Over the past two decades, the evolution of help desk ticketing systems has been rapid. Here we explore some of the key features to look out for.

Introduced initially to assist help desk professionals solve customer issues, they are now the backbone of multiple help desk teams across the globe. When evaluating help desk systems, be sure to look for the following.

10 Must-Have Features of a Great Help Desk Ticketing System

The best help desk ticketing systems have some or all of the features discussed in this article.

1. Ticket Automation

All help desk ticketing systems should have an automation component because it frees up your customer service staff and allows them to work on other tasks. Ticket automation should remind your employees that a ticket response is due, route tickets to specific users, and much more.

2. Ticket Tags

Ticket tags offer users the ability to organize their tickets and spot common issues amongst customers, which help find pain points. They can also provide direct value by automatically recommending articles or FAQs to customers depending on what tags are designed.

3. Service Level Agreement (SLA) Status Information

Without a help desk ticketing system, employees must gauge based on business policy and personal preference if a ticket is urgent. With an SLA, it’s easier for businesses to prioritize or deprioritize tickets while avoiding service level agreement violations simultaneously.

4. Ticket Templates

Templates are an effective way to simplify one of the most tedious parts of the help desk process. Not all tickets are the same, so the ability to add and create several templates can quicken your response time. You can combine templates for more complicated responses.

5. Ticket Status Options

Not all tickets fall into the “open” and “closed” category; others are in limbo or require further information from a customer or a follow-up. Help desk ticketing systems allow for customizable ticket status options, which can also trigger email responses after a change in status.

6. Individual Ticketing Queues

Many businesses are using the same ticketing queues for all of their responses. Unfortunately, this can bottleneck your response time and increase the time it takes to reply. With individual queues, your employees can organize tickets more effectively, quickening the process.

7. Inventory and Product Association

When a customer sends your help desk a question about an item, oftentimes, they forget to add the item number or an accurate description of the product. Help desk ticketing systems can match up the customer’s purchased product with their ticket, leading to less confusion.

8. Private and Public Response Actions

Not all ticket conversations amongst your staff or customers need to be seen by everyone. With a help desk ticketing system, employees can separate conversations between public and private. When they’re ready to inform the customer, your employee sets the action to “public.”

9. Related Tickets

All help desk employees have had to answer the same question multiple times across multiple mediums. Not only is this frustrating, but it also slows down your team. Help desk ticketing systems can combine similar tickets and reply to them all with one click to save time.

10. Customer Ticket Pages

The more your employees know about your customers, the easier it will be for them to solve their issues. Help desk ticketing systems give users the ability to separate each customer by a number, name, or keyword and show information about their open tickets and satisfaction rating.

If you work in customer service, from time to time your customers will have problems and complaints. Responding in an efficient and timely manner is key to customer satisfaction.

If your business has good customer service, you are much more likely to get new customers, you’re more likely to retain old customers, and they’re more likely to spend money.

That said, if you have a large business, keeping track of all of those questions and problems and your own responses can be a nightmare. After all, seeing as response time is so important, you need to organize communications between customers and service reps.

You need to create some kind of order, so nobody gets left behind or forgotten. One way to ensure satisfactory customer service, besides using a high-quality data collection and customer feedback tool such as Responsely, is to use a ticketing system. Let’s discuss what ticketing systems are, how they work, and their benefits.

What is a Ticketing System?

In essence, a ticketing system is a customer service and management tool. This software or app is used to organize and deal with customer requests, questions, complaints, and any communication between a business and its customers.

Ticketing systems organize customer complaints and questions to make it easier and more efficient for the customer service reps. It’s all about streamlining the customer service experience to create the best possible experience for customers while also making the process easier for businesses.

How do Ticketing Systems Work?

Ticketing systems are relatively simple, which is one of their main attractions for customer service. They work by allowing customers to create a ticket – a file containing the queries or problems they face. More often than not, customers can select from various predetermined questions or problem categories and usually write a little piece detailing the query.

Once this has been done, the customer submits the ticket to the ticketing system. The ticket is shared with both the customer service rep and the customer who submitted the ticket (generally via email). This way, both the service rep and the customer can view the ticket to ensure that no details have been missed or misconstrued.

More often than not, at least with the good ticketing systems, there will also be some form of triage. Triage is a system that dictates the importance of the query, with the most critical questions and issues being put at the front of the list. However, this is not always the case.

Either way, at some point, the customer service rep will begin to work on the issue, and sometimes customers will be informed when the service reps start working on their issue. The open ticket can be used for back-and-forth communication between the service rep and the customer.

The ticketing system will log all communications to alert both parties of such. Once the issue has been resolved, the customer or the service rep (usually the service rep) will close the ticket, thus bringing the process to completion.

The Benefits of Ticketing Systems

There are three main benefits of customer service ticketing systems, so let’s take a quick look.

Organization

The main benefit of ticketing systems in customer service is that of organization. This is a great way to keep track of all customer queries and complaints and organize them to make sense, particularly in terms of response time and when the ticket will be dealt with. Tickets can be prioritized in terms of urgency; the most pressing issues need to be dealt with in a timely fashion.

Accessibility

Another benefit that ticketing systems bring to customer service is accessibility. Ticketing systems keep everything in one place, which means that the customer service rep and the customer have easy access to the tickets and, therefore, all necessary information.

Communication

The other benefit is that ticketing systems make it easier to communicate. Here we mean that it is easier for reps and customers to communicate, but there is more to it than that.

If a ticket needs to go through multiple dispute levels and various people need to be called in to deal with it, a ticketing system allows all involved parties or people to communicate efficiently.

Conclusion

While ticketing systems are not new, they are beneficial, both for customers and businesses alike.

Jamie MacSween of Puzzel shares his thoughts on the consumer switch to email, and why it has become more important in contact centres, as well as how to use automated ticketing to resolve a sharp influx of customer enquiries.

Coronavirus has been a catalyst for change, not least in the contact centre world. Long-standing debates about rising customer expectations, the merits of flexible working and whether to stay on-premise or move to the cloud have come to a head. The pandemic has imposed digital communication between organisations and consumers – something that many were unfamiliar with.

As this digital passage progresses, online activity such as shopping has increased, and with it, an influx of customer service enquiries. As customer behaviour changes, contact centre change has been fast-tracked to deal with a surmountable surge in enquiries as the digital world soars.

Crucially, the pandemic has revealed how organisations that rely on legacy systems and resist transitioning to the cloud have struggled to adapt to increased customer demand and a new contact centre environment where the majority of agents work remotely.

Since Coronavirus hit, there has been a significant uplift in email traffic as a means for customers to communicate with an organisation, with contact centres having, in some cases, switched off voice and moved to other channels in order to manage huge spikes in demand. Email is also the basis for good ticketing systems, the new go-to solution for delivering a seamless customer experience (CX). The other significant benefit is that this technology enables home-working agents to interact professionally with customers as they juggle domestic chores, childcare and pets. After all, dogs cannot be heard barking on email.

As some sense of normality resumes, now is the time to take a closer look at email and ticketing, and what this may look like moving forward:

Five reasons to deploy integrated ticketing in contact centres

1. Reduce customer and agent frustration – when response times are longer than usual, a customer might send four emails relating to the same request in a bid to receive a quicker reply. As a result, contact centre inboxes can escalate from 1,000 to 4,000 emails in a very short space of time – frustrating for agents and for customers alike. Integrated ticketing capabilities help contact centres handle large volumes of emails and tickets. They can track and consolidate multiple messages from the same person, or ticket number, enabling agents to deliver one consistent response to the customer, therefore relieving customer frustrations.

2. Efficiencies for faster service – with increased customer demand potentially putting pressure on the warehouse, your contact centre can rely on the latest ticketing solutions to set and manage customer expectations, which is essential to boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty. Use ticketing to generate automatic responses to communicate the progress and estimated arrival of goods to calm frazzled customers and soothe agent nerves. Develop time-saving automatic bulk announcements, such as when the business is open or closed. Agents can swiftly categorise incoming emails either manually or automatically and use templates to provide customised, efficient responses while accelerating wrap-up and follow-up times.

3. Turn on the lights to deliver unified CX – with all data sitting in the cloud – and linked to automated email and ticketing technology –  agents are well equipped to combine the real-time capabilities of the cloud with integrated ticketing and an easy-to-use agent application. This gives employees complete visibility of all customer interactions and empowers agents to solve both simple and complex customer issues from start to finish and deliver a unified customer experience.

4. Service with a smile – make the most of customisable templates to give customers a highly personalised service. Agents can even add emojis to greetings and messages, adding a human touch to electronic communications and giving customers a welcoming, engaging experience. Modern ticketing solutions are sophisticated enough to identify VIP customers, so that they receive priority treatment. This in turn inspires loyalty, encourages future spend and stimulates revenue growth. They’re also highly scalable, making it easy to add additional features such as new languages. Ticketing is the ideal solution for contact centres with geographically dispersed agents and international customers.

5. Enhanced security and compliance – fast and easy to implement, the latest cloud-based ticketing solutions also allow contact centres to manage any number of emails remotely and securely across a virtualised workforce and multiple locations. Secure data storage aids compliance with important personal privacy legislation, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Using integrated ticketing solutions, agents are able to set and adhere to deletion periods for holding personal data while a clear audit trail of deleted emails helps to demonstrate organisational compliance.

As this surge in demand and shift to online communications continues, email ticketing is a flexible, efficient and satisfying way to interact with customers learning to navigate the digital world, and to deliver top-notch, effortless customer experience.

About the Author

Jamie MacSween is Director of Engagement at Puzzel

Puzzel is a leading cloud-based contact center software provider and was a pioneer in offering integrated customer engagement as an easily-deployed service. Today, the company combines omni-channel technology with artificial intelligence capabilities to provide comprehensive, end-to-end customer interaction solutions in an age of digitization. Puzzel was recognized as a Challenger in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant report for Contact Center as a Service in Western Europe for the fifth consecutive year, reflecting its rapid growth, functional breadth, standards compliance, and commitment to customer service and support. Headquartered in Oslo, Norway, with offices in six European markets including the U.K., Puzzel serves more than 900 customers across 40 countries. For more information, please visit www.puzzel.com.