A ticketing system in business is a software application used to manage and track customer support tickets and issues. It serves as a central hub for recording, prioritizing, assigning, and resolving customer inquiries and problems. Ticketing systems help streamline communication between customers and support staff while providing metrics on team performance.
Why are ticketing systems important for businesses?
Ticketing systems provide many benefits for companies across industries:
- Organize customer issues in one place – Rather than customer emails getting lost across inboxes, ticketing systems centralize all interactions for easy tracking.
- Prioritize urgent tickets – Ticket priority levels help teams know which issues to tackle first.
- Route tickets properly – Rules and queues make sure tickets get assigned to reps with the right skills.
- Meet service level agreements (SLAs) – Ticketing systems help monitor response times and resolution times to meet SLAs.
- Gain insights from reporting – Managers can pull reports on agent productivity, common issues, response times and more to optimize operations.
- Improve customer satisfaction – Organized issue resolution and meeting SLAs improves customer experiences and satisfaction.
In summary, ticketing systems bring order to customer service for more efficient issue resolution, compliant SLA adherence and improved customer experiences.
What are the key features of a ticketing system?
Ticketing systems have a variety of features to help businesses manage customer issues end-to-end. Common ticketing system capabilities include:
- Ticket capture – Customers can submit tickets through email, web forms, phone, social media and other channels.
- Ticket templates – Prebuilt templates allow reps to easily log common issue types.
- Ticket queues – Tickets are placed in categorized queues for relevant reps to claim.
- Ticket assignment – Managers or automated rules can assign tickets to individual reps or teams.
- Collision avoidance – Systems prevent two reps from working on the same ticket simultaneously.
- Communication tools – Reps can communicate via notes, email and social media updates within the platform.
- SLA tracking – Systems time and track SLA metrics like first response and resolution times.
- Ticket escalation – Tickets can be escalated to higher tiers of support based on urgency or complexity.
- Ticket routing – Rules route tickets to the right reps based on skills, availability and other criteria.
- Reporting – Custom and canned reports provide insights into performance and team productivity.
Robust ticketing systems centralize and organize all customer support interactions in one configurable platform.
What are the different types of ticketing systems?
Ticketing systems come in several main varieties:
- Help desk software – All-in-one help desk platforms have built-in ticketing along with other features like knowledge bases, call center integration and customer portals.
- Customer service software – Customer service CRMs include ticketing as well as contact center, CSR chat, email management and customer database features.
- Shared inbox tools – These collaborative inbox apps offer basic shared email-based ticketing for small businesses.
- Enterprise ITSM software – IT service management platforms provide robust IT ticketing with additional ITIL-aligned incident, problem, change and release management.
Most help desk software, customer service software and ITSM tools focus primarily on ticketing workflows and provide a full suite of capabilities not found in simple shared inbox tools.
What are the key steps in the ticketing process flow?
A typical customer support ticketing process follows this general workflow:
- Customer submits a ticket via web form, email, phone or social media.
- Ticket lands in a categorized queue based on issue type.
- Agent claims ticket from queue based on skills and availability.
- Agent troubleshoots, resolves issue and communicates with customer.
- Agent updates ticket status throughout process.
- If needed, agent escalates complex ticket to higher tier.
- Agent closes ticket after issue resolution.
- Customer is emailed a satisfaction survey after closure.
- Reporting provides visibility into ticket metrics.
Well-designed ticketing systems optimize this workflow by automatically routing tickets, assigning them based on agent capacity, and tracking SLAs across the process.
What are some popular ticketing system platforms?
Some of the top ticketing systems for business include:
Ticketing System | Details |
---|---|
Zendesk | Leading cloud help desk software with sophisticated ticketing and customer service features. |
Freshdesk | Intuitive, affordable help desk software for SMBs. |
ServiceNow | Enterprise ITSM solution with robust incident management ticketing. |
HappyFox | Unified help desk software with omni-channel ticketing and self-service options. |
HubSpot | All-in-one CRM with help desk features and email ticketing. |
Spiceworks | Free, open source IT help desk software with ticketing at its core. |
These represent some of the top dedicated ticketing system solutions, but many CRM, live chat, call center and business process automation tools also offer ticketing capabilities.
What features should you look for when evaluating ticketing systems?
When researching ticketing system solutions for your business, keep the following key features in mind:
- Multiple ticket submission channels – Email, web, social, phone, etc.
- Custom ticket types and templates
- Automated ticket assignment and routing
- SLA tracking with alarms and escalation
- Collaboration tools like shared notes and chat
- Ticket merge and transfer capabilities
- Reporting on ticket metrics and agent performance
- Integration with tools like CRM, email marketing, live chat, and analytics
- Self-service ticketing portals for customers
- Mobile access to tickets for agents
Prioritize the capabilities that align most closely with your business needs and processes.
What are some best practices for leveraging ticketing systems effectively?
Follow these tips for getting the most value from your ticketing system implementation:
- Set up automatic ticket routing and assignment to save agents time.
- Design efficient ticketing workflows mapped to your processes.
- Create ticket queues and SLAs tailored to your priorities.
- Use collision avoidance rules to eliminate duplicate work.
- Enable support through all customer contact channels via ticketing.
- Integrate tightly with your knowledge base and community forums.
- Build a self-service help portal to deflect common tickets.
- Use canned response templates to speed up ticket resolution.
- Run regular ticketing reports to identify areas for optimization.
By customizing your setup, designing efficient workflows and leveraging automation, you can maximize the value of your ticketing system.
What impact can a ticketing system have on customer satisfaction?
Well-run ticketing systems have tangible benefits for the customer experience including:
- Faster first response times – Organized ticket handling ensures customers get initial responses quickly.
- Shorter time-to-resolution – Structured workflows and SLAs help fix issues faster.
- Improved response quality – Agents have full context and history via the ticketing thread.
- Increased first-contact resolution – Routing to available subject experts improves first call resolution.
- 24/7 support options – Customers can submit tickets around the clock.
- Omni-channel support – Unified ticketing for all channels gives customers options.
- More self-service options – Help portals powered by ticketing let customers help themselves.
For these reasons and more, ticketing systems are incredibly impactful for improving customer experiences and satisfaction.
How can you customize and expand a ticketing system?
Most ticketing systems provide different options for customization and enhancements such as:
- Add-ons and integrations – Connect to other software like CRM, live chat, and analytics tools.
- Custom fields – Capture specialized data not in standard tickets.
- Modified workflows – Optimize workflows for your processes.
- Custom ticket types – Design unique ticket templates.
- SLA rules – Configure a wide array of SLA metrics and alarms.
- Email management – Custom email addresses and triage rules.
- Branding – Tailor interfaces with your logo, colors and terminology.
- Access and permissions – Give specific agent teams access to certain ticket queues.
- Open API – Leverage the API for advanced custom integrations.
- Self-service portal – Let customers manage tickets via their own login.
The right ticketing platform will provide robust options for customization without extensive coding or complex configuration.
Conclusion
Implementing an intelligent ticketing system is one of the best investments a business can make for streamlining issue resolution, optimizing support operations, and improving customer experiences. The key is choosing a platform with robust features for capturing, organizing, assigning, managing, and reporting on tickets across every interaction channel. With the right solution and effective use of its capabilities, ticketing systems can transform customer service, support and satisfaction across an organization.