Issue Management | | Published June 23, 2017

Bug Tracking System: How Customer Support Software Helps

If you’re a software company, you know tracking bugs can sure be a pain. After testing a new software feature to death, you finally decide to roll it out to every user but unfortunately the new feature has spawned bugs all over your software. Tickets are flying in left and right as your support team scrambles to understand the bugs and their impact on your business. But what if there was an easier way? Let’s look at the specifics of bug tracking and how customer support software can help.

What is bug tracking?

Simply put, software companies use bug tracking software because it assists in keeping track of incorrect or missing functionality in a piece of software. While similar to “issue tracking”, it’s a more real world and unpretty definition in the sense many people instinctively want to remove or destroy a bug as soon as they see it. These bugs exist in code that’s supposed to be clean and operational, similar to an insect scurrying across a spotless wood floor. It’s not meant to be there and just when you think you got rid of it, who knows when one may reappear in the future.

How can customer support software help?

Bug tracking by customer – Obviously, you’d like to remove all bugs from every area of your software, but sometimes resources and time can be limited. This is where customer management software can really make a difference in customer management by adding and organizing bug tracking within tickets and associating them to a specific customer. Instead of just trying to fix the biggest or smallest bugs first, look at your largest customers and see if any bugs are really troubling them and decreasing their satisfaction with your software. Big customers are important for company growth and keeping them happy is vital to the long-term success of a business.

Aggregating bugs by ticket volume – As bug requests come in, sometimes it’s just easier to ignore them or “sweep them under the rug” so to speak in hopes they will get squashed eventually. Another way customer support software can help with bug tracking is to provide clear visibility into the ticket volume associated with specific bugs. This enables you to track each bug to see if there’s been an increase or decrease in the number of issues so you can truly quantify if a new feature or fix has stopped certain bugs from appearing.

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Integrations with bug tracking systems – Should you choose to use a software specifically for bug tracking (such as Jira), linking this system with customer support software makes complete sense. Not only will bug information be transferred over from the support software to the bug tracking system, but key information including how happy a customer is with your business and the number of open tickets the customer has can also be shared. This information is important when looking at the progress of bug fixes so you can see what bugs are directly tied to “at risk” customers.

 

In short, bug tracking is fixing existing software functionality and there are several different ways customer support software can help. From tracking bugs by customer and ticket volume to sharing key information with your bug tracking software, the link between the two pieces of software is a natural fit. Bug tracking is only increasing in popularity as the world relies more on software than ever before, so it’s important to understand right now how bug tracking will impact your business both now and in the future.