The support team’s size, productivity issues, team motivation, retention, and many other challenges are real. However, every business works hard towards giving their customer an excellent experience.
Doing so means that they have to ensure that the customer queries receive resolution at the earliest. While it looks like a straightforward goal, it involves many factors that directly and indirectly affect handling customer queries.
For example, where manual support was tedious, the online ticketing system tremendously cut the human hours of the word. Add to it the bots that have taken over a significant chunk of the response system. As a result, managing support tickets have changed for good.
However, despite automated systems, the support team does a humongous amount of customer interaction, and a pile of support tickets is sure to cause them a lot of stress.
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With support tickets, there are many categories like easy to manage, complex due to technical glitches, multiple issues requiring different stakeholders to resolve, etc.
However, the resultant is increased response time, bad customer experience, incurring heavy cost, a lengthy line of support tickets, trickling revenue, and many others. For customers, it is a time-consuming process with a bad experience, no knowledge of the following steps, and leaves them pessimistic about the brand.
While there are many challenges, it is also vital to understand that a few tips and tricks can help manage your support ticket without any hassles.
1. Triage team
A support team inbox management can be a tedious job. Appointing a team to check the queue for any spam or duplicate conversation and delete them, clean up the inbox, identify the emergency issues, and prioritize the tickets can help reduce the response time.
It also helps to cut down the time spent by each team member in sorting through the queries. Once the primary sorting of the questions occurs, it becomes straightforward for the remaining team members to concentrate on the essential tickets and resolve them.
This triage model helps to cut costs and efforts of the support team tremendously.
2. First-come, first-served vs. VIP treatment
First in, first out is a norm, followed by most support teams. It is one of the easiest ways of prioritizing tickets and works best for smaller teams that consider the first-come, first-serve basis as a prioritization model.
While this top-to-bottom approach helps improve the response time, it lacks flexibility in weighing the urgency of support requests. It means in the first-come, first-serve method, all tickets receive the same treatment.
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However, prioritizing customer queries as per urgency, SLA, considering the value involved, etc., might be a challenge in this method. Irrespective of these issues, the first-come, first-serve basis method helps reduce response time and improve the overall customer experience tremendously.
3. Self-service
In recent times, customers are moving away from the lengthy ticket logging model. They would love to read up and resolve their queries without waiting for a long time on the phone/ interacting with a customer support person.
Apart from this, repetitive issues can be managed through an automated email setup rather than wasting time, effort, and cost by assigning a customer support team member to manage the same sort of issue again and again.
A self-service portal with an option to search the knowledge base set up enables customers to find answers to their queries in the simplest way possible.
4. Identify the root causes
Recurring issues may require a different way of managing them. While setting up a separate team to dig through the root cause is one way of managing it. Identifying the technical reason and fixing it is another way of managing it.
Suggesting improvements to the product team, setting up a knowledge base for customers to fix it without any help, and making permanent changes to the product/ service to avoid them are other ways of finding solutions for the root causes.
5. Assign Users To Companies
All customers are not equal. While some are big-budget clients, a few others ensure to sign up for a stringent SLA. It means, while the company treats all its customers equally, it indeed has to prioritize them on a different basis.
Categorizing them based on a few other factors ensures which ones need to get VIP treatment and which ones do not. It makes team prioritization easy, but it also helps to keep the clients with significant value happy.
6. Automation of Workflows
While automation helps to reduce the time and cost incurred in managing tedious parts of repetitive jobs, it also offers tons of other benefits.
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For example, minimizing human error, ensuring the proper assignment of tickets, easy management of incoming queries, notifying the team about an overdue ticket, and many other benefits make workflow automation beneficial to the customer support teams.
Prioritizing tickets based on criticality, the response time (SLA), and taking actions when violated are a few examples of the wonders that an automated workflow can do.
7. Segmentation of tickets
Segmentation of tickets helps to assign them to the correct department and increases the chances of getting resolved in a much shorter time.
Segmentation of tickets helps to resolve them faster and better. It also helps to generate insights about which kind of queries are getting the highest traction so that it becomes easier to identify the root cause and fix it.
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Segmentation offers tons of data to resolve any issues that the business may have not even known to exist. Segmentation can occur based on the type of client, product, priority, and kind of problem.
Segmentation helps support teams stay organized and offers visibility about the areas of concern that need improvement.
8. Move work to the right team
Not all queries are for the customer support team. Sometimes they are just standard questions about the financial part of the product or the marketing partnership.
Automatically assigning tickets to the correct department helps save a lot of time and effort for both the customers and the support team making it a win-win.
Furthermore, moving the ticket to the right team helps to cut response time tremendously.
9. Description
Adding a description to a support ticket is extremely useful since multiple support team members sometimes handle a query. Adding a detailed description helps them understand the history of the access and other helpful information like client IDs, contact details of the client, and the order number.
Adding these details helps to cut down the time involved in back and forth communication and enables faster resolution of tickets.
Conclusion
Specifically for a scaling business with a massive volume of queries dropping in every minute, management of customer queries can be a challenge irrespective of how big and productive their customer support team is. Automation of workflows can cut down the response time tremendously.
However, segmentation and prioritization, based on VIP status/ first come, first serve basis, helps identify the root cause for the most recurrent queries.
Setting up a knowledge base, adding a description to the support ticket to avoid confusion, and assigning them to the right team help to cut down response time, improve SLA adherence, and offer excellent customer experience.
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