Ticketing Systems: The First Step to a Superior Customer Experience

Providing exceptional customer service is a must if you wish to retain customers and boost revenues. Unfortunately, today’s business world is cluttered with so many “productivity tools” and solutions that it is increasingly difficult to quickly understand and personally serve each customer. There are so many aspects to consider when it comes to ensuring a rewarding customer experience. Because the customer journey can be complex, what companies need is a solution that brings together all of the customer data in one place and enables customer service teams to enhance the customer experience by meeting needs quickly. Ticketing systems are one way to meet these needs.

A ticket system (also called a ticketing system or help-desk ticketing system) is a solution most often used to handle customer service requests. A ticket system is a solution that assigns each customer and their service request a specific ticket. The best ticketing systems gather information about customers and their unique issues and organise it in a way that allows it to be seen and utilised by a customer service representative. When a ticket system is open source it means that the software’s source code is open and available to distribute, change, or improve. The advantage of open-source software is that it allows for collaboration and improvement when multiple outside developers come together to work on it. It’s possible, however, that open-source solutions are underdeveloped when they are released to the public, meaning a steeper learning curve, difficulty implementing the solution, and decreased user-friendliness. Paid solutions are typically more robust and better developed. While an open-source ticket system may often be cheap or even free, it often fails to deliver the functionality and intuitive experience that paid solutions do.

A ticketing system is important for a number of different reasons. Some of the most important reasons to implement a ticketing system include:

• Improved organisation
• Improved customer experience
• Individualised customer service
• Improved customer retention
• Increased revenue

Ticketing systems can improve organisation.

Staying organised is one of the first steps to serving the customer. Having the right ticketing system can help you keep all your customer concerns organised and enable you to serve each customer according to their needs. There’s no need to waste time manually inputting customer concerns or information. Instead, find a solution that sorts and stores their concerns in a way that will help you best service them.

Ticketing systems improve customer experience.

Customers are what keep your company afloat. It should come as no secret, then, that ensuring a rich and rewarding customer experience across all touchpoints is vital. In today’s world, the customer experience has never been more important. In fact, one study found that the customer experience will supercede price and product as the main brand differentiator by the year 2020. Ticketing systems allow you to deeply understand and track customer concerns, enabling you to deliver a superior customer experience.

Ticketing systems enable individualised customer service.

Customer experience is built on individual customer service interactions. Treating each customer as the meaningful important person they are will help them feel you care. Each customer concern should be solved quickly and courteously. If customers don’t feel their voices or concerns are heard, they will find it easy to switch from you to another service provider. Companies’ failure to deliver exceptional customer service does result in financial concerns due to customers switching. In fact, it has been found that companies in the United States lose $1.6 trillion dollars annually due to customers switching because of poor customer service.

Ticketing systems improve customer retention.

The whole aim of enhancing the customer experience is to retain customers. Retaining a customer is so much easier than acquiring a new one. In fact, it’s been shown that acquiring new customers can cost five to 25 times as much as retaining existing customers.

Ticketing systems lead to increased revenue.

Providing a superior customer experience through individualised customer service increases revenue. Research shows that companies that create better customer experiences see their revenues increase 4% to 8%, compared to the rest of the market. But ticket systems do more than just boost the chances of customer happiness by storing information and tracking the whole customer service experience; they also eliminate lost time and superfluous resources that are often used to track customer service requests.

Not all ticketing systems are the same. It’s important to look for a ticketing system that is robust enough to truly enhance the customer journey and provide value beyond simply gathering information. The best ticketing systems have some of the following features in common:

• Process automation
• Individualised case management
• Integrated learning resources

Process Automation

The customer service process includes many mundane and repetitive tasks. You’ll want a ticketing system that eliminates these tasks as much as possible. An automated system that handles routine and repeating tasks will provide your customer service reps with more bandwidth to personally interact with customers and better serve them. Not only that, the automated processes will often help filter each customer to the right service rep or department, eliminating time spent on the line and enhancing the overall quality of service.

Individualised Case Management

An effective ticketing system will enable you to easily assign the right customer support specialist to each person or case. The ability to manage each case that comes through will enable a more highly customised and beneficial customer service experience for each and every customer. The best ticketing systems include available artificial intelligence (AI) integrations that enable each unique concern to be routed to the correct agent automatically.

Integrated Learning Resources

The best companies support their customer service representatives by giving them access to the knowledge base they need to efficiently and thoroughly respond to customer concerns. Some ticketing systems will enable you to integrate into the system the answers to complex questions. The ability to build on a robust knowledge base will enable you to store FAQ and knowledge about products and processes in one secure place where customer service reps can easily access it.