The Benefits of Using a Ticketing System

While it can be argued that in the digital world, e-mail is more personable than a support ticket, you may want to consider these tidbits.

SPAM filters - Now don’t get me wrong SPAM filters are GREAT for your personal e-mail accounts; however, if your settings are too high, you may be missing out on legitimate e-mails. Too low and you will get wanna be Rolex offers and…well… you know the others. I had just three accounts being forwarded to one e-mail address and after a few years we were receiving on average of 20,000 e-mails per day with maybe 5 to 10 being legitimate customer contacts.

Now that is a lot of e-mail to sort though. Just imagine your customer e-mailing you time after time, getting more and frustrated that you are not responding. You are going about your day oblivious to the fact you are about to get blasted on a forum, receive a chargeback, and loose a customer. Not because you did anything but because you did nothing. Or vise versa you receive the e-mail and are just plugging away at their issue, but every one of your responses is gobbled up by their SPAM filter, and they think they are being ignored. With a support ticketing system their ticket is right there and houses all their replies as well as yours.

The e-mail dog pile - You check your e-mail in the morning and are all ready to sit down and reply to all of your quires. Then something major goes down, the e-mails start flying and that morning e-mails get buried further and further down the line. You mean to go back, but you are so buried keeping up with what is coming in. By the time you get back to those e-mails a couple days later, people are e-mailing and calling about the lack of service. The beauty of a support ticketing system is until those tickets are answered they are like little reds flags with a countdown timer on them. When you login, you will not be in danger of not knowing which ones you have already replied to and who is still waiting.

Computer or e-mail crash - If you and a client develop a rapport over an issue in January, your computer crashes in March, then in June they are back asking for that information again, you are in trouble. Many times when the computer crashes the e-mail is gone and you have to start back up from scratch. With a ticketing system, you can just pull that ticket right up and viola there is all of the information.

Accountability and Training - A support ticketing system holds you accountable. When you login, you can see exactly who said what and when. If one person on your staff is giving out misinformation, that is an excellent tool for training purposes. You can actually pull up their responses and show them exactly where the mistake was made and what they can do differently.

Time Management and Trending - Many support ticketing systems give you the ability to enter the amount of time worked for each ticket. This way, you can login at any time and see how much time is spent on what. If you see a trend that product XYZ has a ton of support and the others are all about the same, you may want to give XYZ an evaluation. You can even look at the customer tickets to see if there is a theme among them. If you have 45 tickets and of that 45, 37 are asking where a certain bonus it, that may be something that you want to address in their welcome e-mail. By doing this, you will have cut down the support time for that product drastically. You can also develop a FAQ around the common questions.

All on the same page - If you have multiple staff members that work on the accounts, by giving them the access to the support system, they can read the posts of the previous staffers and know exactly what that client is being told. No he said she said.

These are just a few things to consider when handling your support. Ticketing systems may cost more than plain e-mail service, but in my opinion, they are worth every penny.

- Meredith

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