Freshdesk + Freshstatus: Ticket Deflection During Major Incidents | #customersupport #supporticket

It’s just a regular Tuesday morning, your customers are their usual selves and your helpdesk agents are going about their normal day. The sun is shining bright and the birds are chirping happily. Just as you were sipping your coffee, you thought that your day was going to be like any normal one.

Fast forward five minutes: everything changed, and somehow it was not all that cheerful anymore. The phone lines are choking up, your Twitter is buzzing, and the birds’ chirps are drifting away. Customers are angrier than ever and your agents are super stressed – trying to find out where this unmanageable flurry of tickets is coming from. And then the word gets out – you’ve had downtime.

This has happened in almost every organization when faced with a major incident such as downtimes and outages. While such incidents are inevitable, you can soften the blow by responding with speed, calmness, and of course, accurate information. Other than that, having smart tools and integrations can go a long way in managing the barrage of tickets pouring in. 

One source of truth for your downtimes and maintenances 

While a well-detailed incident response plan and smart triaging with Freshdesk work wonders; having a status page that clearly communicates downtimes has become one of the most important tools to broadcast to customers of downtimes even before they have faced a bad experience.   

Wondering how to set up a status page? You can do that in no time by signing up for a free status page tool like Freshstatus by Freshworks, which helps businesses with one source of truth for all their services. For IT or DevOps teams, it doubles up as a lean Incident Communication Management tool. By logging in downtimes as ‘Incidents’ all internal stakeholders, as well as end-users, are kept in the loop during downtime or scheduled maintenance. 

The disconnect between IT/DevOps and customer support

While a status page definitely reduces the potential number of tickets coming in, it does not completely eliminate them during downtime. Customers tend to resort to raising a complaint with the support team to receive updates regularly or express the inconvenience and urgency faced by them. The last thing they want is to hear are vague reasons and unclear resolution timelines. 

Unfortunately, miscommunication between customer support and IT / DevOps teams can be rampant, especially in such time-sensitive issues, leading to poor customer support interactions. When an incident occurs, IT/ DevOps teams are usually busy figuring out the fix of the issue, rather than communicating regularly with customer support teams. This ends up opening doors to mass confusion and angrier customers.

Here’s how we bridged the gap between the two teams

We built the Freshdesk – Freshstatus integration. This integration works by creating a master ticket on Freshdesk the moment your IT/ DevOps teams log an Incident on the status page. This master ticket is also known as a Tracker. An agent gets assigned to this Tracker, and henceforth all other tickets coming in from customers about the same downtime can get tagged to this Tracker. Any Private Notes/updates on the Incident on Freshstatus gets internally broadcasted to all the related tickets, keeping the flow of information between the two teams absolutely uninterrupted so the respective agents can respond to customers instantaneously.

Freshdesk also allows you to create automation rules to broadcast Public Notes on the Master ticket to all its linked or child ticket. This helps in ensuring that all incident updates reach end-users directly without any manual interference.     

Add some swag to your support center with alert widgets

Apart from the status page, Freshstatus also allows companies to embed Status Badges and Alert Widgets onto your web pages, help centers, or apps directly. Status Badges display service availability at all times. On the other hand, the alert widgets are unmissable banners that carry all the relevant information about an incident or scheduled maintenance. The best part is that the widgets appear only when you log an incident or schedule maintenance on Freshstatus, and they go away as soon as the incident is resolved or scheduled maintenance is complete. You can automate this from Freshstatus with no coding or tech expertise. This will help reduce the number of tickets created and also bring down help desk SLAs tremendously. That’s what we call ticket deflection done like a pro!

If you’d like your IT/ DevOps teams and customer support teams to collaborate better and deliver a great experience for your customers then, sign up here to try Freshstatus with the Freshdesk integration! You can also build your own status page by signing up on Freshstatus.