Tracking the open tickets and ensuring on-time closure is one of the most challenging parts of every business. While monitoring the turnaround time has become more accessible with ticketing software, reducing the total number of open tickets remains a challenge in most companies.
The process of reducing the number of open tickets is not complex. However, it is vital to equip the team with the right set of tools that help them to monitor and control the factors leading to it in real-time.
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Therefore, let us look at a few basic steps that help companies find the solution to their high number of open tickets.
1 . Evaluation of the current status(open tickets)
Taking stock of all the open tickets, including those suspended without traction, helps to understand the situation better. Moreover, doing so helps bring about a few rules that can help improve the number to a satisfactory level, if not a miraculous “zero.”
2. Track the number of open tickets per day
Tracking the average of closed and opened tickets for a typical week and the number of open tickets for specific days enables you to identify the incoming load of tickets and the kind of team support required to work on them.
It helps manage load balancing within the team and helps to have a reasonable expectation from the team, making it easy to track the underlying issues.
3. Closure of older tickets
Most companies have a significant number of old open tickets that have become redundant, or the team is yet to find a solution to the issues raised by the customer. In any case, the best way to tackle it would be to close those old tickets with an automated email to the sender stating how it is old and closed.
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They should be opening a new ticket with the issue indicated so that the team can fix it for them at the earliest. Doing so reduces the load and keeps the customer informed about the updates and thereby reduces the overall load of the open tickets.
4. Monitor the open tickets
Setting up a blinker visible to the team shows the number of open tickets in each area of expertise. While the blinker helps each team identify their numbers and ensure they close them on time, thereby avoiding any pile-ups.
The visible number also helps the team identify the pile-ups and look for help if any actions are required.
5. Empower the team
Empowering the team with the right set of tools and classifying the tickets based on competencies helps manage load balancing and ensure the complex situations are well organized with a specialized team so that a pile-up can be curbed right at the beginning before it escalates.
6. Estimate the service time
Tracking the time taken to respond to an open ticket over a week/ month helps understand the average time to respond. A different look at the kind of tickets that received a delayed response helps better understand the support team’s strengths and weaknesses.
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A further step to identify the bottlenecks responsible for the issues and tools and suggestions to overcome them can help reduce the service time.
Identify the problems and find solutions.
Using a ticketing system can help identify the average time taken to close tickets, the average time to respond to tickets, and a few others. This data further helps to find the underlying issues of the system and enables the management to find solutions to them.
7. Prioritization and classification
Prioritizing the open tickets based on the technicality, time since open, criticality, and classifying them based on their complexity are a few ways to ensure they get addressed accordingly, thereby leading to a shorter lead time to respond.
While these basic steps help the team perform better, they may as well not be the only means to improve efficiency.
However, prioritization, classification, identifying the challenges, proper estimation of the service time, providing helpful tools that enable the team to keep a close eye on the open tickets help curb any issues and improve the overall efficiency of the support team.
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