Over the last ten years, customer experience has become a vital component of any company's success. In the current fiercely competitive digital world that we live in, customers are more powerful and have more touchpoints with companies than at any other point in history. Via emails, social media platforms, websites, forums, text, or phone, customers expect to contact the company on their terms. They expect a correspondingly swift and focused reply to their complex inquiries.

Just consider the following statistics:

• 74% of customers say that their purchase decisions are based on how the company treated them.
• Nearly 80% of consumers state that customer experience is as important as products themselves.
• 61% of customers are ready to stop doing business with a brand because of a poor customer service experience.
• 96% declare that customer service impacts their devotion and loyalty to a particular company.
  

As you can tell from the numbers, the rapid development of technology and unlimited access to information has empowered modern-day customers worldwide not to waste their time by giving second chances to the brands and businesses that care less than their competitors. Nowadays, with so many similar choices around, consumers tend to be less loyal and don't mind switching firms more carelessly than in the past, making the complete customer experience one of the crucial differentiating factors between companies.

And when customer loyalty is at stake, no business can afford to ignore the processes and operations that lead to it. That's where an automated ticketing system comes into play. In this blog post, we'll provide an answer to what ticketing system software is, how it can benefit your business and how it can improve your customer service representatives' daily workflow. But first, in order to decipher the whole ticketing system, let's start from the beginning and explain what a customer ticket is.

What Is A Ticket?

The term ticket generally alludes to a piece of work slated to be done by a customer support team, ordinary tasks such as bug fixes and other user requests, or any different process in the technology environment. With implementing this usage to the customer service environment, each customer issue, request, or inquiry creates a ticket that is placed into a system all along its life cycle:

• Submission of a request by the customer.
• Establishing a support ticket shared with the client and the customer service agent.
• Distribution of the ticket to a dedicated agent.
• Sending status to other concerned departments.
• Resolving the request and terminating the case.
  

The ticket binds the customer service representative and customer, enabling them to communicate and follow the progress of the topic through one clear thread.

What Is A Ticketing System?

A ticketing system is a customer service tool that monitors and documents customer interaction with customer service agents and efficiently manages incoming contacts' flow, whether from social media, websites, or online forums. The ticketing system processes and registers different inquiries and requests, tracking the progression of each case from customer request to solution and closing.

Once a customer ticket is created, it's usually assigned to a customer service agent. This agent will start working on the ticket and keep the customer informed about the progression. The customer can also reach out at any time to customer service using that same ticket. This way, the relevant customer service representative will receive a notification from the system and reply immediately.

When the ticket is closed, it remains forever archived in the system, so repetitive inquiries or requests can be utilized to create frequently asked questions or forum responses via a company representative, permitting clients to find an immediate answer whenever one is required, without needing direct support from an agent.

Automated ticketing systems help customer service teams better prioritize their assignments to create a more enjoyable customer experience. Below, we'll describe how a system like this actually works.

How Does A Ticketing System Work?

The whole ticketing ecosystem works by initially creating a ticket that records all interactions on a support or service case. Each ticket is shared between the customer and the representative and logs their communication to one continuous thread. If any details get overlooked, or there’s any confusion, both parties can always refer back to the thread to review past information on the case.

As soon as the ticket is established, customer service agents can then resolve the issue on their end. When they have updates or a resolution about the situation, they can instantly alert the customer via the ticket. Conversely, if the customer has any questions, they can also use the ticket to communicate with the customer service department from the company. The ticketing system will alert the dedicated representative that there is a response logged on the ticket so that the agent can address it without any delay.

Once the issue is resolved, either the customer or the representative can close the ticket for good. However, tickets can be reopened if either party has any additional requests or follow-up questions. Rather than creating a brand-new ticket with a different agent assigned to it, this way, the client has access to the same person that they worked with before and can continue where they left off. The best ticketing systems include built-in customer feedback tools that collect customer reviews every time a ticket gets resolved.

Benefits Of Adopting A Sophisticated Ticketing System

As time passes by and your company becomes bigger and bigger, it’s only normal that the more customers you have, the higher the volume of customer support and service cases will be. And unless you decide to hire more customer service agents to match the demand, this uptick will put more pressure on your existing team to multi-task and successfully resolve problems at the same time.

Because of that, adding a ticketing system to your customer service efforts is a fantastic way to overcome this bottleneck as it will provide scalable solutions for your customer service agents. Below, we’ll explore some of the leading reasons why your growing business should consider adopting an automated ticketing system to serve your customer service team and the benefits this innovative tool puts on the table.

Organizing High Volumes Of Requests In A Centralized System

To begin with, one of the most notable benefits of ticketing systems is the ability to organize and catalog all inbound support requests in one place. This is particularly important for companies that have to deal with high volumes of requests daily. Ticketing systems not only enable customer service representatives to manage support cases easily, but they also make it far less likely that some request or inquiry will go unresolved or unanswered.

Besides, thanks to revolutionary AI and machine learning-powered solutions that can easily be integrated within all internal ticketing systems like Y Meadows’ software, you can further accelerate the automation of your ticketing procedure and narrow down which tickets require immediate attention and which don’t. That way you keep your service teams organized and more importantly, your customers content with your service.

All Interactions Into One Thread

Sophisticated ticketing systems are created to function seamlessly in today’s multi-channel environment. So, if you’re providing customer support to your clients through several different channels, ticketing systems can assist your team of agents to consolidate all customer communications into one thread.

This means that your clients can use their favorite channel or even switch channels in the course of resolving their issues. Furthermore, the interactions with each customer will always be logged to the same place so that if the customer works with another representative in the future, all communication will remain stored in the original ticket.

Your Agents Will Have Context Of All Former Customer Communications

According to a Microsoft survey, more than 75% of customers expect service agents to have visibility into former communication and made purchases. Nonetheless, almost 50% of those surveyed stated that customer service representatives rarely have the context to efficiently and effectively solve their issue.

Through ticketing system implementation, representatives have full access to the records of previous interactions with each individual. Accordingly, your agents will have all the information they need to provide an excellent customer service experience at all times.

Better Communication With Customers

With all the communication being narrowed to one shared location, ticket systems make it simpler for both service agents and customers to communicate. Clients can access the ticket using their email inbox and continue communication with the representative who’s in charge of handling their request.

When the dialogue needs to be continued by another representative, they will have all the history of prior interactions at hand. This way, they will be able to provide a highly personalized experience to that client.

More Efficient Team Collaboration

Among other things, ticketing systems encourage better and more efficient cooperation between team members of your customer support team using many collaboration features like transferring and escalating tickets to senior team members, adding private notes to tickets that are solely visible to agents, other internal messaging capabilities, and more.

The shared visibility offered by ticket management systems permits multiple representatives to smoothly work together on the same case or exchange crucial information that can help resolve customer requests faster.

Increased Agent Productivity And Efficiency

Due to the level of automation and organization sophisticated ticketing systems bring, the representatives can work on cases matching their level of expertise and always know which request needs to be taken care of first based on priorities. That ultimately brings increased agent productivity and efficiency, faster response times, and less room for human error.

Tracking Valuable Service Metrics

Ticketing systems commonly come with built-in reporting possibilities that enable tracking various customer service metrics and KPIs. Those could comprise ticket volume, channel usage, ticket resolution time, SLA compliance, first reply time, agent activity, productivity, and more. These metrics form the basis for estimating your overall customer service performance and efficiency and give relevant insights into where you need to optimize your service processes.

Traditional Ticketing Systems Difficulties

As they stand to be more effective than email support, automate support workflows, and make your team of agents more productive, ticketing systems exist to help you solve your biggest customer support problems.

However, when it comes to delivering these promises, most old-fashioned ticketing systems can fall short because they’re struggling to meet the changing digital landscape of forward-thinking businesses. Below, we’ll look at a few of the most common reasons why such difficulties may occur and how to address them appropriately.

• Modern-day customers want quick support and this is where an old-fashioned ticketing system can get in the way. Traditional systems require extra effort and frequently involve switching between several tabs or screens to gather relevant data (e.g. customer name is one system, and billing info is another). All this can waste your team’s time and resources with ineffective techniques and senior representatives might even be forced to manually assign tickets to agents.
• As they were initially intended and initially designed for IT teams, traditional ticketing systems almost always require assistance from IT to change or alter, are pretty rigid when it comes to customizations, and are terrible at scaling. Not having complete control over your setup can make it difficult to stay agile and scale with ease.
• A traditional ticketing system builds a workflow that requires action on every request and allows your support team to get swamped with repetitive tasks. With conventional systems, agents often need to repeatedly fulfill simple tasks, which contributes to poor employee use and might increase job dissatisfaction.
  

The resolution to the above-mentioned ticketing systems' difficulties lies in artificial intelligence, which transforms the ticketing industry for good. Whether using natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, or another technology of the artificial intelligence umbrella, there are numerous applications for this technology within the ticketing industry that can help overcome the problems mentioned earlier. AI-powered software can automate traditional ticketing systems, help analyze the billions of data created in tickets each day, drive categorization, prioritization, and routing of service request tickets, and much more.

Final Thoughts

Nowadays, customer service is at the forefront of the whole customer experience and is one of the most critical components that make a company stand out from its rivals. So in order to meet customers' increasing needs and expectations, companies need to implement reliable solutions that help to deal with constantly growing demand.

A ticketing system is a priceless tool when it comes to handling customer support requests. It helps customer support representatives better organize their work, browse through tickets faster, stay more motivated and focused, and offer customers a better overall experience. Bottom line, it's one of the best ways to keep up with the rising expectations and meet them by giving the customer what they want—fast, reliable, and attentive support.