The customer service team works as the backbone of a business. Customer service representatives spend a lot of time handling inbound inquiries, and time is of the essence while managing the support tickets.
The time taken to complete a request plays a vital role and is a significant contributor to the overall efficiency of the customer service team. You and your team should begin to track time for support tickets if success is vital for your business.
As per a study conducted by SDI, 77% of the support desks have a formal SLA (Service level agreement). Customer support teams are under tremendous pressure to resolve all the tickets.
But the time taken to close them holds the key to a lot of crucial data points that can help businesses find the existing gaps and challenges. The challenges may range from insufficient team strength to technical issues in the process.
Let us look at the top benefits of time tracking for support tickets.
1 . Customer Experience
Customer experience would go through a tremendous improvement when you decide to track time for support tickets. It not only helps to improve transparency, efficiency, and consistency.
It also ensures the prioritization of the support tickets. It removes any mismanagement of time. Customer experience is the first and foremost benefit of time tracking the support tickets since it is the essence of the business.
2. Centralized information database
Sometimes, the issues can be recurring and may need the customer service team to check for details with the technical teams. It can lead to the team digging through emails for every issue that has been left open-ended.
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Using a ticketing system ensures all the information available at one place available for anyone in the team with complete updates so that the team spends less time on follow-ups and data collection.
3. Trackable employee efficiency
Tracking the time taken by a customer service executive to resolve a ticket enables you to track the time spent accurately.
Productivity level, streamlining the processes, and time spent resolving tickets will be accountable when tracking time for support tickets. It also helps to remove any redundancy in the process.
4. Prioritization
While some customer queries do not take much time to resolve, a few others may take longer. When you track time for support tickets, it helps you to understand the time taken to resolve a particular ticket and enables you to prioritize and assign tickets to the team accordingly.
Thus, tracking time for support tickets ensures prioritization, faster resolution of issues, cutting down on time wastage, and satisfied customers.
5. Department-based load balancing
When you track time for support tickets, it becomes easier to understand which department is getting the highest number of requests—allocation of help based on the tickets taking the highest amount of time to resolve.
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The distribution of support to the departments based on the workload is also helpful to improve employee morale and customer satisfaction.
6. Effortless Budgeting and billing.
There are tons of financial benefits when you track time for support tickets. Time tracking helps streamline areas like estimating future costs, client billing, details of work in progress, budget and resource allocation for projects, and payroll management.
In addition, time tracking helps to make data-driven decisions and manage cost-efficiently as an organization.
7. Collaboration
Tracking time for support ticket resolutions enables collaboration between teams and resolve issues much faster.
The ticketing system enables multiple people to open a particular ticket and work simultaneously, leading to faster resolution and efficient teamwork. Increased teamwork also leads to the team and overall business success.
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Collaboration can free up a lot more time for teams to work on more queries too.
8. In-built reporting metrics
There are tons of benefits when you track time for support tickets. However, reporting tops it all. One can quickly churn out a humongous amount of data/metrics when time tracking support tickets.
A ticketing system with a time tracker helps to generate reporting metrics that would have otherwise taken a lot of time by the team. These reports help make various strategic and ad hoc decisions, from calculating the best performance to ascertaining the time to resolve a ticket.
9. Escalations
Creating a workflow and tracking time for support tickets help teams to escalate if a particular ticket takes longer than usual to resolve. Or, if a regular customer support rep cannot resolve them, then it can be referred to the expert’s team.
10. Team motivation
As per a study by Zendesk, 69% of the support tickets go through resolution at the first touch. When you track time for support tickets, it is a win-win for all the parties involved.
Customers are happy about the quick response, overall business improves, and the employees can evaluate their performance, set goals, and identify gaps. The customer rep team can find effective and efficient ways to streamline their work processes and improve their performance without hassles.
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Moving to a different team, finding a more innovative way to resolve an issue, and improving one’s performance by self-identifying the challenges is a clear motivator. When you track time for support tickets, the team can utilize the data at the performance review time.
Conclusion
When you track the support tickets, a few factors like the productivity, efficiency, and load balance of the team become easy to manage since the time tracking metrics offer enough data to make decisions.
For example, you can ascertain whether the team is stressed out, needs recognition, or training without many stressful discussions. As per a study, service desk employees receive ten to eighty hours of training.
Time tracking also enables you to identify any underperformers, better understand overall team health, and make better hiring and training decisions accordingly.
While you reap tons of benefits when you decide to track time for support tickets, improved customer experience is at the top of it.
Quicker resolutions of tickets mean a happy customer, and a happy customer means more business. So, it is a win-win for all the stakeholders when you decide to track time for support tickets.
