Hints and Tips | | Published May 21, 2015

Ticket Tags: 6 Ways to Categorize Tickets in Customer Support

Customer support software often comes with a tagging feature – a way to tag similar support requests with keywords and group them together. But not all Support teams use this handy support ticket categorization feature to it’s fullest potential.

For ideas and inspiration, we asked a few stellar Customer Support teams how they use ticket tags. Here’s what they told us:hand_cursor

Get the Lay of the Land (At a Glance!) – Scanning tags is a great way to psych yourself up for the start of your day. If you’ve grabbed your coffee, pulled up your TeamSupport app and see that most of your ticket tags are about a certain subject, then you’re prepared to put on your customer support hat and start digging into tickets.

Guidance in Quickly Answering Questions – As a Support Rep, your overarching goal is to quickly and easily clear those tickets as efficiently as you can. One CSR here at Team Support told us that if she runs into an issue or wants to see how another rep dealt with a specific problem she simply clicks the tag and all the info is there. You can also filter and perform advanced searches within a set of tagged tickets.

Generate Reports – Is a certain question cropping up over and over again?  Or does the Boss want to see a report on current support issues? You can generate reports based on tags in your system. Pro Tip: If your business is seasonal, run a report to find out which tags you used the most this time last year. It will help you prepare for the next onslaught.  There are plenty of other ways to use tagging to generate reports for planning, training, and even budgeting.

Build Your Knowledge Base – Tagging allows you to see trends start to crop up. From there, you can take proactive steps to support your customers before their issue even becomes a support ticket. This may mean writing up a new article in your customer support knowledge base or even working with product managers to correct an issue with the product itself.

Do Your Sales and Marketing Team a Favor – Your sales and marketing team is always trying to identify customer pain points in order to sell more products. Sales and customer support have a circular relationship so let them know if you notice a certain trend in tagging. You might just help them close the next sale!

Identify Support Superstars – Customer support specialists are the consummate Jacks and Jills of all trades, but sometimes a support rep really excels in one area. If, as a customer support manager, you notice that one rep is really killing it on answering tickets with a certain tag, you can use automation to make sure other similar tickets are assigned to them so they can work their magic on them, too. Better yet, you can give them kudos and recognition for their great customer service work!

 

Do you use your support software’s tagging system for something else? Let us know in the comments!