Support ticket

What is a support ticket?

Support tickets essentially describe the interactions that your customers have had with your customer service representatives. It records the conversations that individual customers have had with your customer support team.

You could consider a support ticket to be a log of the conversations between your customers and your support team, a thread that both parties (customers and support team members) can refer to in the future.

You can manage all your support tickets through a ticket management system. Engati even empowers you to integrate your ticket management system with your chat solution, making it easier than ever to automate, personalize and scale your customer support.

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Why are support tickets important?

Support tickets are very important not only to your customer support team but also to your customers and your entire organization.

Since the support ticket details the issues that your customers are facing and allows them to update the ticket with newly arising issues, your customers do not need to repeat themselves every time they interact with your customer service team members. It also helps your agents have context about past conversations, so even if a new agent is handling the ticket, she/he does not need to ask questions that the customers have already answered in the past.

It also helps your support team track the customers whom they need to get back to, and how soon they need to get their issues resolved.

In addition to this, it helps your support team track recurring issues. If a large number of tickets revolve around similar issues, your support team can group them together and intimate product managers or senior management about the issues. 

This can help your organization identify issues and solve them before other customers face them. 

If a large number of your customers raise tickets because they don’t know how to use certain functionalities in your product or are confused about any aspect of your product, you now know that you need to add a section on that topic in your knowledge base, or train your chatbot on that topic.

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How do support tickets work?

Here’s the simple version:

Tickets can come from multiple channels, depending on how your customers chose to get in touch with you. When your customers face issues, they can choose to open a support ticket.

It is then routed to an agent (preferably one equipped to deal with the issue that your customer is facing). If the agent can solve the customer’s issue immediately, she/he can mark the ticket as ‘resolved’ or close the ticket.

If it would take time to resolve the issue, the agent could mark the ticket as one that is ‘pending resolution’ and then close it after resolving the customer’s issue.

How do you respond to a support ticket?

Here are the three best practices for responding to support tickets effectively and efficiently:

1. Route them to the right agent

Don’t send your customers hopping across multiple agents and departments. Route the ticket to an agent that is capable of handling and resolving the issue the very first time.

2. Speed is of the essence

You need to respond to the ticket as quickly as possible. While it would be fantastic for you to resolve their issue immediately, you should make sure to respond to your customers speedily, so that they know that you have their backs and are not leaving them hanging.

3. Simplify things

Don’t use jargon or humongous chunks of text. These are your customers, not your product team. Answer in layman’s terms, and make your responses as easy to understand as possible.

Space your answers out so that they are easier to read and don’t come across as intimidating blocks of text.

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What is a ticketing system?

A ticketing system is a customer support tool that organizations make use of for the purpose of managing their customer service and support requests. When a query comes in, the ticketing system creates a support ticket that records the customer’s requests and their interactions with the company over time so that resolving complex customer issues becomes an easier task for your customer service agents. They even help you customer support team prioritize support requests so that they are able to create a better customer experience.

Essentially, a ticketing system makes it possible for your team to manage incidents in a better, more streamlined manner, thus allowing them to reduce their resolution time as well.

Since ticketing systems get rid of the need for a lot of unneceassry manual processes, it saves time and money, allowing your team to focus on more important work.

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How does a support ticket system work?

A support ticket system creates a ticket that documents the interactions on a customer support or service case. This ticket is shared with the customer  as well as your customer service agents, recording their entire conversation in one place. If there is any confusion in the future, your customers or your agents can refer to the ticket.

After the system creates a ticket, your agents start working to solve the issue. If there are any updates, or the issue is resolved, your agents can update customers on the ticket. Even if your customers have any additional questions, they can ask them over the ticket, the system will inform the agent about the new query being asked and the support agent can go ahead and address it.

After the issue gets resolved, your agent or your customer can close the ticket. If either of them have any follow-up questions or requests, the tickets can be re-opened. This means that instead of having to talk to another agent that does not have any context of the past conversation, the customer can continue the conversation with the same agent.