Managing a ticketing system involves a constant balancing act between customer requests, strategic priorities, and the capabilities of your customer support team. Staying organized and prepared is an absolute must. One effective way to get the most out of your team efforts is to leverage your support desk ticketing system fully. These systems can have a dramatic impact on the cost of your customer support operations. Data collected by BMC indicates that the cost of manually completing a help desk ticket is $22. Plus, automation can handle approximately 22% of tickets with little to no labor cost. That means that your system could handle nearly a quarter of your support request volume. But how?

In this post, we'll take a look at a few best practices that teams are using to take advantage of the many features that their ticketing systems provide. By reviewing these essential considerations with your team, you can ensure that you are getting the most out of your help desk ticketing software.

Have a Clear Prioritization Scheme for Requests

When a customer ticket enters your shared inbox, the last thing you want is for it to sit there for an extended time. Having a clear set of rules for prioritizing, categorizing, and assigning tickets is necessary to make sure that a backlog does not develop. A help desk ticketing software can help make this process easier by allowing you to tag tickets, review the status of all tickets from a single location, and use tools to facilitate team communication. One of the best ways to categorize tickets is by urgency, as this is often a useful filter for determining immediate priorities for the team.

Document Common Solutions for Future Use

As your customer support team completes requests, they'll be in constant communication with customers on a variety of issues. A great way to save time and share knowledge among your team is to capture these solutions in a knowledge base. Nearly any type of document or media can be added to the knowledge base, and it gives your team a resource to review when preparing a customer reply. By integrating your knowledge base with your ticketing system, you can also share it directly with customers through a customer portal and provide access to a variety of other self-service functions.

Use Draft Message Templates When Possible

With a help desk ticketing system, you can easily create templates for frequently used email replies. These may not work in all situations, but they give your support staff a standard set of outlines from which to build their messages. Using templates helps to unify the messaging among support team members and also helps ensure that they do not forget an important piece of information. You can also embed links to your knowledge base within the emails to share helpful documents or articles related to a support request. Templates may take a little time to set up initially, but they are an advantageous way to save effort over time.

Monitor and Make Improvements

There is little value in using a sophisticated software platform if you don't take advantage of the detailed metrics and reporting features that it provides. Since your ticketing system likely acts as the central platform for your management and documentation activities, you can track a number of useful measurements to gauge your effectiveness. Recently, the perspective of the customer has become the most vital aspect of a world-class customer support strategy. As a result, there are some excellent customer experience-related metrics that you may want to track, such as:

• Net tickets
• Ticket volume by support channel
• Support tickets solved
• Wait time
• Ticket distribution
• Individual agent performance

By reviewing metrics directly from your system, you can align your entire team around established improvement goals and give them clear targets.

Leverage Your Software and Automation Tools

An effective ticketing software solution will allow you to customize several settings related to security, appearance, and ticketing management. Since you will have multiple employees and customers accessing the system at different times, it's a good practice to review your security settings and permissions regularly. Regularly reviewing these settings will help you control system access and find better ways to categorize your projects, products, and customers. In addition, you may find ways to automate your ticket routing from within the shared team inbox. Providing self-service access to your knowledge base through a customer portal is also one of the best ways to leverage your software to create a truly engaging ticketing system that adds value for your customers.

A customer service operation may be challenging to manage at times, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. By taking the time to organize your processes and ticket management workflow, you can create an environment that enables your staff while providing clear answers to customers. We hope that some of these best practices can help you find new ways to master your help desk ticketing software system.