Designed to help you streamline support requests and improve customer support efficiency by providing staff with tools they need to deliver fast, effective and measurable support.
The basic features that you would require in any such tool is the ability to create, update and list multiple tickets and view if their status is open, on hold or closed.
The Six Benefits of Using a Ticketing System
While it can be argued that in the digital world, e-mail is more personable than a support ticket, you may want to consider the following:
- SPAM
- Organisation
- Redundancy
- Accountability and Training
- Collaboration
- Time Management and Trending
SPAM filters – GREAT for your personal e-mail accounts, however if your settings are too high, you can miss out on legitimate e-mails.
When a customer constantly experiences lack of response to emails which have taken time and effort during a busy working day, your business is the loser, meanwhile you bear the brunt of negative feedback on a forum, receive a chargeback, and/or lose a customer, not because of what you did but what you did not do. Conversely, you receive an e-mail and deal with the issues only to have your time and effort gobbled up by their SPAM filter; once again the customer thinks that they have been ignored. With a support ticketing system the ticket is right there housing their replies as well as yours.
Organisation – you check your e-mail in the morning and are ready to reply to their queries, something major goes down, the e-mails start flying and the morning e-mails get buried down the line. The intention is to go back, however keeping up with what is coming in can mean not getting back to those e-mails until considerably later, thereby gaining you a reputation for lack of service. The beauty of a support ticketing system is that until the tickets are answered they are like little red flags with a countdown timer on them,you will immediately know which have been dealt with and which are pending.
Redundancy - you develop a rapport with a client over an issue in January, your computer crashes in March, then in June the customer is requests the information again, this could be a large problem. Many times when the computer crashes the e-mail is gone and you have to start from scratch, however with a ticketing system the ticket can be pulled up to retrieve all relevant and valuable information.
Accountability and Training – A support ticketing system provides accountability, log on and you can see exactly who said what and when. Should one of your staff is give out misinformation, the ticketing system becomes an excellent training tool, responses can be recalled and used to show where the mistake was made and how things could have been done more effectively.
Collaboration – If you have multiple staff members working on the accounts, by giving them access to the support system, they can read the posts of previous staffers and know exactly what that client is being told, no “he said she said”.
Time Management and Trending - Support ticketing systems provide the facilityof entering the amount of time worked for each ticket enabling you to evaluate time and efficiency of each transaction, for example you may decide that product XYZ requires more support. There is also the ability to look at the customer tickets to see if there is a theme among them,* i.e. you have 45 tickets and of that forty-five, 37 are asking where a certain bonus is, this could possibly be addressed in their welcome e-mail, In this way you will have significantly shortened the support time required for that product. An FAQ can also be developed regarding common questions.
Along with the tangible benefits of saving time by providing professional expertise to your customers, you can count on the benefit of peace of mind. Unanswered emails from customers accumulating in your inbox can make you lose focus and become pressured. By using only emails for customer support, you attract spammers, also when you do get reply to each customer’s email, there is no guarantee that the replies will not get blocked by spam filters. All such frustrations can be avoided by installing support ticket software. These are just a few things to consider when handling your support. Ticketing systems may cost more than plain e-mail service, but worth every cent.
Contact Favourites Multimedia to find out more about adding this feature to your business.