Customers tend to get in touch with companies when they have problems. When there are a lot of problems with your product or service, this results in a flood of support tickets to your customer support team. This can be costly and time-consuming as agents struggle to get through the tickets. Agents may end up falling behind and queues may be long, resulting in a poor experience for your customers.
If customers have no other choice but to contact support then they will open a ticket. Your business is contractually obliged to respond to the support ticket within a set amount of time, usually according to a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Businesses usually publish the support queues online so customers can see how well they are adhering to the SLA.
Customer support teams are usually concerned with keeping support tickets down to reduce the burden on their team. It’s not an option to turn away customers so you’ll need to invest in other forms of help. There are a number of ways that you can limit support tickets from overwhelming your team.
Businesses want to deflect customer tickets with other forms of service to lighten the load on their team.
What are customer support tickets?
Customer support tickets are opened when a customer submits an inquiry to your business with an issue. They are usually logged in the help desk as unique tickets with a customer ID and they can mount up into a backlog. It’s your agents’ job to work through the tickets at a reasonably fast pace so customers can obtain timely support.
The problem comes when the backlog gets too high and customers are waiting hours or even days for a response to their support ticket. This results in decreased customer satisfaction and loyalty as customers get the impression your business doesn’t care about them enough to respond.
So when customers submit a support ticket you need to try to get back to them in a timely fashion. It’s easier to get back to customers when you have fewer support tickets so we’ll look at ways to lower the number of incoming tickets.
Customer support teams usually have a dedicated help desk to log their tickets and keep track. The help desk offers all sorts of features to help with ticket management such as assignment, status, and prioritization.
A customer support ticket is a unique ID within your help desk that refers to a particular customer inquiry.
Why do customers seek support?
Customers may seek support when they have a simple question about your business. They can’t find the answer anywhere else so they open a support ticket with your team. The easiest thing to do is contact support in these kinds of situations but they could easily be deflected. Often, it’s not necessary for customers to get in touch with support.
Customers may also have a problem with your product or service that they need help with in which case they seek help from support. They’re looking to your team to provide help or advice with troubleshooting the problem. There may be common problems that frequently send customers to support with a ticket.
Customers may be getting in touch to cancel their subscription or to return a product. In this case there may be no other way to obtain support other than to contact your support team. Customers face no choice when seeking the solution to the issue.
Customers contact support when they need some form of help from your business with regards to products and services.
Ways to reduce customer support tickets
Invest in self-service support
Self-service documentation is a great way to deflect customer tickets with a knowledge base. Customers can consult the documentation instead of opening a support ticket. They can also find the answers to basic questions in your FAQs and troubleshoot common problems using the documentation. An AI knowledge base quickly finds answers for your customers and understands natural language. Self-service support empowers customers to solve problems themselves.
Adopt a chatbot
Chatbots are a program that simulates and processes human conversation. They are perfect for fielding popular inquiries and can even handle things like returns and cancellations. Chatbots are a way to deflect support tickets from your customer support team and can easily escalate to a ticket if customers don’t find an answer. Chatbots can have conversations with your customers just like a human agent and potentially help with more inquiries.
Use an AI help desk
AI help desks can help you get through more tickets as they offer AI capabilities. AI help desks enable agents to draft answers to inquiries and change the tone of their answer to one that is more appropriate. AI assigns tickets automatically to the right agent and prioritizes the tickets. Getting through more tickets with an AI help desk is one way to reduce the number of overall tickets.
Improve the product
Improving the overall product and fixing bugs reduces the number of tickets that customers submit to your support team. If customers have fewer problems they have less need to submit a ticket. Providing a better customer experience through improving the product results in happier customers who don’t need to contact your support team. Making product improvements is a powerful way to limit the number of support tickets through removing the need to contact support.
Use in-app help
Contextual help in-app, or content inside the app, provides customers with common answers to their questions that can deflect a potential support ticket. Installing in-app help is a great way to provide answers exactly when customers need it while they are working inside your app. Contextual help is unavoidable as customers can’t help but see it during the app experience and it links straight to your documentation.
Why should companies reduce support tickets?
Reducing the number of support tickets your company receives means there is more team for agents to work on other tasks. These other tasks may be more complex tickets or they may be administrative tasks necessary for the effective running of the team.
You’re able to shorten the ticket queue and reduce wait times so that only customers with essential tickets can quickly obtain the help that they need. Eliminating unnecessary tickets results in better productivity for your support team.
Customers are happier when you provide them with self-service options that removes the need to contact support.
Conclusion
Customers will always need to contact your business for support. But it’s your job to reduce the number of support tickets through various methods, including self-service, chatbots, and improving the overall product.
Fewer support tickets means customer support agents can devote extra time to handling each inquiry and frees them up for the more complex queries that actually require an agent.
Customers are happier when you provide ways for them to solve their own queries and prevent the need to contact an agent. Great customer service improves satisfaction, loyalty and repeat purchases, so investing in ways for customers to help themselves will help with business success.
Deflecting more customer tickets returns more time for your agents and a higher level of agent satisfaction. Reducing the workload means you can employ fewer agents to serve the same number of customers because fewer will need to get in touch with inquiries.
