Customer experience is at the crux of every business. One unhappy customer can cause tremendous damage if not appropriately managed. Companies must stay digital if they want to survive, and customer service is an integral part of it.
The ticket resolution time of a customer query plays a vital role in making a customer happy or unhappy.
Forrester’s research says that up to 45% of the consumers in the USA would abandon an online transaction if their queries go unanswered.
Ticket resolution time is one of the KPI that impacts the satisfaction level of a customer. No matter who the customer is and their queries, the need for speedy resolutions is the key.
If a customer does not respond to their problem at the right time, he/she may switch to a competitor. Let us look at a few simple tricks to ensure a customer gets a good experience and a reduced ticket resolution time.
What is Time to Resolution?
Time to resolution means the average amount of time taken to resolve a customer query/ ticket.
The entire customer interaction process can be great, and a longer time to resolution may still lead to a bad customer experience.
While there are several ways of curtailing the meant time to resolve, a few tips and tricks may go a long way in offering an excellent customer experience.
1 . Automation
Automated responses and chatbots are helpful to manage repetitive customer queries. Chatbots and customer service representatives can help resolve questions through live chats. Automation reduces human error.
Automating the workflow sends alerts on overdue tickets, creation of tickets, and priority customers raise tickets.
2. Ticket Resolution Time
We all have been through the excruciatingly long waiting time to get our issues resolved. Bad experiences make us walk away from the brand and opt for better service.
However, there could be a wide range of reasons for the long waiting time to resolve tickets. Assignment of a ticket might be a reason. An auto-assignment rule helps to assign tickets based on the agents’ availability enables a good customer experience.
A help desk software allows customer representatives to receive real-time notifications to not miss out on customer responses. Some customer queries require technical experts to respond, and a lack of internal communication can leave a customer waiting for long with no real solution to their issues.
A delay from the customers during resolving and a lack of data maintenance in a centralized platform may require customer service representatives to go back and forth looking for information and resulting in a longer ticket resolution time.
3. Canned responses
Multiple customers can come up with the same queries, and this may lead to repetitive work. Adding canned responses to resolve a ticket may be helpful to manage multiple customer queries in a shorter ticket resolution time.
Canned responses help solve tickets faster so that customer service representatives can prioritize more critical questions and respond.
4. Role clarity for response teams
The customer response teams are the front-end teams that interact with the customers. While it does seem like an easy job, things can get very ambiguous for the response team regarding roles and responsibilities.
Too many to-do things and ongoing customer queries can get overwhelming and lead to confusion. Establishing clear roles and responsibilities is helpful and inefficient.
5. Automation of repetitive queries
Automation reduces the tedious process and enables the customer service representatives to concentrate on critical issues. Ticket assignment, due date changing, and many other repetitive steps can be managed best through automation and do not require representatives to work.
Automation also helps to cut the ticket resolution time. Condition-based triggering of a variety of categories helps to manage time, effort, and cost-efficiently and effectively.
6. Ticket categorization
SLA varies based on the priority and type of the ticket. The CSR team responds to tickets based on their severity. Categorizing tickets enable better organization, improves workload distribution, and helps to set realistic targets for the CSR team.
Categorizing tickets also help the CSR team to move them to different stages like on hold or pending for review, thereby informing all parties involved.
7. Offering Self-service Options
Automation is increasing the quality of service. Digitalization has enabled the reduction of human interaction and encourages customers to solve their issues rather than waiting on a lengthy customer executive call.
A knowledge library consisting of FAQs and community support groups enables customers to read through the details, troubleshoot their issues, and resolve them by themselves.
It is an excellent option since it reduces the ticket resolution time and enables customer support representatives to prioritize serious queries.
8. SLA Management to Avoid Breaches
SLA Management enables the CSR teams to manage customer expectations and stay ahead to ensure consistent performance.
SLA’s enable to manage resolution time and check on the other parameters involved in the process that may reduce ticket resolution time.
SLA helps measure parameters like time taken for first response, time-lapse between responses, ticket assignment, and ticket resolution.
9. Reporting and Analytics
Analytics and reporting help track any issues and streamline them to enhance customer experience and reduce ticket resolution time.
Analytics can also help to track details like agent performances, problem areas, and many other parameters to improve efficiency in the overall process.
10. Real-time collaboration
Real-time collaborations enable the CSR teams to reduce their time on various platforms to verify the information.
Efficient operations, shorter ticket resolution time, and a streamlined process are a few advantages of real-time collaboration.
11. Customer service software
Implementing customer service software enables customer service reps to manage all the customer data on a single platform, manage requests, and configure workflow for repetitive tasks.
Conclusion
Minimizing the ticket resolution time is crucial for a positive customer experience. Automating workflows for repetitive processes, self-servicing options, canned responses, SLA management, and categorization of tickets are a great way to curb lengthy ticket resolution time.
As per Metric Net’s global benchmarking database, an average incident ticket resolution time is 8.85 business hours.
Establishing the roles and responsibilities of a customer service team member, using live chats, using the software as a single platform, and utilizing reports and analytics are a few other tricks that can help reduce the ticket resolution time.
A ticketing software enables automating and streamlining workflows, improving ticket resolution time, and improving the overall business process.
