5 Must-Have Customer Ticket System Features in Help Desk

To increase business efficiency you want the best help desk ticketing system possible. Not only will a great help desk solution eliminate confusion and enable your team to better help customers, it can streamline your entire customer service department.

In your search for the best help desk application for your business, look for the following 5 customer ticketing system features that are a must-have for any business-to-business (B2B) customer support solution.

1. Self Service

Your customers don’t just encounter problems when they’re at home or at the office staring at their computer. Issues can arise 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It can be late at night, early in the morning, or while having a nice lunch with friends. The longer customers have to wait for a resolution, the more the problem festers.

That’s why your support system needs to be available at all times. A ticketing system with varied self-service options provides a 24/7 solution for customers. FAQs, knowledge base articles, community forums, and an easy to use ticket submission portal are all vital to customer success.

2. Customer Visibility

It is extremely frustrating for anyone to submit a ticket and never receive a response or update for weeks on end. Time crawls by and you get more agitated by the day. When or if you do finally get a response it's almost never going to be good enough. Alternatively, if you were able to follow the process and see your ticket being received and answered, at least you feel like you’re being taken seriously. Time goes by way faster if you’re “in the know.” Look for a help desk ticketing system that includes a customer portal or hub or portal, so your customers can keep track of their issues. As businesses they should be able to see individual as well as organization-wide tickets.

3. Collaboration Tools

Many times a problem can't be answered with a standard response, especially when supporting business customers. Your customers may stumble upon an impressively rare or bizarre scenario when using your product or service. When this happens, you want an easy way for your team to collaborate. Internal chat or social networking is a bare minimum for efficient collaboration. This allows multiple support agents (or even coworkers from other departments - like development) to work together to solve complex customers issues faster and more effectively. The ability to share screenshots and screen or video recordings directly within your help desk ticketing system can also ensure everyone, including your customers, is on the same page with the problem. Providing visual support can also improve communication between customers and agents, eliminating unnecessary confusion and speeding the ticket resolution process.

To learn more about collaborative customer support, download our white paper: 

4. Powerful Search

Your support agents should never have to spend hours rifling through pages of notes or disorganized emails to find the information they need. Nothing is worse for a dedicated customer service agent than knowing they have the right information for a customer and being unable to locate it. You may have a comprehensive knowledge base, but if your agents can't find the information held within it, it's useless.

If your ticketing system includes a powerful search engine, however, it becomes fast and easy for agents to find what they need. Think of it like Google for help desk ticketing - it searches every corner of your knowledge base, tickets, internal posts, even the wiki and chats.

5. Products Database

Your business likely sells more than one product. If so, customer issues can be difficult for team members to address if they're not experts on that product, especially when new products or versions are regularly added. Instead of having support reps spend a ton of time memorizing every product, having access to a product database within your help desk ticketing system allows all users to view every product and version (and specifically which one each customer has) so they can assist your customers to fix the issue.