6 Ways to Organize Customer Support Tickets
The topic of how to organize your customer support tickets can lead to some debate among team members. Here are 6 ways we at TeamSupport recommend organizing customer issues with support ticket software:
1. Severity
Severity is one of the most common ways to organize support tickets. While we'd like to think all tickets are the same, the truth is they just aren't. The bigger issues get addressed first, and the more minor stuff gets taken care of at a later date,
Generally 3-5 levels of severity work well - too few and your customer will mark stuff as severe that isn't, too many and it is confusing. Finding a good balance can take time.
2. SLAs (Severice Level Agreements)
SLAs, or Service Level Agreements, are the agreed upon terms between two businesses for the standards of service. Sometimes this can mean offering support for certain times of day, other times it can state who works on what tickets and how quickly they are expected to respond. SLAs are common in B2B (business-to-business) customer support.
B2B software can be a big help here, enabling certain tickets to be routed to certain agents as needed. Meeting SLAs is very important as it is often directly tied to the success of the relationship between two companies.
3. Product/Brand
This is an important way for companies that have multiple product lines or brands. For example, a large company like Amazon doesn't want support tickets for its array of businesses getting mixed up.
It also allows brands to deal with tickets the way they want to and doesn't necessarily confine them to a corporate structure, A light-hearted brand like Zappos can be more whimsical with their support than, say, the Amazon Marketplace.
4. Customer Size/Revenue
The big fish needs to eat first, right? This is the motto of some companies that organize and prioritize tickets by customer size and revenue. Bigger customers are simply more valuable in B2B and some businesses think they should be a higher priority for support.
Be smart when deploying this method though and don't forget about smaller customers, especially in the era of online reviews and ratings, Extra slow response times can hurt a support reputation.
5. Ticket Type
This works well when there are lots of "specialists" on your customer support team. Instead of just throwing tickets into a general pool and having a free for all, customer support software automatically routes a ticket to a specific agent or group of agents. The software can even enable agents to instantly close multiple tickets with the same resolution.
This is beneficial and cost effective because agents who specialize in a certain type of issue can generally solve them faster. The downside is if there's a lot of a particular issue, it can be tough to find assistance within the support team if nobody is cross-trained to help with the issue that is in high demand.
6. Support Channel
Some B2B customer support operations are still not trained to handle multi-channel inquires. This generally forces support teams to handle tickets by support channel, with the most popular channels being email, phone, and online through live chat and social media.
This tactic can still be effective at low volumes but it can really struggle as ticket volumes surge, meaning an increase in support tickets via one channel (such as phone) can keep an agent busy all day while an email support agent may not have nearly the workload.
To wrap up, these ways of organizing tickets work for many companies around the world. If you're not sure what to do, feel free to organize your tickets one way and give it a shot. The best part about a comprehensive support ticket software solution is it's easy to change to a different way if you want to!
