Automated ticketing system

High volumes of customer support requests can easily cause agents to fall behind. Aside from taking a toll on customer satisfaction, this can lead to burnout amongst customer service representatives and lower job satisfaction.

The good news is that your reps don’t have to burden themselves by taking on all support requests – according to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2024, 51% of customers prefer AI agents over humans when they want immediate service. Implementing an AI-powered ticketing system can help you manage this increased demand effectively, ensuring rapid resolutions and freeing up skilled agents to focus on more meaningful tasks.

Follow along in this guide as we compare different automated ticketing software. Additionally, we’ll provide ticketing system tips on implementation, features to consider and more.

More in this guide:

• What is an automated ticketing system?
• What’s the impact of AI ticketing systems on businesses?
• Features of automated ticketing software
• Benefits of automated ticketing software
• How to implement automated ticketing software
• The 10 best automated ticketing software
• Frequently asked questions
• Try the Zendesk automated ticketing system for free

An automated ticketing system is software that uses automation and AI to help support teams deliver fast and personalised support at scale, while lowering operational costs and increasing efficiency.

The best automated ticketing systems don’t just keep a record of customer enquiries – they help manage all kinds of customer support requests. Automated ticketing systems can open tickets with contextual information and automatically route them to the most appropriate agent.

Leading automated ticketing and request management systems come with AI agents that can independently resolve customer enquiries. They also seamlessly integrate with your support team’s workflows, offering AI-powered insights and recommendations to enhance service effectiveness.

AI has completely changed the customer experience (CX) and how businesses approach customer support. CX leaders are leveraging the expansive potential of generative AI to humanise the customer journey across touchpoints, making it more personable, swift, friendly, conversational and tailored. According to the Zendesk CX Trends Report, 69% of organisations believe generative AI can help humanise digital interactions.

Meanwhile, 70% say AI makes every digital customer interaction more efficient. For example, AI solutions like Zendesk AI can automate up to 80% of customer interactions. As a result, customers receive faster support, agents gain time to focus on more engaging work and your business saves time and money. Our CX Trends Report also revealed that 83% of CX leaders already using generative AI in CX report a positive ROI.

There are some key features to look for when considering automated ticketing systems. Not every system will have all these features, but the best ones will – like Zendesk.

Workflow automation

Workflow automation tools help improve your support team’s efficiency, ensuring you meet your service level agreements (SLAs). For example, Zendesk intelligent triage categorises and routes interactions based on intent, sentiment and language. Additionally, omnichannel routing can route requests based on agent skill, capacity, status and ticket priority.

AI and automation can also streamline agent workflows through several actions:

• Suggesting pre-written responses to customer requests
• Notifying agents when an assigned ticket remains unresolved
• Automatically closing tickets after a specific time period

These are just a few examples of how these technologies can make previously manual processes more efficient.

AI knowledge bases

The smartest ticketing systems streamline self-service with AI knowledge bases. They flag common topics based on ticket data, helping agents write relevant help centre content. Additionally, they leverage generative AI to accelerate content creation – agents can expand a few words to complete paragraphs. AI-powered knowledge bases also facilitate self-service through intuitive search features and AI-driven recommendations, giving customers quick access to FAQs, troubleshooting guides and tutorials.

AI agents

AI agents, also known as advanced chatbots, help deflect tickets and collect customer information. These agents automatically detect what customers want and respond to basic and complex enquiries in your brand’s voice and tone. A no-code bot builder makes this technology accessible to companies that may not have the resources to build or acquire one otherwise.

AI reporting tools

If you’re going to use AI, you should also use tools that measure its impact. AI reporting tools provide visibility into every interaction and deliver key insights to track agent performance, identify areas of improvement and inspire ideas for improving the customer experience. They can also highlight which features to automate next.

Agent assistance and copilot tools

AI can also guide agents through customer interactions. For example, it can automatically shift the tone of their messages, expand their replies and offer insights into what each customer is feeling and thinking to save agents time. Plus, ticketing systems can identify and group similar tickets so agents can see how other reps resolved a related issue.

QA and WFM

In addition to automating tasks for agents handling tickets, automated ticketing systems also offer valuable automations for admins and managers overseeing operations.

AI-driven workforce management (WFM) and quality assurance (QA) tools can help you better track and improve agent performance and productivity. QA tools can evaluate customer interactions across channels to spotlight knowledge gaps, while WFM tools help you optimise your operations by forecasting staffing needs and ensuring schedule adherence.

You need a ticketing system that supports, not inhibits, your operations. The best automated ticketing software allows you to do more with fewer resources and maximise support efficiency.

Decreased operational costs

Automating your ticket-handling process allows you to handle far greater ticket volumes than possible without AI. Plus, you increase your capacity to address support requests with fewer resources –keeping your operational costs down while ramping up support.

Increased productivity

Automated ticketing systems improve productivity by taking over manual, time-consuming processes. For example, they can automatically generate and share reports with key stakeholders. Additionally, AI agents can resolve customer requests independently, giving your human agents time back for more engaging work.

Improved agent satisfaction

Automating routine tasks allows your support team to focus on more stimulating projects, boosting job satisfaction and reducing burnout. Additionally, AI-powered workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions identify training opportunities that help agents enhance their skills and grow in their roles – thereby increasing retention – and highlight top performers. This enables you to reward exceptional agents and further boost morale.

Higher quality support at scale

By assisting your agents, automated ticketing systems can improve both the speed and quality of your customer service. For instance, the Zendesk agent copilot provides real-time, contextually relevant suggestions and automations, enabling your support team to resolve customer issues more efficiently and effectively.

You can implement fully optimised ticketing software in five steps.

1. Identify your automation needs

Analyse historical ticket data to identify areas of your support operations that are ripe for automation. Key metrics to consider include:

• The most common types of support requests
• Average ticket volume
• Resources required for resolution
• Average resolution time

With this understanding, you can strategically tailor your ticketing system to specific goals. For example, you might want to increase your first response time by 25%.

2. Choose a ticketing system

Research and select an automated ticketing software that fits your requirements. Consider factors like time to value, scalability and total cost of ownership.

3. Create ticket automation rules

Once you select a ticket management system and fully understand your business needs, the next step is to set up ticket automation rules.

Some ways you can automate ticketing and create more dynamic workflows include:

• Leveraging skills-based routing
• Using standardised inputs and fields
• Setting and managing service level agreements (SLAs)
• Using triggers to minimise repetitive tasks

Every automation aims to optimise operations for efficiency, giving your team valuable time back to focus on non-manual tasks.

4. Build a knowledge base

Harnessing a knowledge base is a rapid method for implementing ticket automation. By connecting your AI agent to your knowledge base, it can swiftly access support articles to promptly address customer enquiries and relay relevant details within seconds.

AI-powered tools can also help you write knowledge base content faster. For example, Zendesk AI can turn a few bullet points into a complete article and adjust the tone to better meet your brand voice.

5. Create pre-written responses

Pre-written responses are ready-to-go replies to simple yet common questions. You can also use these standardised responses in ‘no-reply’ situations to speed up response times.

For example, you can compose a pre-written response to let customers know you’re working on their ticket or you’re closing a conversation due to a lack of response.

You can create a pre-written response by:

• Addressing the customer by name
• Re-stating the situation
• Explaining the next steps
• Providing a way for the customer to follow up
• Signing off with a real agent’s name

AI can also suggest pre-written responses to automate based on ticket context.

6. Monitor and adjust

Once the system is in place, monitor its performance and gather feedback from customers and agents. Use this information to adjust and optimise the system for better efficiency and user satisfaction.

We’ve provided a comprehensive overview of 10 automated ticketing systems, including their key features, pricing and free trial options.

1. Zendesk

Zendesk is the complete customer service solution for the AI era, boasting AI that’s pre-trained on the industry’s largest dataset. Unlike other automated ticketing systems, Zendesk is fast to set up and easy to use, so you can get started on day one and keep costs low.

Zendesk AI agents are adept at understanding and resolving a wide array of customer interactions, freeing human agents to focus on high-value tasks. Additionally, intelligent workflow tools help admins streamline service operations. For example, you can route customer requests based on sentiment, language, intent, agent skill, capacity, status and conversion priority.

Furthermore, Zendesk empowers agents with AI assistance tools. They get the full context behind every interaction within their workspace, including insights into customer sentiment and intent. AI can also summarise customer conversations, surface similar tickets, make macro suggestions and more, enabling agents to deliver faster support. Meanwhile, our agent copilot takes a proactive approach, presenting agents with suggested responses and actions based on customer queries, which agents can customise before sending.

Finally, Zendesk offers automations for admins and managers who are running operations. Zendesk WFM and QA tools leverage AI to help you increase your team’s productivity and enhance your CX. With these WEM solutions, you can easily gain visibility into agent activity, identify coaching opportunities and foster workforce engagement through systematic feedback.

Features:

• Easy-to-set-up workflow automations
• Real-time reporting and analytics
• Agent copilot with agent assistance
• AI agents
• QA and WFM tools
• Intelligent triage and routing
• Omnichannel support
• AI knowledge bases
• Enterprise-grade security and privacy controls
• 1,500+ apps and integrations

Pricing: plans start at $19 per agent/month, billed annually. A 14-day free trial is available.

Explore more Zendesk pricing plans.

2. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is Zoho’s built-in ticket management system for customer support workflows. This ticketing software works across various customer channels with omnichannel support. When a customer submits a ticket, Zoho Desk automatically classifies it by urgency, topic or product. This routes enquiries to the most qualified agent.

Zoho Desk also utilises its proprietary AI assistant, Zia, to automate repetitive tasks. Zia deflects tickets by directing customers to informative help centre articles. She can then report to system administrators on any insufficient documentation to ensure they’re aware of gaps in the existing knowledge base.

Features:

• Omnichannel compatibility
• AI agent for knowledge base help
• Automatic ticket tagging
• Customer sentiment analysis
• Low-code guided conversations

Pricing: paid plans start at $7 per user/month, billed annually. A free plan and a 15-day free trial are available.

Recommended reading: learn how Zoho integrates with Zendesk and how Zendesk vs. Zoho compare.

3. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is Freshworks’ help desk solution. When customers submit tickets, Freshdesk routes them based on predefined rules. Depending on your customer support needs, these rules can relate to urgency, topic or product so the query finds an agent with relevant experience to address it. Freshdesk also offers automation features for repetitive tasks and integrates with third-party knowledge base solutions.

Though Freshdesk has AI features, they aren’t uniform across its products and require manual training, which makes the solution less scalable. According to a study from Nucleus Research, users who moved from Freshdesk to Zendesk saw benefits like a 42% decrease in first response time and a 27% decrease in average handling time.

Features:

• Intelligent routing
• SLA management
• Canned and suggested responses
• Scenario automation

Pricing: paid plans start at $15 per agent/month, billed annually. A free plan and a 14-day free trial are available.

Recommended reading: learn how Zendesk vs. Freshdesk compare.

4. LiveAgent

LiveAgent’s ticketing system has automatic ticket distribution for agents. It can route incoming tickets to different departments or team members based on rules you set, such as trigger keywords within the ticket itself. LiveAgent’s automated system tags the ticket and sends it to the corresponding party.

LiveAgent’s automated ticketing solution can condense inbound customer communications from email, phone calls, website chat messages, social media mentions and more in a central location. It can also suggest pre-written responses to inbound messages and use collision detection to prevent multiple agents from simultaneously working on the same ticket.

Features:

• Agent collision detection
• Agent performance ranking
• Automated ticket distribution
• Pre-written messages and responses
• Hybrid, multichannel ticket stream

Pricing: paid plans start at $9 per agent/month, billed annually. A 14- or 30-day free trial is available. A free plan with limited features is also available.

Recommended reading: learn how Zendesk vs. LiveAgent compare.

5. HubSpot Ticketing System

HubSpot primarily focuses on marketing but also offers a ticketing system. Its free tier includes limited access to certain ticket management features and email automations. Ticket automation stems from email and chat channels, where HubSpot generates a ticket, tags it and routes it to the appropriate agent.

HubSpot also has internal and external knowledge bases for employee and customer support. The paid packages include more reporting and analytics tools, such as data-driven dashboards. Agents can also set up automated notifications to inform customers about ticket status.

Features:

• Shared inbox
• Simple ticket automation
• Conversation routing
• Email and in-app chat support
• Knowledge base
• Data-driven dashboards

Pricing: paid plans start at $15 per seat/month, billed annually. A free plan is available.

Recommended reading: learn how HubSpot integrates with Zendesk and how Zendesk vs. HubSpot compare.

6. SupportBee

SupportBee’s ticketing system is a collaboration tool for interdepartmental support on customer tickets. It analyses incoming tickets based on pre-determined factors and automatically assigns them a priority level. It has collision detection that routes tickets away from busy agents and ensures no two agents work on the same ticket.

The platform also has an integrated knowledge base, a customer portal and a shared inbox. Users can set up multiple knowledge bases. SupportBee offers some no-code customisation options and third-party integrations.

Features:

• Shared inbox
• Integrated knowledge base
• Customer web portal
• Mobile ticketing system
• Easy installation

Pricing: paid plans start at $13 per user/month, billed annually. A free plan and a 14-day free trial are available.

7. TeamSupport

TeamSupport is a B2B customer service solution with ticket management functionality. It offers various no-code third-party integrations. It also features SLA management tools and templates to define and track SLAs at different levels, such as individual customer accounts, product lines or specific ticket types.

TeamSupport includes basic automation functionality for customer support tickets, primarily focused on repetitive tasks. Its Macro functionality allows agents to create predefined workflows that can be triggered manually or automatically based on specific criteria. A live chat support function powered by AI and ML engages with simple customer enquiries.

Features:

• Email integration
• Ticket automation
• Customisable workflows
• Knowledge base article suggestions
• Sentiment analysis

Pricing: plans start at $19 per agent/month.

8. HappyFox

HappyFox is a cloud-based ticketing system built for operations teams. HappyFox has a Smart Rules feature to automate basic support communications and simple agent duties. It also offers automations for recurring tasks and editable templates for frequently encountered issues. Agents can modify templates with pre-written text, attachments and specific ticket fields.

HappyFox provides customised ticket queues to analyse customer conversations from multiple channels, such as email, social media, chat and phone. Users can set up auto-timers to track resolution times, understand trends, pull data from integrated apps and direct customers to self-service resources.

Features:

• Ticket tagging and sorting
• Omnichannel ticketing
• Private note collaboration
• Pre-written replies
• Anti-agent collision

Pricing: plans start at $29 per agent/month, billed annually.

Recommended reading: learn how HappyFox integrates with Zendesk.

9. Jira Service Management

Jira Service Management by Atlassian is an automated ticketing system for legal, IT, HR and other teams. It offers prebuilt service desk templates for different use cases, each equipped with pre-configured workflows, automations and fields. Jira can also tag and categorise tickets based on keywords, send email notifications to customers upon receiving a ticket and assign tickets to specific agents based on availability and skill sets.

Users can leverage integrations to import communications from their typical messaging applications or customise their software view. In addition to imports, Jira Service Management requires integrations for collaboration, task management, compliance, productivity, planning, self-service, reporting and pipeline needs. Many add-on features cost an additional charge per seat.

Features:

• Request management
• Organised customer interactions
• Customer support integrations
• Ticket resolution metrics
• Repetitive task automations

Pricing: paid plans start at $22.05 per agent/month. A free plan and a seven-day free trial are available.

Recommended reading: learn how Jira integrates with Zendesk and how Zendesk vs. Jira Service Management compare.

10. Web Help Desk by SolarWinds

SolarWinds offers a ticketing system that integrates with multiple communication channels. It allows ticket routing based on configurable rules. Technicians can define rules to automatically escalate tickets that haven’t received a response or progressed beyond a specific stage within a certain time frame.

With SolarWinds, businesses can build a service desk to customise specifications for issue tracking, IT management, change management and employee or customer self-service. SolarWinds Web Help Desk also integrates with external knowledge base solutions, enabling users to add features like article suggestions based on ticket keywords.

Features:

• Machine learning
• Ticket classification and routing automation
• Centralised support requests
• Service desk dashboard
• Customised reports

Pricing: plans start at $426 per year for up to five named users. A 14-day free trial is available.

Recommended reading: learn how SolarWinds integrates with Zendesk.

Learn the answers to the most common questions about automated ticketing.

Why does your business need an automated ticketing system?

Omnichannel customer service ticketing systems can open problem tickets and use skills-based routing to ensure all customer issues get in front of the right agent for the job. They can also track open tickets, escalate tickets with unresolved issues, send surveys when tickets close and perform repetitive tasks when a pre-defined trigger occurs.

Why is automation an important part of a ticketing system?

An automated ticketing system for customer service has some serious potential to speed up ticket resolution times. Automated ticketing systems and chatbots provide quick answers to most support queries and can make representatives more readily available to handle tougher issues that the robots can’t.

An automated ticketing system can also:

• Lower payroll costs
• Free up specialised agents to focus on complex issues
• Deflect basic or repetitive issues to prevent agent burnout
• Speed up resolution times by collecting essential customer data
• Facilitate cross-team collaboration by documenting conversation history in a centralised database

What are some best practices for ticket automation?

Here are nine best practices that businesses should follow after adopting an automated ticketing system:

1. Rely on AI chatbots to handle simple tasks and collect customer information.
2. Train agents to make the most of your automated ticketing system.
3. Document your strategy for ticket prioritisation.
4. Ensure tickets are always organised and up-to-date.
5. Understand your system’s automation capabilities.
6. Create pre-written responses for repetitive messages.
7. Use SLA management capabilities to meet contractual obligations.
8. Monitor ticket statuses and reward high-performing agents.
9. Send a survey to the customer after you close the ticket.