Why a Help Desk Ticketing System Is Key to Maximising Customer Service

Help Desk Software / February 2023

To improve the management of an expanding customer base, a help desk ticketing system is essential. It provides the automation tools needed to create, track, and manage support tickets as well as improve how tickets are categorised and assigned, ensuring they’re handled by the right support agents.

Automating your help desk ticketing system leads to increased customer retention rates and greater customer satisfaction levels. It also provides the tools for tickets to be generated from multiple communication channels, enabling businesses to provide omnichannel support via social media and live chat. 47% of UK customers use 5 types of communication channels, making multichannel ticketing support are must-have.

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The Importance of Automating Your Help Desk Ticketing System

Typically, a ticket management system workflow will look like this:

  • A user/customer raises a concern
  • This concern is forwarded to a support team member
  • The support team member works on correcting the user’s concern
  • The user is updated on progress throughout the process until the completion

Without the use of automated tools, this process would be performed manually using handwritten notes, spreadsheets, and email.

Ticketing systems found in most Help Desk Software solutions are designed to automate this process making it more streamlined and efficient for support agents.

Help desk ticketing systems are used to help businesses provide greater customer service, which leads to an increase in customer satisfaction levels, improved brand loyalty, and higher customer retention rates.

With a system in place, tickets are automatically created from customer requests where the automation continues, as tickets are categorised and assigned to agents. This helps to:

  • Provide fast support to customers
  • Reduce wasted time spent on manual ticketing assigning
  • Reduce long-term support team costs
  • Improve brand loyalty
  • Increase customer retention rates

Having an automated ticketing system allows tickets to be created across multiple communication channels such as social media, live chat, email, text message, and phone. This means no requests go unanswered or are forgotten about and essentially reduces the risk of a backlog for support teams.

The quality of a help desk team’s support can then be monitored through reporting functionality. Ticket inflow and SLAs become easier to track and team leaders can reallocate resources where necessary.

4 Benefits of a Help Desk Ticketing System

An IT help desk ticketing system works by turning end-user requests into tickets. It then tracks and monitors the status of each ticket, displaying the process in a shared dashboard. Each ticket displays information regarding a request. Such as customer interaction, the channel used, solved status, and the assigned agent.

The key to a good ticketing system is automation. By automating your customer support tasks, your support team can:

1. Easily Categorise and Prioritise Tickets

Help desk systems enable you to automate otherwise manual and time-consuming tasks. Including updating ticket status and routing requests. But, two key areas that benefit from automation are categorising and prioritising tickets. You can set parameters that allow tickets to be organised as soon as they’re created. Parameters can include high priority users, customer location, and language.

2. Assign Tickets to the Right Agents

To increase customer satisfaction and reduce wait times, tickets need to be solved quickly. 90% of today’s customers expect an immediate response to their queries. A way to achieve this is to distribute tickets to the right support agents. If a ticket is high priority, it will automatically be assigned to a more knowledgeable agent. If a customer request is in Spanish, it will be assigned to a Spanish-speaking agent.

3. Collaborate with Other Support Staff

Ticketing systems help to increase the level of collaboration between support teams. By using a centralised system to view ticket status, agents can work together. Essentially providing support and working together to solve a customer request.

4. Provide Multichannel Support

47% of UK customers use five different forms of communication channels. This opens the door to provide support across multiple platforms, not just email and phone. A help desk ticketing system provides the tools to help create tickets from various channels. Allowing customers to contact support teams through their preferred choice of communication.

Help desk ticketing system channels

Increasing Customer Satisfaction & Retention

Automated ticketing systems provide several benefits. One that determines the success of your support tasks is customer satisfaction. There are several factors to how a help desk system can improve customer satisfaction. These include:

  • Speed of resolve
  • Availability of agents
  • 24/7 self-service resources (knowledge bases, live chat, and AI chatbots)
  • Omnichannel support

Another key area that can be improved with a ticketing system is customer retention. Customers expect businesses to have multichannel support and tools such as live chat. They also demand immediate resolves to issues. By providing this, you’re likely to retain your customers instead of losing them to competitors. This is key, as acquiring new customers can cost 5 times more than retaining existing ones.

The Importance of Omnichannel Ticketing Support

Omnichannel support is seamless for the customer, no matter what support channel they use. For instance, a customer may contact your support team via Facebook Messenger. This triggers an automated response, with a ticket number, that is sent to the customer. But, after communication with an agent, the customer might get disconnected. This time, they decide to contact your support team via live chat.

What the customer wants is to be able to pick up where they left off. Without going through their issue multiple times. Something that two-thirds of consumers say is the most frustrating aspect of customer service.

A help desk ticketing system allows your support team to deliver an omnichannel experience. Agents can check the status of a ticket and find all the relevant information. Including a customer’s initial request, contact details, and actions. This initiative provides a positive experience for customers.

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Tracking Your Ticketing System Performance

A robust ticketing system will have built-in monitoring and reporting capabilities. This gives the data needed to report on critical areas of your support workflow. Such as customer satisfaction rates, ticket volume, and improvement opportunities.

Based on these insights, you can manage each support team more effectively. Such as reallocating agents to avoid ticket backlogs. As well view a live reading of agent productivity. Indicating what support agents are performing well and which need further training.