Ticketing software can help your SME provide excellent service, winning over the hearts and minds of your customers. Read on to find out how.
The days in which customer service was just one person reactively responding to phone calls and emails are long gone. Today, six years into the Age of the Customer, more and more businesses are starting to acknowledge the importance of proper customer care.
With good reason: great service can prove to be a Unique Selling Proposition to SMEs in particular. Unfortunately, those same SMEs are often still in the dark when it comes to the technology supporting a great customer service.
Take ticketing software for instance - which can help you organise, prioritise and communicate, while also offering more efficiency, transparency and flexibility.
Looking for software that could support your SME towards becoming a more customer-centric organisation? Discover how Teamleader can help.
What is ticketing software?
Ticketing or support ticket software, turns any question that comes in through a support channel (mostly email or chatbots) into a customer service ticket. These questions can be anything from inquiries to service requests to complaints and can come from prospects, customers, suppliers or any other contact. The ticket can be handled by the person receiving and opening it, or assigned to a co-worker.
Ticketing software is a great way to handle incoming requests in a fast, cost-effective, mistake-free and transparent way, and a big improvement on traditional customer service methods.
The advantages of ticketing software
In short, ticketing software allows you to create and manage customer requests through a centralised support database, instead of keeping track of everything through email. Tickets can then be tracked from the moment they are reported until the issue is resolved. Each ticket created involves a specific question or complaint and can be assigned to the right support team member or department for proper follow-up.
1. Store and retrieve all information in one place
All communication is saved on one, single ticket. There’s no need to exchange emails to understand what was discussed, which will also make it easier for multiple people to collaborate on an issue.
Imagine having lots of requests or tasks to complete simultaneously, and putting off a reply for a number of days. It’s great to be able to reopen a ticket and see all relevant information right away, instead of having to dig your way through previously sent emails.
2. Obtain the right data and insights
Information is power. Ticketing software provides you access to crucial support statistics and metrics such as:
- Full resolution time: the resolution time for tickets created in a selected date range.
- Average response time: the average time a user takes to respond to a client’s message for tickets created in this date range.
- Busiest time of the day: new tickets and incoming messages split up in days and timeslots. This allows you to assess the busiest and calmest moments in terms of tickets.
- Individual performances: all replies sent during a selected date range per user.
- Most ‘active’ customers: an overview of the customers that created the most tickets during a selected date range.
These insights allow you to monitor and proactively improve your customer service efforts. How well is your team performing today? Which areas could you improve upon? You’ll also have a clearer overview of frequently asked questions - allowing you to write How To-articles on these topics, or even provide answers to questions new customers hadn’t even thought of yet.
3. Increase customer satisfaction
Once you find out through the statistics which customers request help most often, you can plan meetings with each of them to ask for their feedback or discuss how you could improve. After all, your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning - you’ll be surprised how much they’ll want to share with you.
Ticketing software also grants you continuous access to full customer information, past interactions, payment and billing information - which in turn will help you add a more personal touch to your service. Suppose a customer reaches out to you again, you’ll automatically have access to when they last requested support, what the issue was, how it was resolved, and how long that customer had to wait for a resolution.
4. Save time and resources
In the Age of the Customer, the support you offer is undoubtedly one of your most important assets (or it can become your most important one). Your support crew is the voice of your business, speaking with customers on a daily basis. However, if you waste time trying to retrieve emails or talking to coworkers in order to retrieve the right information, this will quickly eat away at your productivity.
That’s where ticketing software comes into play: less time will be wasted because you’re able to sort and assign tickets centrally, your efficiency will be higher and your response time will be lower.
5. Improve transparency and collaboration
If you’re a one-man support team, a simple email inbox can take you a long way. But as soon as you add one more person to your team, you’ll need to find better ways of communicating internally. With ticketing software, you can have multiple people working on the same issue, while maintaining a real-time overview of your shared progress. Think about people from multiple side of your business, such as sales, development, and design, that all chime in to solve an issue because it requires the help of different people.
You’ll also know who worked on which ticket, and you’ll even have the option to track the time spent on each issue. Whenever one of your team members calls in sick or decides to leave the company, you’ll be able to reorganize and reassign tickets at the click of a mouse.
