The customer raises a support ticket to the provider to resolve any issues that may have occurred while using the product/ service offered. The business interaction needs the business to document as per the ITIL service management framework.
It enables tracking progress and for any other business references. Required solutions and specific data are part of the support ticket description that the IT department determines.
Once assigned to an executive, he/she will be responsible for the entire process until its closure. As per the ITIL framework, each ticket requires individual priority based on its urgency and impact.
Each priority level of the ticket is associated with a timeline that ensures the order and resolution time to close the ticket. Every customer and their query is essential. However, the SLA, subscription plan, and a few other factors contribute to the Prioritization of the ticket.
Let us look at a few best practices that enable businesses to manage support ticket prioritization better
1 . Severity based Prioritization
Resolving the ticket based on the urgency of the issue is one of the best methods of Prioritization.
The support team can create a worksheet with ticket information, a description of the issues, contact information, and a quick summary of how the issue affects the customer deliverables. This grading method is beneficial for customer reps to attend to the problem and valuable when there are many tickets to be resolved. Most business has a twelve hours tur-around time for the first reply.
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While this is an excellent method to prioritize, the downside of this method is that the customer support reps may fail to understand the severity.
There is a possibility that the customer may not have logged the issue urgency properly or the description may have been misunderstood by the support team result in a delay. It may not be a regular occurrence. However, there is a possibility.
a . Customer-based Prioritization
There are customers, and then there are high paying customers. Prioritizing support tickets based on free, paid, and VIP customers. The first preference is always the VIP customer, then the paid customers, and then the free customers.
Prioritization based on the customer type can sometimes enable the ticket to moved further on an urgent basis. However, the preferences may change based on technical criticality.
However, it may or may not be in the order mentioned above. While all customers should get the same treatment, organizations prioritize the customer query based on the plan (VIP, Paid, and free).
While this works well for the businesses, there is a possibility of the free subscription customer waiting for too long to get the ticket resolved. It may lead to the customer waiting for long, getting frustrated, and moving on to a different provider.
b. FIFO or Choose
The first in, First out method ensures the first one to log the ticket get the priority. While this works great for small businesses, large enterprises may like to choose based on the urgency method.
Chronology is the key when it comes to the First in, First Out method. The advantage of this method is that it cuts down backlogs and ensures each and everyone is resolved based on the timeline of the tickets raised.
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The FIFO method works best for small teams with piles of tickets and a relatively small team to attend. The choice based on the priority/technicality method works well for large enterprises with large teams of technical support personnel available to attend to the issues.
Most of the tickets are prioritized based on the level of technical issue/ urgency level.
2 . Prioritization based on account type
The customer support representatives cannot find a solution for all the tickets. Some of the tickets require the technical support team to resolve them. Errors are bound to happen when tickets are routed manually to a technical support representative.
However, CRM integrated service automation enables to achieve the same effortlessly.
Customer support reps can use tags and move all the tickets with the particular label to the tech team to resolve. This method helps save time and improves efficiency.
a . Respond even when there is no resolution
Understandably, the tickets pile up at times, and the team does not have the resources to attend all of them.
However, it would be a great idea to respond to the customer first. Doing this assures the customer that their issue is under assessment. This way, a little more time to address the query is available.
Automation plays a vital role in this method. Personalized ticket responses are efficient and save a lot of time. However, this is possible only if CRM integration is available for service automation.
b . Optimizing custom Fields
Each ticketing system has a form, and each form has a few basic fields like contact details. Customization of the forms and adding more fields to capture some crucial information.
These additional fields are helpful to capture relevant information like a description of the issue, whether it is recurring, and how much it is affecting the deliverables at the customer end.
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The case description helps the customer care personnel better understand the problem, prioritize, and resolve it accordingly.
Conclusion
Customers are the king of every business. Resolving customer issues is an essential part of the business.
As per a survey, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for an excellent customer experience. Whether through following the best practices or choosing from a combination of the methods mentioned above.
However, ensuring the customer support reps offer prompt resolutions to those issues of the customers is essential. Support ticket prioritization is crucial to ensure all the customers are equally prioritized.
While each business works differently, one method of support ticket prioritization may not work well for all.
It would be best to experiment with the most feasible methods, collect data, and analyze them before settling down on the most suitable method.
