problems quickly. For instance, a few paragraphs and visual flowcharts can help you do your job just fine. Next, clarify who handles what, and where you should escalate support tickets to.
After this extensive process, you should have comprehensive documentation for ticket queue management. This rich documentation should be readily accessible all the time, but also every customer support rep must go through initial training. Customer support managers should also bypass tickets-by-ticket protocols when unusual situations happen. However, in normal circumstances, they should lead by example by applying and enforcing workflows that allow for quick diagnosis and resolution of customer issues.
Examples of Best Customer Support Ticketing Systems
A ticketing system is software that customer support reps use to create, manage, and maintain lists of customer tickets. A great ticketing system should provide the following functions:
- Ticket categorization, tagging, and routing
- Omnichannel customer support
- Monitoring and measurement of important customer support metrics
- Integrations
- Automation
- Live chat
- Knowledge base management
Ticketing systems are also referred to as ticketing support, ticketing software, or helpdesk ticketing system. The best ticketing systems include:
1. Zendesk
This ticketing software seamlessly connects your customer support reps with your clients across all channels. Apart from increased customer satisfaction, Zendesk is also a dream for chat agents who want to get a detailed view of the entire customer journey to stop looking for information and start helping customers.
Plus, Zendesk’s centralized hub makes it easier for customer support managers and admins to monitor their team’s KPIs, performance metrics, and service level agreements (SLAs) across the customer journey.
Zendesk sets your support team up with what they need to offer personalized customer service. With its omnichannel ticket support system, your team will have information about every client they interact with via an organized workflow. Armed with context about each customer, your customer support team can promptly resolve support queries and offer an exceptional customer experience across the board.
Beyond providing a centralized hub that fosters seamless workflow, Zendesk makes it easier for your agents to identify problems as soon as they occur. This ticketing system assigns unique statuses and reference numbers to help your reps manage and prioritize their workflows. Your team can also use Zendesk to set up alerts for customer tickets they haven’t responded to on time to stay on track.
2. Freshdesk
Freshdesk’s ease of use, enterprise-level automation, and affordable pricing make it an ideal choice for small businesses. Its star feature is the shared inbox, making it easier for customer support teams to categorize, assign, and collaborate on customer support tickets. In addition, the ticketing system automatically converts voicemail, email, and social media support queries into tickets and prioritizes and assigns them to the right customer support reps.
This ticketing software also leverages automation to help customer support teams eliminate repetitive tasks and focus on urgent customer tickets and those that need more attention. With this system, you can send your customers automatic email notifications depending on their ticket status, set tickets to escalate automatically to the next stage based on event and time triggers, and perform several actions on tickets with a single click. Freshdesk also has the agent collision detection feature to prevent more than one customer support rep from handling the same ticket.
Its paid plans integrate other platforms, including Zoho CRM, QuickBooks, FreshBooks, live chat apps, Google apps, OneDrive, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey, and Mailchimp.
How You Can Use Zight (formerly CloudApp) to Close Customer Tickets 3X Faster
With Zight (formerly CloudApp), you can cut to the chase by directing your clients to what you need them to see, all while keeping sensitive information private. You can:
- Use GIFs to create follow-along tutorials.
- Use annotated screen recordings with arrows, text boxes, lines, and circles to emphasize important details.
- Create webcam screen recordings to guide your customers through the solutions to their issues.
Zight (formerly CloudApp) is a revolutionary customer support software that can help your team respond to customers quickly, with high-quality content that offers detailed answers to their questions. This app can also help you cut back-and-forth conversations over email, leaving no room for miscommunication and confusion. So with Zight (formerly CloudApp), you can offer your customers easy-to-understand content that gives them the clarity and help they need, so they can go back to enjoying using your product.
To learn how to use Zight (formerly CloudApp) to close customer tickets 3X faster, visit Zight (formerly CloudApp)’s customer support page to read more.
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