In a perfect world, your support team would be able to resolve every customer issue during the initial touchpoint stage. Unfortunately, this will never be the case. Issues with your products and service are inevitable, often requiring escalation to other departments. The good news is, this doesn’t have to be a negative thing. There are ways to create a seamless ticketing process which will allow for faster resolution times and less stress put on your support team.
Much of this can be achieved by using features provided by configurable help desk software. You’ll also need to implement internal guidelines depending on your support infrastructure. However, there are some techniques that just about any B2B entity will benefit from. Let’s go over a few.
Define the Escalation Process
In order to create a smoother ticketing process, you need to establish guidelines. More specifically, you need to define the types of situations that warrant ticket escalation. Every B2B organization is different, so it’s important to look at the capability of your support team along with your clients’ demands. You’ll also need to consider what issues inhibit product success.
Once you’ve defined the escalation process, create detailed documentation for your support agents to review. While this process should be clearly defined, it should also leave room for improvisation during more pressing situations. This documentation should become one of the imperative assets within your internal knowledge base.
Ticket Automation
If your agents are monitoring emails for client issues, there’s a big chance a problem will fall through the cracks. In order to provide a highly responsive support experience for your customers, you must implement ticket automation. This allows a client to submit a ticket simply by sending an email. This is where your analysis of the escalation process comes into play.
With ticket automation functionality, a client’s email is automatically transformed into a ticket that includes all the pertinent information concerning the issue. This means your agents won’t get sidetracked by creating tickets themselves. The system will alert your support team when a ticket was created, deliver any attachments sent by the client, and log the ticket in the support history. Not only will this help streamline the ticket submission process, it will also help with ticket tracking.
Ensure Agents Make Thorough Updates to Tickets
Ticket automation and other tools such as customizable complaint management software are both imperative assets when trying to develop a smoother issue resolution process. However, you still need to ensure your support agents are taking the right steps to make future problems easier to address. This involves making detailed updates to tickets.
If an agent needs to assign a ticket to another rep or development team, it’s critical they update the ticket with any additional information needed. Any confusion will result in delays to the resolution process. Before the ticket is closed out, agents need to detail what measures were taken to resolve the issue. This will help other agents resolve future problems.
PhaseWare provides ticketing solutions along with configurable help desk software to ensure your support team has everything they need to provide a high-quality customer experience. For more information, contact us today.