Ticket deflection is not a bad word
Ticket deflection, when done right, is an excellent way to provide better customer support. However customer self-service is not a one-size-fits-all solution - to do it right you must understand your customer needs and provide the tools and channels they are looking for. In this article from Smart Customer Service, John Ragsdale discusses the results from the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA)'s social media survey including the art of customer self-service and best practices for B2B support organizations.
He discusses best practices for customer self-service which include tailoring options to meet your customers' needs, using FAQs and auto-suggestions (aka Ticket Deflection) to address customer issues quickly, and incorporating multi-media into your resources.
One of the points he makes really stood out, as it is incredibly simple yet very often overlooked in customer support software. He says "The first step to improving self-service is to adopt an intelligent search platform that can search all content repositories...with a single query." At TeamSupport we understand that knowledge about your customers and the interactions you have with them are stored in a variety of places - although this is critical information it is often stored in several separate systems that do not communicate with each other, and this can leave both front line customer support agents and managers in the dark. TeamSupport tracks and stores data not just about tickets like other support systems, but also detailed notes about your customers, their products, and even physical inventory that they have on site. Our intelligent search capability looks through all of this information and even searches side conversations held in our Water Cooler to help you find the information you need to both understand your customers better and to solve their problems. In turn, this will help you better serve your customers and provide an exceptional customer experience.
To read the full article, click here.
If you are interested in learning more, check out TeamSupport's resources on customer self-service and improving customer support:
Omnichannel Customer Self-Service
Leverage Your Team's Collective Knowledge for Better Customer Support
