Ticket System – What is it? How does it work? Do you need it in your company?

21 June 2023

What is a Ticket System?

A ticket system is an automated customer support tool designed to expedite and streamline the resolution of customer issues. It allows for the automatic tracking of work performed on a particular issue, such as status changes, categories, or priorities, providing customers with visibility into the progress of their problems.

A ticketing system enables quick and efficient resolution of recurring customer problems. “Ticket” typically refers to a pass or permit, but in this context, it represents a customer issue that is assigned a unique number. Each support request is placed in a queue for resolution by the support team.

A ticket system not only prioritizes issues based on their time of submission but also categorizes them according to priority, topic, source of the incident, or communication path through which the issue was reported. It can also organize issues into appropriate folders in email inboxes or external programs used by support agents and even route them to the relevant individuals within the company based on keywords.

How does a help desk ticket system work?

What does the ticketing system include? The client reports an issue (e.g., application error) through a chosen communication channel such as email or SMS, by contacting a customer support representative in the Contact Center via phone, live chat, chatbot, using a contact form on a website, or even through social media. The ticketing system collects cases from all integrated support channels and imports them into one ticket software. Such a “case” is then forwarded to the help desk/service desk/Contact Center department, assigning a unique identification number called a ticket ID.

By having all cases collected in one system, it is easier to track customer contact attempts. The client receives a virtual document that can be configured to integrate with a case management tool, so any changes in the ticket handling process are automatically visible in the ticket management system. This means that whenever an agent updates the status of the handled customer request, the client receives an update from the helpdesk ticket system, showing how their case progressed.

Each service request can be routed through a chosen omnichannel tool that allows organizing and managing tickets in any desired way, such as by topic, date, priority, or the location the case pertains to. This also enables reporting and automatic analysis of the potential error scale over time. The omnichannel ticketing system can also assign tickets to a specific employee who should handle the case as quickly as possible among all the working advisors at that moment.

Who is the ticketing system for?

The help desk ticketing software is suitable for the majority of business needs related to customer support in e-commerce, customer service regardless of the industry. Such as logistics, insurance companies, businesses utilizing CRM systems like SalesForce or engaged in shipping goods and collaborating with courier companies such as UPS ors USPS..

It works great in any company dealing with a large volume of inquiries, such as complaints. E.g. telecommunications service providers, cable TV, utilities providers (gas, electricity, etc.), as it allows for managing, categorizing, and sorting the tickets in any way desired. This enables analysis and obtaining information that can highlight areas requiring improvement.

The system can be used in the company-customer relationship as a tool to ensure data security, increase trust, and customer satisfaction by automatically sending information about changes. This allows the customer to see updates regarding the resolution of their issue and feel that the company is actively engaged in resolving their matter.

It is equally useful in the employer-employee relationship due to the ability to monitor the work of consultants by managers or supervisors. This can be achieved through status changes, efficiency and effectiveness reports, employee working time reports, as well as satisfaction surveys that can be sent to customers after their interaction with an employee. These surveys aim to gather customer feedback on the quality of service provided by the agents and the level of clients’ satisfaction following their interaction with your staff, which will allow for taking action in order to improve customer satisfaction.

The ticketing system software facilitates work in customer service areas such as Contact Centers, enables teamwork on tickets, analysis of KPIs, and ensures data security. The ticketing system helps ensure customer satisfaction, enhances customer experience, and builds their trust. This should be the primary focus of your business.

If you are looking for a system to handle customer or employee support, consider outsourcing your ticketing system. By entrusting the support to an external company like CCIG, you can immediately start the service without wasting time on selecting a system. Check out our outsourcing services.

What features does the support system have?

A comprehensive personalized support system offers the following capabilities.

Collecting cases reported by customers

Receiving cases from all communication channels in one place and the ability to manually register cases (email messages, SMS messages, phone-reported cases, live chat, chatbot, social media, etc.).

It happens that a customer contacts us multiple times through different channels in the hope that their case will be resolved faster. However, they find themselves having to answer the same questions asked by the advisor during each contact attempt, which makes them feel unsupported. Additionally, multiple employees may be simultaneously handling the same case because one received it over the phone, another via email, and yet another through social media.

Ticketing allows for the complete elimination of such situations by enabling the recording of a case from every communication channel and creating a customer account in the system. The consultant who encounters the case as the second person in line will see a complete description of the case in the system, created by the first advisor. This enables them to serve the customer more efficiently, and with the knowledge of the issue at hand, the customer can be confident that their problem has indeed been passed on to the appropriate party and is being resolved.

Queuing of cases

Queueing of cases is very helpful in phone-based interactions, such as in hotline support, as it allows for serving customers in the order they started connecting, from the first to the last. Agents can see how many people are waiting in the queue, which also enables counting the customer support requests that were gathered throughout the day and identifying peak hours. This information helps adjust staffing levels to the incoming call volume throughout the day.

Flexible categorization, sorting, and filtering of cases as needed

For example, by event priority, case submission date, subject, source of origin, or case severity. If we don’t want customers to be served strictly in the order of their ticket number, priority, or loyalty level, the system can be configured in a customized way. We can filter cases based on submission date, the date of the last action taken on the case by a consultant, case resolution time, or the consultants handling the case, location of the incident, and more. In terms of filtering settings, the only limitation is our imagination.

Ability to assign cases to specific individuals based on responsibility

In companies consisting of multiple teams, the Contact Center sometimes needs to assign cases to individuals responsible for specific topics or gather important information. The ability to create groups in the system and transfer cases between these groups makes it much easier than passing information through, for example, direct phone contact. In larger companies with a large number of employees, where consultants cannot know everyone’s name and scope of responsibility, this feature is a significant facilitation.

Customer Panel

This dashboard contains customer data, all reported cases, and the entire customer conversation, thanks to message threading, for example, in email communication. According to the 80/20 rule, 20% of customers generate 80% of profits for a company, and those customers should be given the highest priority. With such information about the customer, we can determine if they are a VIP customer, generating significant revenue, and we should prioritize their service. According to a survey by Microsoft, as many as 75% of customers expect consultants to have access to their previously reported cases. Ticketing systems come in various forms and with multiple available filtering options.

Ability to expand with additional features

The implementation of new modules for communication with both customers and suppliers, as well as modifications to existing ones, is a crucial element in the entire process. As we know, customers are looking for increasingly simple and fast ways to contact us and resolve their issues. Therefore, if you are considering opening a communication channel for customers, such as through Facebook, Messenger, or WhatsApp, the ticketing system that allows such capability.

Additional features

There are many benefits of a ticketing system depending on the plaftorm, but these mainly include:

Omnichannel support: An application that automatically assigns cases to specific consultants and allows for managing cases in a way that minimizes the resolution time as much as possible.
Reporting and real-time event analysis: The ability to generate reports and perform ongoing analysis of events, enabling insights and identifying weaknesses in customer service processes. This allows you to identify what causes the most problems and eliminate any errors.
Technical support in case of program errors: You don’t need an IT team to smoothly implement the program. With the purchase of the program, you receive access to the vendor’s help desk software or service desk whenever you need it.
Full management software implementation and customization according to project needs.
Recording capabilities and the option to purchase storage space for recordings.
Creation and management of consultant schedules, saving costs on separate external scheduling software. This is especially beneficial for larger teams and saves time if you were previously manually arranging your consultants’ schedules.
Tracking and reporting of case resolution time for monitoring progress.
Knowledge bases: A place to store all the information you want to provide to your team, with the ability to create and save articles that your team can access at any time.

These additional features enhance the functionality and customization options of the application, providing a comprehensive solution for efficient customer service management.

Ticketing System Prices

The costs of implementing and maintaining ticketing systems available on the market primarily depend on the capabilities and level of complexity of such systems. Prices can start from 10 USD per license per month, but sometimes you can come across free software. Typically, these are very basic programs, and the price does not include the implementation costs on the side of the software provider, so advanced technical or service options should not be expected from them.

Ticketing solution that offer services such as access to a customer panel, note-taking or document creation for customer inquiries, automated notifications, software implementation, consultant training, technical support in the form of a help desk, the ability to implement a new module for customer communication, customization according to project needs, access to a mobile application, dashboard, reporting, and performance analysis, etc., can cost anywhere 25-150 USD per license per month.

The cost ultimately depends on the requirements of the company. In the market, you can find offers from many companies that provide the implementation of such systems, compare prices, and decide which one best suits your needs. Companies using a ticketing system can benefit from services such as ticket distribution, security module, ticket queuing, IVR configurator, dashboard, wallboard, API access, handling of tickets from a help desk available from 8:00 am to 7:00 pm, call registration, anti-spam policy, account and permission configurator, data export, information about handled tickets, access to a mobile application, or storage space for recordings.

It is also worth considering services from companies offering intuitive programs that present data in a simple and clear manner, such as Jira Service Management, Gartner, Bitrix. The aforementioned programs offer features such as planning by breaking down complex ideas into smaller fragments, team monitoring, full visibility at every level, priority setting, reporting, and automation of support.

If you have doubts about choosing the right system or feel that it does not fully meet your needs, it is worth considering customer service outsourcing at CCIG.

Benefits of Implementing a Ticketing System

Implementing a ticketing system provides several benefits that can positively impact the development of your company, such as improving key performance indicators like efficiency.

The system streamlines the work of your consultants, reduces the handling time of cases, and enhances the handling process for customers. This is achieved through features like communication history, customer data consolidated in a single ticket, access to previous case histories, and customer loyalty levels, especially for e-commerce businesses, online stores, or even brick-and-mortar grocery stores with loyalty programs that register customer cards.

A ticketing system automatically sorts customer messages, improving, automating, and speeding up the support process. It processes data from other systems, allowing employees to access all relevant information regarding a case in one place, including customer data, correspondence history, payments, sources, etc. Some systems also provide knowledge base capabilities, enabling the creation of articles for note-taking, change communication, or instructions. Advisors can refer back to these articles at any time. The knowledge base is also an excellent repository for storing regulations and price lists, particularly if they frequently change.

By automatically updating customers on the progress of their inquiries, the system saves your advisors time that they would otherwise spend writing emails or making phone calls to provide information. Consequently, advisors can focus on addressing the needs of other customers, saving time and reducing costs that would otherwise be allocated to hiring additional staff to ensure fast and high-quality service.

Tracking SLA (Service Level Agreement) parameters is another benefit of having a ticketing system. If you provide services to external companies with predefined conditions for your team, it’s valuable to have real-time monitoring of the fulfillment of those parameters, which a ticketing system can provide. It allows you to monitor metrics such as message deliverability, wait time for connection with an advisor, average wait time for case handling, average customer wait time for problem resolution, number of received and abandoned calls in the queue, and more.

A wallboard is a tool that facilitates the work of managers and advisors. It presents information about the current status of advisors (e.g., on break, logged in, in conversation, waiting for a call), the number of received and queued calls, SLA parameters, interaction information (e.g., phone numbers), call answerability and effectiveness, longest and shortest call and wait times. For advisors, the wallboard can be used to observe the queue and the number of people currently on break. In the case of IVR (Interactive Voice Response) divided helplines, it also indicates the thematic areas with which customers can contact, allowing the advisor to prepare for the conversation before answering the call.

Find out more: Contact Center Outsourcing – Does it Bring Value to Your Company?

Summary

In summary, why should you implement a ticketing system? Here are several benefits:

organizing and streamlining customer support,
managing emails, SMS, and web-based inquiries in an organized manner,
accelerating helpdesk processes and optimizing their costs,
generating reports and ticket analytics,
labeling and categorizing tickets,
one ticketing system for multiple contact channels (email, phone, SMS, website, social media, etc.),
maintaining a history of interactions with customers in the ticketing system,
quick resolution of recurring issues,
wallboard functionality,
lead management,
automation of customer support,
improved efficiency and service quality,
increase in the effectiveness index,
reduction of customer case resolution time by up to 40%,
employee work monitoring capability,
comprehensive knowledge about customers,
identifying weaknesses in company operations and drawing conclusions,
time savings through automated notifications and updates sent directly to involved parties,
prioritization of cases and leads,
minimization of the risk of overlooking customer issues,
customer satisfaction and trust,
tracking SLA parameters,
facilitating company processes.

A ticketing system is a tool enabling your employees to manage customer support requests and their issues from various communication channels in one program. It streamlines the work of your consulting team, reduces issue resolution time, automates your company’s processes, collects necessary data about customers and their issues, generates reports and analyzes team performance, allowing you to draw conclusions, improve, and grow. It optimizes costs, ensures customer satisfaction and trust, positively impacting sales and customer loyalty. It handles all incoming tickets and minimizes the risk of overlooking any of them.

If you are still wondering if these tools help businesses and are unsure if it will work for you, consider scheduling a free program presentation (some programs offer a free trial period of the full version).

It is also worth considering outsourcing a ticketing system. By opting for outsourcing, you have the opportunity to sign an indefinite contract, allowing you to terminate the service at any time if it proves to be insufficient for your needs.