Support Ticket Management: How to Manage Customer Support Tickets
The success of business-to-business (B2B) customer support relies primarily on how efficiently agents handle incoming customer support tickets. Your organization could have the best, brightest, and most courteous support employees, but the job's not getting done if they can't address incoming queries.
Agents could fall behind on tickets for any number of reasons. Increasing workloads make it harder for reps to manage their daily tasks. Your agents could be using a ticketing system that simply collects customer issues but doesn't organize them, or perhaps customer correspondence gets lost among a slew of incoming emails. If any of these sound familiar or if your agents aren't responding to customers in a timely, organized fashion, it's time to switch to a B2B customer support software solution with support ticket management features.
"Today's B2B environment demands omnichannel support."
Collect all customer inquiries in one location
Today's B2B environment demands omnichannel support, but it's difficult for businesses to keep track of the various ways customers contact them. Support requests come through email, via web-based chat, over the phone, and even from social media. Having to track and cross-check each channel individually is time consuming, and it's easy for agents to get lost.
Omnichannel customer support solutions gather all types of correspondence into one application so agents can see everything they need without having to hop back and forth between email, social, and other channels. The software can also automatically generate tickets so agents don't have to manually create them by searching through each channel. For example, customer support software can enable the transfer of a chat conversation to a ticket should an issue become too complex to handle over chat, or if the customer has to leave the chat but would still like to have the issue resolved.
Notify agents of recent and pending tickets
Regardless of how a ticket is created, customer support software automatically notifies agents of a new customer inquiry. With ticket automation, it is a tool that automatically routes tickets based on specific criteria, the correct agents are instantly contacted whenever a new ticket is assigned to them or to a group they are a member of. If a ticket sits for too long without a reply, the software can notify agents so no queries accidentally go unanswered.
"Ticket automation is customizable, so you can use conditions unique to your business."
Ticket automation is customizable, so you can use conditions unique to your business. You can choose to notify agents of tickets pending a response after 24 hours, 72 hours, or however long you wish.
Organize tickets in logical, custom ways
Use customer support software to group agents into various teams. These groups can be categorized based on agent experience, function (i.e.: bugs, training, general support), customer industry, or whatever works best for your business. For instance, if your business sells customer support software (like TeamSupport) your customers can range from veterinary software to entertainment lighting to education software. You can group your agents based on their expertise and knowledge of how your software meets the various needs of customers in each industry.
Incoming tickets can be assigned to groups as opposed to individual reps. What's more, assigning a ticket can be automated. The software assigns tickets to specific groups based on keywords in the customer query. All members of the group are contacted when a new ticket arrives, and any one of them can take charge and add that ticket to their individual queue. These groups can also communicate internally within the software to solve tickets together and more efficiently.
Sometimes multiple tickets will be received asking for a response to a similar issue. These related tickets can also be grouped into categories where one ticket acts as the parent and the rest are considered children. In this situation, closing the parent ticket automatically closes the rest. This way, agents don't have to create the same response for every individual ticket.
Finally, ticket queues give agents a brief overview of all of their tickets in one easily accessible screen.You can sort these tickets by severity, status, date modified, or any custom feature you choose. This way, reps get an instant understanding of what needs their attention and can prioritize as needed.
Remaining organized with tickets is the key to helping your agents maintain their workload and respond to every customer request. Customer support software for B2B organizations lets you coordinate tickets in logical, customizable ways that suit the needs of your business.
