Your issue tracking software is the primary platform through which your customers will interface with your organization, and it is important that you choose a robust and professional issue tracking solution. Strong issue tracking software can help your customers have a more positive experience interacting with your organization, and will help your company or service team better incorporate customer feedback for product, service and process improvements. Here are several factors to consider when buying issue tracking software:
1. Ease of use: Your issue tracking software should make your internal processes easier, not harder. How long will it take to get your organization up and running with the software? And don’t forget to consider the learning curve for your support team. Look for a tool with an intuitive user interface and one that won’t require an extensive training investment.
2. Installation and hosting options: Your security needs, IT resources, and current infrastructure components will have an impact on where your issue tracking software is hosted. Optimally, though, choose a solution that offers both Cloud and on-site hosting options: this will allow you to gain insight into the broadest pool of best practices and have the most options when it is time to install.
3. Integration features: The ability to smoothly work in tangent with your other IT tools is a “must-have†when you are implementing a new software solution. Choosing a solution that offers integrations is vital. At the very minimum, look for a solution that integrates with your current e-mail system. This will streamline communication and help your customer service representatives resolve more cases in less time.
4. Reputable: You want your customers to know and recognize that you are using a professional solution for managing and resolving their concerns. Do your due diligence as you research issue tracking tools: who are their current customers and what are they saying? You want your customers to know and recognize that you care about customer satisfaction and retention–prove it to them with your investment in a strong tracking tool.
5. Analytics & Visual Reporting: The best way to improve your customer satisfaction over time is to look back at the past and evaluate how you can improve in the future. That means your issue tracking tool must have an analytics component to assist with the collection of your support metrics as well as a visual reporting component that will allow your agents and managers to visualy gather an understanding of how the team is performing at any given time.
6. Automated components: You have a team to manage and a customer base to satisfy. That means there is no time to manually assign issues, forward e-mails, and other redundant, time-consuming tasks. Make sure you select an issue tracking software solution that contains automated workflow steps and intelligent automation.
7. Organization: A good issue tracking tool will make it easy for your customer support team to locate the information they need quickly, all while handling numerous support cases.
8. Live chat: You want to make it easy for customers to get in touch with you and for your team to manage those customer contacts directly from your issue tracking tool. Live chat, in addition to solutions for customer and contact management, is an important feature for issue tracking software.
9. Knowledge sharing: A strong search component and robust internal knowledge base for sharing issues and resolutions will speed up resolution times and enable your team to solve more cases with less effort.
10. Customization component: Many of your support processes and workflows may already exist, and you don’t want to reinvent the wheel when you implement a new tool. Ensure that you can customize labels, menus, tasks, and SLAs to match the processes and lingo already in place.
Choosing the right issue tracking solution doesn’t have to be difficult. If you follow our 10 buying tips, you will be on your way to a successful issue tracking system for your business.