Automation is the key to make your company a cut above the competition, going beyond traditional business processes. This is especially true for customer support, a vital tenet for all enterprises to maintain seamless and effective multi-channel interaction. An automated ticketing software optimizes the way your firm manages ‘tickets’ (individual customer support cases), thus, enabling better customer interaction from ticket creation to resolution, avoiding the lags and delays that usually accompany manual processes.

But how does that work?

AI and Machine Learning technologies have replaced time-consuming manual classification systems, making it easy to streamline and speed up service management. AI and ML-powered automated ticketing systems come up with smarter, more intelligent solutions, predict the time for resolution, and calculate the ROI from lack of resolution caused to the enterprise’s YOY.

While your manual service operations may be able to function at a base level using email and similar software solutions, they don’t come close to matching the functionality and capabilities of a professional ticketing system.

Each time a customer submits a CX case, the AI and machine learning applied to your automated ticketing software creates a ‘helpdesk ticket’, using it to track any and all progress made towards resolution, until the case is closed. It automates time consuming, repetitive administrative tasks associated with managing customer support cases, and links back to a central CRM (customer relationship management) database.

While this may sound like an overwhelming transition to make, it is not only highly scalable, but also comes with several advantages. Let’s take a look at some.

Centralizes High Volume Requests for Faster Complaint Resolution

If you own a business dealing with a high volume of customer requests, an automated ticketing software is nothing short of a magic potion.

Using its machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, an automated ticketing system sorts, organizes and catalogues incoming support queries using the historical data (past resolved and unresolved tickets) it has studied.

This allows agents enough time to easily manage support cases and reduce the chances of some customer requests going unanswered/unresolved. There’s also a pretty neat bonus here. Since tickets can be prioritized, agents can use their experience and discretion to determine which requests should be answered first. This reduces the pressure of solving multiple queries simultaneously.

Even during the busiest business days, with a heavy flow of seemingly never-ending issues, queries, and requests, AI-driven automated ticketing analysis eliminates the need to hire additional resources. It also ensures that your team is not burdened with repetitive support tickets, reducing inefficiency and redundancy.

An incoming ticket is automatically entered into the system, routed to the appropriate support representative, and populated with details about that particular case, let’s say the customer’s name, the product being used, the urgency of the ticket, and so on. So right from the start, that’s several steps your team need not do, giving them the chance to focus more time and energy on addressing customer issues. Of course, as your customer support team moves through and resolves more tickets with the surplus time on their hands, the backlog reduces swiftly.

This impacts your business positively in two direct ways.

  1. The wait-time for a response from your support team decreases, your customers’ trust in your ability to resolve any hiccups goes up. The faster you can reply to them and resolve their issues, the more successful they will be using your product, which is important for recurring revenue.
  2. A looming backlog of unresolved tickets puts your customer support team under stress, hampering their ability to do their jobs. They are also more likely to be curt or short with your customers, which will have a detrimental impact on your brand’s reputation in the market. With dwindling backlogs and more time, you have satisfied customers and productive employees, and that’s what we call a win-win!

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More Personalization = Better CX

Ideally, a strong automated ticketing system either links to a CRM database or comes with one ensuite. This gives your company access to the only goldmine worth having in CX — data, lots of it. It stores information pertaining to each individual contact. This includes basic contact information such as name and address, as well as buying history, web browsing activity, their likes, and interests, and much more. Armed with this precious actionable insight about their patrons, your support team understands who each customer is, what they want, and how to address their complaints, leading to a more personalized interaction. Better customer experience guaranteed.

With evolving consumer expectations, modernizing your ticketing process with artificial intelligence is definitely a big step forward, but there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the challenges of AI-led service management either. Each enterprise, firm, or business comes with its unique set of applications, challenges, data sources and objectives. With intelligent automation, the goal is for solutions to become elegant and user-friendly. You can improve application functionality, mobility, and UI, and add a secure, streamlined reporting process to polish service-related decision making.

With a strong helpdesk ticketing system in place, your clients and their various support issues get much-needed one-on-one attention, ensuring customers feel valued. This breeds a strong brand loyalty and helps ensure revenue growth over the long term.

Track Employee Performance, Service Metrics and KPIs

An effective and comprehensive ticketing system typically has built-in reporting possibilities that allow tracking a variety of customer service metrics or KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). These include, but are limited to, channel usage, ticket volume, ticket resolution time, first reply time, SLA compliance, agent activity, and productivity. Together, these key metrics form the foundation on which your firm’s overall customer service performance and efficiency is measured. Just as importantly, they provide valuable insights into where you need to optimize your service operations.

A truly worthy automated ticketing system informs you about the performance of your team via metrics and analytics. You can view said metrics on a central dashboard, offering a wealth of intel at a mere glance. This way, you know when someone on the team is falling behind and address the issue before it escalates further.

Helpdesk analytics bring transparency to your support team’s efforts and help to identify bottlenecks or other kinks in your process and course correct accordingly. They also lend an element of accountability to your team, because when something goes wrong, you can easily understand the reason why it happened, from your system reporting.

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