The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has undoubtedly shifted the paradigm of the customer service industry. More than anything else, ticketing systems for agents that play a crucial role in the overall customer experience for each company have had to evolve with the changing times to offer better customer support.

These days, having a fantastic product or service is not enough to warrant a company as successful. Five-star customer service is the better half of a real successful endeavor. In the past, customer service was predominantly done through face-to-face interactions. Nowadays, there are numerous ways users can interact with a company, which can principally be attributed to improved technology and digital disruption. 

With the ongoing pandemic, companies encounter changes in their customer service efforts and interactions. For example, financial institutions and banks have fully moved to Internet banking. Similarly, sophisticated companies are turning to technology to help enhance their ticketing systems for agents to conform to the evolving business environment. 

This blog post will unveil the latest advancements in ticketing systems for agents that are changing the landscape of ticketing software for good. But first, even though we’ve covered the matter in our previous blog posts, let’s remind ourselves what ticketing systems are and the most significant benefits they can bring to modern-day organizations’ customer service teams.

What Are Ticketing Systems For Agents? 

In a nutshell, ticketing software solutions aid in automating long-winded and repetitive administrative tasks in managing customers’ support issues. In 2021, most innovative companies that have a lot of support issues on their hands appreciate the concept of ticketing systems for agents to help them successfully track support issues and their resolution, prevent incidents from happening, improve team collaboration, and deliver delightful support to the modern-day customers.

Ticketing systems for agents streamline the customer service and help develop a centralized and fully functional contact point for incident ticketing, tracking the caliber of customer service, and monitoring customer problems. Furthermore, they automate ticket assignments, respond to customer requests, categorize issues, and tag the concerned customer service representative when there’s an issue from their expertise.

The Biggest Benefits Of Ticketing Systems For Agents 

Ticketing software has considerably contributed revolutionize the customer service of most companies. In this process, technology has played a vital role in transforming customer service, particularly customer experience.

The bottom line is that satisfied customers exhibit deeper loyalty to companies, spend more, and create conditions that permit businesses to have lower costs and higher levels of employee engagement. For that reason, every aspiring company needs to invest in a ticketing system to support its customer service agents. Here’s why:

Fast Ticket Resolution 

First, ticketing systems for agents can automate the resolution of customer issue cases, allowing the customer service representatives to focus on more important, pressing tasks. For example, when a customer service issue ticket is received, the software automatically feeds the ticket into the system, directs it to the relevant customer support professional, and creates details about each case like the client's name, product, and ticket urgency.

Ceaseless Performance Improvement 

Along with providing your company to resolve customer tickets promptly, having a ticketing system solution in place will also help you easily monitor your support teams' productivity and efficiency. Through the system's central dashboard, you can observe details on the time taken to resolve a particular ticket and how many tickets have been closed. 

This permits you to acknowledge which of your customer service employees are not productive and uncover the areas that need training and improvement. In addition, ticketing systems improve accountability as you can quickly identify the problems and where they originate before it escalates further down the line.

Time Tracking 

One of the most significant benefits of ticketing systems for agents is that they enable you to keep track of time. Once a customer support ticket is initiated, a timer starts so that you can observe for how long the ticket remains open. Likewise, the timer will indicate which representatives are closing the most tickets and allow you to monitor their productivity. 

Fast response excites clients, and ticketing systems continuously aim to provide you with fantastic response times. Each time there’s a downtime in response, you will also be promptly notified to take action and improve the results.

24/7 Support 

While most companies operate from 9 to 5, customer support requests and inquiries don’t stop coming through, and that’s where ticketing systems come in. They enable the response to customer requests anytime, throughout the year. This saves the expenses of paying overtime to agents while efficiency is still pretty much attained.

Lowering Costs 

The best ticketing systems for agents help cut down operational expenditures for any organization, as your company will be able to handle numerous customer needs with minimal human resources. 

With the improved response times, your brand will enjoy more satisfied customers. That way, your company will be able to generate more leads and have higher customer retention rates.

Increasing Productivity 

Most customer support employees get pulled in a thousand different directions during each workday. Consequently, the ticket resolution times take longer, and your team's productivity is lowered. Ticketing systems for agents can help increase the productivity of your workforce because they rank tickets in order of priority, keeping the human employees more organized. Furthermore, the software can be programmed to forward tasks to the most relevant agent in order of the task priority, increasing efficiency even further.

The New Face Of Customer Service In The Wake Of The Pandemic 

Companies are now faced with new health and operational protocols to manage the spread of Covid-19. Most of these protocols have forced companies to encourage more personnel to work remotely. Over time, working remotely and managing remote employees will get easier and thoroughly effective. In addition, organizations are currently switching to social media and live chat tools to assist their customers who have shifted to online shopping due to restrictions due to the pandemic. All this means that the volume of digital and eCommerce customer service inquiries will increase in the years to come.

As a result, customers who would rather place a call or walk into a store can now quickly go to a company’s website and read about their services and FAQ. In addition, as live chat popularity among customers is steadily growing, this shift forces companies to incorporate a digital-first support strategy—ticketing systems.

The Changing Landscape Of Ticketing Systems For Agents 

As companies worldwide are battling with the wrath of the ongoing global pandemic, online shopping and activities have experienced a sharp spike. As a result, it’s no longer business as usual for most companies, and they’ve found it necessary to reconsider and refocus their IT budgets and spending. In the customer service domain, ticketing systems providers have also had to update their products in order to serve their customers better. Below, you will find the top new trends that we are seeing in customer service ticketing systems.

More Automation And Artificial Intelligence Support 

Through automated workflows, AI-powered chatbots, and self-service solutions, all of the best ticketing systems for agents offer a solution to simplify the customer service efforts. At the core of this are the collaborative features of ticketing systems which make it much easier for cross-departments to work as a single unit in solving customer requests. However, maintaining teamwork can be a daunting task when working remotely, and ticketing systems are keen to ensure that their software supports effective collaboration among different company teams and departments. 

In addition, the need to automate dull, repetitive tasks can’t be overstated enough, and organizations that utilize ticketing systems know firsthand what a system can do regarding automation. For that reason, every business out there, especially enterprises that handle hundreds or even thousands of customer tickets daily, should strongly consider integrating AI-powered software within their existing ticketing system to automate a huge chunk of their customer service processes and improve ticket analysis. Relying on such an AI-enhanced model can save time for both agents and customers and help equip agents with all the necessary knowledge to promptly and precisely service their customers.   

The Need For Omnichannel Support 

As we already mentioned, many consumers have recently become comfortable with online shopping. Because of that, companies now must incorporate a digital-first customer support initiative and omnichannel ticketing systems. Until now, most ticketing systems used to convert support emails to tickets so that representatives can reply and solve the issues as soon as possible. 

However, nowadays, the most sophisticated omnichannel ticketing systems can help agents track engagements across numerous channels, including email, chat, and social media, for an improved customer experience.

Progressive Tracking Of Tickets 

Lately, ticketing systems for agents have moved a step further in how companies handle their customer support tickets. Sophisticated systems permit customer service professionals to view all interactions with customers in a single dynamic interface to progress tickets efficiently and seamlessly.  

Such systems also permit one to track customer engagements throughout numerous channels and have additional powerful automated workflows to speed up specific processes, improve metrics, and free up employees to focus on other, more urgent tasks.

Easy-To-Use And Interactive Interface 

With most companies allowing their personnel to work remotely, accessing IT support can challenge many employees. As such, companies need to employ applications that are easy to use, which also applies to omnichannel ticketing systems for agents.

As a result, software creators are constantly updating their applications to make them more user-friendly and create systems that are easy-to-use, scalable, and customized to the client's needs.

Self-Service Knowledge Libraries 

Can you imagine a scenario where clients could access a knowledge library on your company’s website to find a solution to their problem, only to escalate the issues when they cannot self-serve? 

Although this might sound far-fetched, the best ticketing systems already offer this service. Such systems come with a knowledge base software that permits companies to organize, collect, and store valuable content. Most of this content is based on customer feedback and commonly experienced issues and solutions. This way, customers can successfully refer to the content before submitting a customer service ticket.

Personalized Ticket Generation 

As time goes by, one thing regarding customer service gets constantly more evident—personalized customer service is at the core of creating an exceptional customer experience. Modern-day customers know their precise needs, and customized customer service makes them feel more connected with the company. 

This can help build trust and confidence with the brand, and each forward-thinking organization must take this into account and generate personalized tickets for agents to use. The best ticketing systems for agents can allow service agents to see past tickets raised by the user, make them better understand the customer, and serve them in an improved manner.

Final Thoughts 

More and more companies worldwide are looking for innovative ways to improve their customer support efforts and the disruptions brought about by the ongoing pandemic. Ticketing systems have thus had to evolve with the time to provide their clients with superior support during these difficult times. The most significant changes include increased automation to improve efficiency and support working remotely and provide advanced tracking of tickets for a better customer experience.