If you’re running a newly established business with a limited pool of customers, you may get away with a team-shared inbox when resolving customer service issues. Nevertheless, once success knocks on your door, your sales start to grow, and you have lots of customers to handle, you can quickly get overwhelmed with emails coming from satisfied and unsatisfied customers. Not to mention the numerous customer service requests you’ll receive in the shape of live chat messages, comments or messages on your social media accounts, and phone calls. Unfortunately, that’s precisely when customer requests begin falling through the cracks and customer satisfaction declines. 

The solution to this problem is obtaining a top-of-the-range ticketing system for your customer service efforts that will enable your team of agents to stay on top of customer queries at all times and solve the problems as fast as possible. Utilizing a killer ticketing system will result in more satisfied customers, which essentially will bring new leads, more loyalty, and ultimately, higher profits for your company. Initially made to replace spreadsheets, ticketing management systems are now the core of modern-day help desk operations.

But, how can you recognize a robust ticketing solution when you see one? In this blog post, we’ll share the ten must-have ticketing system features that you should look for when considering incorporating this innovative solution within your customer service efforts. 

Multi-Channel Accessibility 

Nowadays we live in a hyper-connected society. And in our hyper-connected community, streamlining your customer support work and activities across multiple platforms is more critical than at any other point in history. Furthermore, by providing diverse contact channels to your customers, you practically allow them to choose the channel they feel most comfortable with freely. This freedom of customer support channel choice results in an overall better experience for customers that benefits both sides—a win-win situation.   

For this reason, each ticketing management system you take into serious consideration needs to be able to track and manage customer service requests from multiple channels all in one place. Thus far, email and phone are still the two most significant customer support channels, followed by live chat. Despite their popularity, social media platforms are still behind these three primary communication lines, but there’s no doubt whatsoever that they’ll grow considerably in the years to come. 

Selecting a ticketing system that supports all these different types of communication, and merges them into one clean, ordered line of tickets will definitely have a significant impact on your customer service efforts and represents one of the most remarkable features of ticketing systems that you should have by your side.

Ticket Categories And Tags 

A ticketing system in 2021 without the sophisticated features of ticketing system categorization and tagging is just a system asking for chaos. Because so much happens from the moment a customer service ticket is created until it's entirely resolved. Moving them around, searching for similar issues, merging them, and assigning individual tickets to different customer reps can be an uphill manual task for every person who will find themselves in the position to manage the requests. The only way to keep track of your support tickets without losing your grip is by automatic categorization, tagging, and labeling. 

The solution to the difficulties mentioned above lies in artificial intelligence, a technology that certainly helps continuously transform the ticketing industry. New platforms enable organizations to incorporate natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, and other artificial intelligence technology umbrella subcategories, to enrich ticketing systems to automate outdated solutions by driving categorization, prioritization, and successful routing of service tickets. By doing so, you will enable customer service representatives to quickly understand the status of each request and the steps that need to be taken to resolve each request. In addition, your system will allow for advanced filtering, thus allowing for quick search by status, issue, type of request, department, and more. 

Workflow Automation 

Workflow automation is yet another of the ticketing system features your system should most certainly have. Irrespective of your industry, your company needs a ticketing system that works with rule engines to create automation rules regarding assigning new tasks. For instance, your ticket management system should be able to send alerts when tickets become overdue or create a filter system based on specific keywords. This will help you eliminate the unnecessary delay between receiving a customer service request and assigning it to the right person. 

Support For Multiple Languages 

As there are no geographic borders in the digital world, providing support for different human languages is yet another one of the most critical features of ticketing systems that your system should possess. There’s no point in creating them yourself if you’re utilizing an outdated ticketing system that only supports one language. 

Speaking their native language is the primary step towards a loyal relationship. Present-day customers have high expectations and look for companies ready to go the extra mile to earn their loyalty. The only thing you should expect from prospective customers is to reach out and initiate contact with your company; the rest of the efforts depend on your organization, and when speaking about customer service issues, the capability of your ticketing system to support multiple languages. 

Even if you believe that you don’t need multilingual support at the moment because your customers are not foreign citizens, try to think ahead. Most online companies require at least two languages to serve their customers. Why go with a monolinguistic ticketing system solution now just to go through the entire process again in just a couple of years at best? Make the best decision for your business, and ensure that offering support for multiple languages is one of the ticketing system features incorporated in your final solution.

Personalized Ticket Pages 

Each and every customer is unique, and so are their demands and needs. In addition, nowadays, customers expect companies to know their preferences in advance, mainly if they have already previously contacted your customer support team. Therefore, the more you know about each customer, the more refined service you’ll be able to provide. 

Back in the day, before ticket management systems existed, this was nearly impossible. Nevertheless, nowadays, knowing what your customer expects from your company is an undeniable necessity. This is where personalized ticket pages as ticketing system features come in handy. This way, when a new customer query is created, customer service representatives will be able to access the complete ticket history of the customer and acknowledge which issues they had in the past and how they were resolved or handled. In addition, not having to ask the same questions multiple times will save you precious amounts of time and nurture your customer base loyalty. 

For even better results, sophisticated solutions now offer data log features of ticketing system tools to collect information about the device, browser, and service provider. This is particularly valuable for companies whose service heavily depends on the Internet access of the client. 

Complete Customization 

In fact, your ticketing system should be fully integrated into your company’s brand, and it should act, look, and feel the same as the rest of your online presence. This is particularly important from the customer’s point of view. They don’t want to feel as if your company didn’t put enough effort into the platform that gives them a voice, and for this reason, you should steer away from systems that can’t be personalized. 

Preferably, you want to go with a solution that offers customizable ticketing system features. This will help you create a cohesive brand picture with minimal requirements. This impact will be huge for you and your team, and the superior the navigation and the more pleasant the layout of the system, the more efficient your entire customer service workflow will be.  

Knowledge Base 

A comprehensive knowledge base is the spine of a robust customer support service. Providing truthful and quick answers through an easily searchable content database will result in fewer support requests and happier customers. 

As you can guess, this portal is also a crucial piece of any ticketing system, and as such, it should have easy access from within the system. The bottom line is that having a ticket deflection system in place like a robust knowledge base can save your agents a significant amount of time. Moreover, such a platform equipped with smart suggestion capabilities can save your agents from repetitive searching for relevant content, especially when dealing with the most common requests and issues.

Team Empowerment 

Each respectable ticketing system should benefit your team of customer service professionals first and foremost. Regardless of how great the system is, it won’t work as it should without a strong team behind it. 

After all, this problem-resolving platform should drastically reduce the effort required to answer a customer service query and serve as a tool to improve team communication and collaboration. Furthermore, the ticketing system features that can benefit your team are almost unlimited, from fundamental ones like allotting tickets to specific individuals in your group to more advanced features like adding internal notes to discussions for future references. All in all, the ticketing systems should empower your entire team and not only your agents. For example, they should permit your manager to track the team’s individual and collective performance.

Excellent Reporting Tools 

The initial step to any kind of improvement is knowing what needs to be fixed. For this reason, insights are one of the crucial features of every sound ticketing system. Based on the customer service requests you receive, they will enable you to understand what your customers are looking for, how they are being answered, and how your team of professionals is performing as a whole. This information is invaluable and will be the source of every move your support team makes. For example, you’ll know what type of articles should be published on your knowledge base next, or which category to train your new representatives in.

Customer Experience-Oriented

The perfect ticketing system for your company should allow you to improve your customers’ entire experience with your brand continuously. It’s not only about providing them with the correct answers to their questions but being with them every step of their journey and ensuring that they receive what they want quickly and comfortably. 

You can begin by introducing a help widget to offer them help from anywhere on your website. And once they decide to open a ticket, use custom fields to inquire about any additional information that will keep follow-up questions to a bare minimum. Also, after their ticket gets resolved, please encourage them to leave honest feedback about their experience with your customer service team. This can help you uncover which areas you need to improve in the future to provide even better service. 

Final Thoughts 

The bottom line is that your solution needs to incorporate several must-have ticketing system features to provide your customers with the best possible care and assistance. Ranging from the ability to automatically conduct categorization and tagging to support from multiple languages and multi-channel accessibility, there’s no denying that sophisticated ticket management systems can save your company both time and money.