Support tickets are the foundation of customer support, nothing works without it. The idea of tickets is simple - a customer has a concern about your product or service, they raise that concern in the form of a ticket which gets assigned to a customer support agent. The agent then needs to address that concern and resolve it as quickly, politely, and with as little back-and-forth as possible such as to ensure that the customer doesn’t go through a bad experience.
Sounds simple, but the challengers only uncover themselves when things scale. More customers mean more tickets and more tickets mean more workload on each agent to resolve those queries. But that’s not the kicker - if you receive two tickets at once, or, if you have a backlog of tickets, how do you decide which one to solve first? Sure, you can continue resolving them one after another without paying much attention to order or priority, but your customers are waiting. A lot hangs in the balance when your customer service becomes questionable; you face the risk of churn and loss of business. What’s more, some concerns are a lot more severe than others. In critical cases, your customer’s entire functioning depends on you resolving their issue, so, how can you not prioritize that over other issues?
The idea of faster resolutions has more to do with structure than mostly anything else. You can use tools and tech stacks that aid in resolving tickets faster but that is but a catalyst, not the foundation.
Before you can do anything else, you need a place where you can manage all the tickets, get a view of them, respond to them, resolve them, revisit them, and organize them. This is the first step to having a structured approach to ticket resolution. What a lot of teams don’t realize is the time taken to search and find tickets which contributes to a major part of a support agent’s day-to-day, not amounting to a commendable effort-to-reward ratio. If you do this let’s say with emails, that turns into an unmanageable system quickly, eventually resulting in losses from unproductive use of man hours.
This is where you need to start by including a ticketing system in your tech stack and that serves as an instrumental part of resolving tickets faster because you have one single tool that gives you complete control of the inflow of tickets - from assigning, resolving, delegating, to revisiting, and searching - everything becomes tenfold easier and faster if you have a ticketing platform. Some great tools to think of are Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Intercom.
Triaging is the idea of prioritizing tickets based on factors like the intensity of the issue, when was the ticket raised, criticality, and complexity. When you have a certain system in place where tickets are triaged and prioritized based on these external factors. Better triaging will help agents save time on sorting through tickets and focus on resolutions which will improve drastically as well.
But not just for agents, triaging is also the answer to better customer satisfaction despite an increase in issues raised. And customer satisfaction is only accounted for when you help resolve concerns that are of higher severity faster, reassuring the customers that they can, in fact, depend on you for great service.
A great way to ensure that tickets are resolved faster is to keep your agents updated and trained on the product or service you offer. If your agents are not equipped to handle the queries, having the systems and triaging tickets won’t be enough to ensure swift resolutions. A lot of the decision-making still falls on your agents who need to be aware of the query that’s been asked, how you approach it, and help the customer get to a conclusion without a lot of back-and-forth. This can be achieved by giving your agents continuous training, updating them on new features, and make familiar with the product or service up-front.
In a recent report published by Intercom, it was stated that 61% of the customers preferred to opt for the faster responses of AI vs waiting to speak with a customer support agent. Like it or not, AI is changing the landscape for customer service and customer’s expectations have skyrocketed in the past year. They want prompt resolutions and better self-service options so they don’t have to reach out to agents unless it’s necessary.
Improving self-serve options entails a few things from your side as a customer support team. Begin by creating and bullet-proofing your knowledge base which is a two-way street i.e. not only does it help customers find most of the answers to their questions in your help center but also serves as the go-to place for finding and curating answers for your agents.
With AI, you can now also have AI-enabled chatbots that can resolve most customer concerns on their own, without having to interrupt agents. This way, agents have lesser ticket volume to take care of, leading to better overall customer service where agents don’t feel burnt out and customers can have great experiences. What's more, these chatbots have the ability to assign the concern to a support agent if the customer isn’t satisfied with the answer or specifically wants to talk to an agent.
According to the same report, almost 68% of C-suite leaders believe that customer retention has become increasingly difficult because customer expectations are at an all-time high. AI in customer support has seen unexpected growth in the last year. None of us were prepared for it but that's also arguably the beauty of it. Adaptability is the greatest currency of growth and that's evident with the current state of customer support.
Almost half (45%) of support teams have already started using AI solutions - from customer chatbots to AI-powered agent assist solutions that have, in a way, redefined how efficient support can be. Enabling your support teams the convenience to offer better support with tools that cut down the time taken to search, understand, and curate answers is perhaps one of the best ways in which you can be on top of this AI revolution. Not only does this immensely benefit agent productivity but also accounts for higher customer expectations that have skyrocketed lately.
Threado AI is an instant and accurate AI assistance for support teams that helps connect your entire knowledge base and significantly cuts down the time taken to search, understand, and curate answers. Threado AI can be trained flexibly across your entire database through links, docs, sheets, and integrations. It can craft perfect answers based on the resources it’s been trained on reference the sources that validate accuracy and help your teams find links faster.
It’s versatile and is available wherever your team is. Get AI-generated answers, automated ticket summaries, and conversational support within Slack, a Chrome extension that sits on top of your favorite ticketing tools, and a web chat. What’s more, it can be set up in minutes. Threado AI is one of the easiest tools to train, test, customize, integrate with your favorite apps including Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, HubSpot, Confluence, and Notion, and install across your favorite channels.
Signup to Threado AI if you haven’t already.
Connect and train Threado AI on your entire knowledge base through links, sheets, docs, and integrate your favorite apps like Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, HubSpot, Confluence, and Notion.
Install the Chrome plugin and you can use the AI Assist launcher as a tool to summarize tickets, get auto-suggested replies for customer tickets, expand or shorten responses, personalize them, or rephrase them.
With Threado AI, you can provide support to your teams wherever they are. Slack is one of the most popularly used platforms for team communication and Threado AI answers queries automatically on channels where it has been installed when a team member posts a question.
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Your support side-kick
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