Consistent Customer Service: the Ticketing System

The growing number of channels customers now have at their disposal, while often convenient for the customer, can make it difficult to provide customers with consistent service. For years, many companies only allowed their customers to create support requests via web forms, which often forced customers to fill in required fields, such as their account number or service plan. This helped ensure the responding support agent had all the necessary context to provide support but was not always a great experience for the customer. Some prefer the immediacy of a phone call or brevity of a Tweet. Now agents are forced to respond to support requests that come in a variety of formats, many of which lack the requisite contextual data.

What's more, the different formats can’t “speak” to each other, so if a customer emails a complaint to a company, then publicly Tweets the complaint, it’s entirely possible that two separate agents will respond to the customer without either one realising it. Also, that data is never captured for further use, making it impossible for support agents to refer to previous service issues with that customer.

A ticketing system allows customers to contact a company via their preferred channel. It also ensures support agents are set up for success with a consistent view into the customers—including contextual data and previous support requests—within a highly organised system that tracks all relevant data over time, allowing teams to learn and improve the support they provide.

Any company that does not use a support ticket system should begin doing so immediately. Until that happens:

• Customer support requests created via channels the company is not tracking will go unnoticed.
• Customer data will go untracked, making it difficult to provide efficient or customised support. In fact, every time a customer contacts a company, from the company’s point of view, it will seem like their first interaction with the customer. That’s not how relationships are built!
• Bug-tracking will be mostly impossible.