No doubt it can be complicated choosing a help desk ticketing system. It’s easy to get confused and overwhelmed when there are so many features and options to take into account.
Taking the optimal system selection process step by step makes it easier for everyone to stay on track and eventually access the tools they need to execute their jobs.
Therefore, before getting into how you can choose the best ticketing system, let’s go through the basics of a ticketing system.
What Is a Help Desk Ticketing System?
A help desk ticketing system is a piece of software that logs client complaints so your support staff can address them quickly. It provides a team with the practical resources they require to carry out daily tasks, such as assisting customers and working together on projects.
The hub of your support staff should ideally be your help desk. It provides your team with the resources they need to carry out their duties effectively, from handling support requests to working together with other team members, resulting in happy clients.
The following are just a few of the additional features that many help desk ticketing systems offer:
- Knowledge base management
- Omnichannel support
- Automation
- Categorization, ticket routing, and tagging
- Live chat
- Integrations
- Tracking and measurement
The Process of IT Ticketing System
An IT help desk ticketing system converts all end-user issues from various sources into tickets. As support team members work to resolve each ticket, the system monitors its progress. Interaction with a user and any internal discussions about the problem between staff members are documented as a ticket. For instance, multiple incidents might be connected to a company’s email server being down. Each user’s incident ticket receives a status update when the primary issue is resolved.
Tickets are not simply erased when they are closed by customer service representatives. Tickets include useful information that can help you understand your customers and business. IT ticketing programs can slice data in several ways to show performance metrics and provide reports.
Benefits of Help Desk Ticketing Systems
Help desk ticketing software collects, records, and organizes incoming tickets to expedite problem-solving. Any competent customer service team, even a team of one, must start with basic ticketing software. The help desk ticketing system offers the following five significant benefits:
Improved Customer Services
Excellent customer service is priceless. However, delivering excellent customer service involves a lot of low-value, time-consuming operations, like finding information, directing calls, sorting tickets, and more.
Ticketing systems allow agents to focus more of their time on high-value activities like training and customer service by automating the entire or a portion of these tasks. With fewer agents working for your company and improved productivity, prices can be drastically reduced without necessarily affecting service quality.
Improve Customers Interaction
Customers are less likely to become irritated when they don’t have to repeat themselves. Additionally, customer service agents can personalize their services to move things along even further.
These agents are given the tools to engage in more fruitful, informed dialogues with clients, thanks to complete audit trails of every conversation (even when it involves numerous channels). For instance, a retail customer representative may view a customer’s sizing information and assist them in choosing the appropriate fit for an outfit if they had access to data on previous purchases.
Transparent Customer Care Services
There is no centralized data source that you can use to evaluate the performance of customer service without a ticket support system in place. Certainly, if you have data on customer retention, you could use it. However, this data can also be influenced by other factors. Furthermore, while directly polling clients may yield useful information, you normally require more precise, quantitative data to track and evaluate service performance.
Opportunities to Learn and Grow Over Time
Ticketing systems serve as both a learning tool and a central repository for client issues and your support team’s responses to those issues. Managers can use it to identify which common challenges can be improved with fresh knowledge base articles. Alternatively, they can pinpoint specific scenarios that customer care agents are having trouble managing, which may point to areas that require more training. Good help desk ticketing software makes it possible for you to take advantage of countless possibilities to learn and develop over time.
Good Internal Communication
The all-too-common “hot potato” call is one of the worst customer service experiences. This occurs when a customer calls in and is transferred from agent to agent, who are all scrambling to find a solution. Poor internal communication, which a help desk ticketing system helps to minimize or remove, is usually the underlying factor behind this.
When Should I Invest in a Help Desk Ticketing System?
It’s time to think about switching to a help desk ticketing system if your daily efforts on a support team are not converting to a great experience for your customers and employees. High staff turnover and low customer satisfaction can happen when there is a real discrepancy between a company’s goals and a support team’s capacity to provide excellent customer service.
Most small customer service teams begin with a basic, affordable option, such as an email distribution list. Up until your company begins to scale, everything appears to work great. However, one help request that gets overlooked is all it takes for you to lose the confidence of a significant client. A help desk is essential in this situation. Your team will actually have a chance to improve people’s experiences if you can provide them with the insights, transparency, accountability, and collaborative space they need to do so.
Here are several signs that your team is prepared for a novel strategy:
- Support tickets continue to be overlooked.
- Duplicate responses are sent to the same ticket by team members.
- You have no idea who has been tackling a challenging support issue.
- You lack support-driven insights into your client’s level of satisfaction.
- Morale is low, and your top support staff members are dissatisfied with the current setup.
- Team feedback is totally subjective and unrelated to metrics.
- Real-time collaboration with access to tickets is not possible.
- Your boss expects you to improve or make the client’s experience more consistent.
Kindly be informed that the selection process shouldn’t merely involve a review of the technologies your customer service team currently uses and what they will require in the future. It ought to thoroughly evaluate the overall support strategy’s successes and failures.
Features of Ticketing Tools
The best IT ticketing software consists of a set of features that are easy to set up and use. Keep in mind that these features have a wide range of sophistication levels.
Here are six different features to search for and assess as you get ready to compare various online ticketing systems.
- Knowledge Base Management
The truth is that a lot of customers are perfectly capable of serving themselves and sometimes prefer to do so. Knowledge base systems assist customers in doing this by summarizing and archiving vast volumes of data in linked, searchable databases.
By simultaneously enhancing client self-service and lowering the number of tickets that need to be handled by your agents, these systems improve your customer care ticket system. Additionally, knowledge bases give customer service representatives access to a searchable database where they may quickly identify resources for clients.
- Omnichannel Support
Numerous channels, including live chat, phone, email, and social media, are used by customers to contact your business. The knowledge gained from these interactions is often dispersed among teams and tools in many organizations. This leads the customer to repeat themselves each time they communicate with a customer care representative. However, omnichannel support enables agents to provide customer service in the channels that they prefer by combining customer conversations and profiles into a shared inbox.
- Automation
Providing the necessary information to the right person at the right time is what defines “excellent” customer service. Moreover, the logistics of getting information from various systems to the right people can quickly get complicated, even in a small business. Automating processes like delivering pre-written responses, allocating tickets, gathering pertinent customer data, and more can be quite effective in this regard.
Automation aids in increasing the happiness, engagement, and productivity of customer service professionals by removing or drastically lowering the amount of time they must spend on tedious, repetitive tasks. Not to mention that automating these processes decreases the possibility of human error.
- Categorization, ticket routing, and tagging
Just centralizing customer support communications is insufficient in a bigger company. Customer service representatives need to quickly determine a ticket’s status and the necessary actions, such as whether to forward the ticket to another agent or handle it themselves, to offer the best possible customer care.
Because of this, help desk ticketing systems now allow users to tag and categorize new tickets. You now have the option to swiftly route support tickets to the support agents who are most equipped to address them using these categories and tags.
- Tracking and Measurement
Quick problem-solving and minimal back-and-forth are hallmarks of effective customer service departments. However, that is impossible without analytics. You can create reports based on the information you’re trying to grasp with helpdesk ticketing system analytics. For instance, to assist in making decisions about where to allocate additional resources, you can measure the length of time your team spends on specific challenges.
- Integration
Businesses typically utilize many databases and tools to use and manage crucial customer data. Data silos are produced as a result. Help Desk ticketing systems aid in the dismantling of these silos through a wide range of integrations.
A single, streamlined user experience is hence much simpler to develop. Additionally, it avoids the confusing and frequently stressful experience customer service representatives face when they are required to try and make sense of various sources of conflicting information while interacting with impatient clients.
- Workforce Management Systems
Success in providing excellent customer service entails more than just your customer service representative’s one-on-one interactions with clients. It also involves the unseen decisions that facilitate such valued relationships. Workforce management features operate in conjunction with ticketing systems to help you plan seasonal staffing and make real-time changes to your service operation.
How to Maximize Your Ticketing System
If you’re not careful about how it’s implemented, it is impossible to expect that help desk ticketing software will provide all the benefits it promises. You can use the following six steps to make sure your software is properly implemented:
- Document your goals
You may think it’s obvious, but properly outlining your objectives and clarifying your purpose will help you gain support from your team and other stakeholders. It will also keep everyone on task. It will also maintain everyone’s attention. You can always refer back to your goals in order to move forward if you find yourself in a rut while implementing your plan. Common objectives include reducing costs, raising client retention, and reducing the average resolution time.
- Define your service level agreement (SLA)
Your SLA specifies what your team and/or customers can expect in terms of the services your support staff offers, your service channels, business hours, and your anticipated response times. You can establish external SLAs with clients or internal SLAs to set expectations within the company. Having one is crucial because it will enable you to plan the specifics of implementing your ticketing software, regardless of how you want to go about it.
- Assign roles and responsibilities
Clearly defined roles and responsibilities lay the foundation for managing user rights in your ticketing system. No agent, administrator, or manager should be unsure of their obligations. You can define who does what and when by designating roles and responsibilities. Additionally, you encourage more effective communication by making it clear who to contact in case team members have questions.
- Define your ticketing workflows
Setting up your ticketing processes is crucial to the successful implementation of your software because ticket routing is the primary function of your IT ticketing system. In this stage, you specify how inquiries will be handled depending on the time they are received, the channel(s) involved, the kind of the query, the client who made the inquiry, and any other factors pertinent to your business.
- Test your help desk ticketing system
It doesn’t take much for a client to switch from your business to a competitor. Consider taking the time to test your system after it has been set up. Submit several types of tickets while putting yourself in your customers’ shoes. Observe any obstacles or dead ends as you move through the procedure. The system shouldn’t be deployed live until it has undergone extensive testing.
The Best Help Desk Ticketing System Today
The top 6 help desk ticketing systems are listed below for you to add to your shortlist.
Zoho Desk
Zoho Desk is very helpful to many Zoho users because it integrates with other Zoho products without any difficulty. Smaller support teams who require a platform they can expand on might consider Zoho Desk. However, Zoho’s CRM serves companies of all sizes and across all sectors. Hence, implementing and utilizing Zoho Desk will be easy if you’ve used other Zoho products.
FreshDesk
With the aid of Freshdesk, companies can fully harness the potential of AI to automate and streamline their customer service. Its artificial intelligence (AI), known as “Freddy,” can help your team by closing complete tickets and recommending related knowledge base articles to agents.
LiveChat
LiveChat provides a comprehensive customer help desk platform to assist both customers and sales teams. You can manage several lines of communication, including SMS, applications, emails, chat, and the website itself, from a single dashboard, in addition to being able to add chat widgets to your website.
Moreover, LiveChat provides connections for a wide range of additional popular software programs, including HubSpot, Shopify, Salesforce, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.
Zendesk
Using Zendesk, customer service teams can manage discussions on numerous platforms. Support staff members have access to tags for issues, the option to respond via a specific channel, priority setting, interaction tracking, and more.
Additionally, the central hub’s pre-built dashboards and customer reports make it simple for managers and administrators to monitor the success of their teams.
Help Scout
With more than 500 users, Help Scout can assist large teams. Modern companies in the recruiting and technology sectors are among their long list of clients. Even so, Help Scout may be a perfect choice for small teams that require strong, customizable ticket management tools.
Help Scout offers strong reporting capabilities and integrated knowledge bases in addition to a ticketing system. Furthermore, you shouldn’t have any trouble integrating the system with your current customer channels and databases because of its strong API and wide range of interfaces.
HubSpot Service Hub
HubSpot is another software that offers a wide range of possibilities for teams in charge of sales, marketing, and customer support. Support agents may automate workflows, offer personalized service across a variety of service channels, and prioritize tickets in addition to offering comprehensive helpdesk capability. Businesses of all sizes in almost every industry can discover a package that meets their needs since HubSpot offers a wide range of expertly crafted packages.
Time to Make a Choice
In order to choose the right help desk ticketing system, you must first determine your needs. For instance, a free tool like email or social media might be the more cost-effective choice for someone who only wants to contact a select group of people casually. But if you’re using it for professional or business purposes, especially if there are a lot of people involved, you should consider looking at help desk software options.
