+1-877-904-4227 
Help Desk Ticketing System
Learn how to resolve support tickets faster and boost customer satisfaction.
Learn how to resolve support tickets faster and boost customer satisfaction.
If you provide customer support, you likely need a help desk ticketing system that helps you manage, organize and execute on customer support tickets. A common challenge faced by customer support teams is an inability to respond to support cases in a timely manner, which has a detrimental impact on customer satisfaction and increases attrition. A help desk ticketing system can help you address that challenge. Here is an overview of what such a system does and the ways that it can help your customer support team work more efficiently and effectively.
At a basic level, a help desk ticketing system helps you automate the time consuming, repetitive administrative tasks associated with managing customer support cases. It works off a centralized customer relationship management (CRM) database that stores all of a contact’s information—often with a 360-degree contact view, such as provided by Agile CRM. Incoming support tickets are entered into the system and can be labeled with certain attributes that help with ticket organization. Let’s drill down into some of the common features to shed light on how you can benefit from a help desk ticketing system.
Some help desk ticketing systems provide help desk groups, which let you give customers a dedicated support rep that’s familiar with the kinds of issues that customer might face—read about Agile CRM’s help desk groups. This helps to close tickets faster, which eases the burden of a ticket backlog on reps and results in more satisfied customers who stay loyal to your brand.
Help desk ticketing systems often provide the ability to leverage service level agreements, which help you set clear expectations for your support team and your customers, providing clarity around what customers can expect and giving your support team goals to work toward. You can use them to track performance against KPIs and analyze results to continuously improve your customer support. Learn more about service level agreements.
Most help desk ticketing systems are able to leverage a knowledge base, which provides answers to commonly-faced issues customers have. In this way, customers can often solve their own issues by viewing knowledge base articles, which reduces that number of incoming tickets. Some systems even offer customers the ability to provide feedback on articles, helping you refine your knowledge base as you grow.
Many support tickets come in as emails from customers—it’s a common aspect of help desk email ticketing. If your system provides the ability to send canned responses, your support team can create a number of pre-drafted responses to common issues faced by customers. When a ticket comes in through your help desk email ticketing system, your reps can route the canned response to them, which saves loads of time and helps to reduce ticket backlog—one of the things that erodes customer satisfaction the most.
While a solid help desk ticketing system helps you become much more efficient at closing tickets and solving customer issues, if you choose a system that lets you put in place smart workflows to move things through the process faster, you will see an even greater increase in efficiency and customer satisfaction. For example, Agile CRM’s customer support workflows take care of lots of administration around ticketing that would otherwise have to be done manually. When a ticket comes in, it can automatically assign a priority to the ticket, set the status of the ticket, and route it to the appropriate customer support rep. In addition to boosting efficiency, workflows also ensure accurate and consistent processing of tickets every time.
Your customer support team is on the front line at all times, trying to keep customers happy and successful using your product. It’s a tough job, and a very important one. That’s why you need to keep your finger on the pulse of your team’s performance. Help desk reporting allows you to do this by providing analytics around key metrics, such as average response time, ticket closure time, and violations of your service level agreements. Maintaining insight into performance is critically important, and it allows you to identify weak links in the process and course correct as needed. See how Agile CRM’s help desk reporting elevates performance.
This is growing in popularity these days, and at this point it’s almost necessary to have this functionality in place if you want to be competitive. The way this works is when someone arrives on your website, a live chat window appears that lets customers address their issues immediately with a live rep. It helps reduce ticket backlog, as often times issues can be resolved in the chat without further investigation. Plus, the younger generation of professional often prefers to communicate this way, as opposed to telephone conversations, which means you’re getting out ahead of the curve.
We’ve covered the primary functionality of a robust help desk ticketing system. We’ve also touched on some of the main benefits one provides. These include increased customer satisfaction, a more efficient customer support team, a reduced help desk ticket backlog, faster ticket resolution, more accurate communication to customers, greater insight into your performance so you can continually improve your results, and more time for each rep to spend giving one-on- one attention to customers who have issues.
Now is the time to look into a help desk ticketing system if you don’t have one. There are tons of options on the market, but not all are created equal, so it’s important to understand your needs and find a solution that meets them. You could spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month on a help desk ticketing system. Or, you could look into more affordable options—like Agile CRM which provides this functionality for free. And when you consider that Agile CRM also comes with full CRM, sales and marketing automation features, it’s hard to not investigate Agile CRM as an option.
