12 Must-Have Features of a Good Help Desk Ticketing System | #customersupport #supporticket

What makes customer support software great? These solutions require more than just dedicated customer support teams – without the necessary features, a ticketing software solution is hampering your efforts. Ticketing software goes far beyond just addressing customer issues, it forms the backbone of customer support operations. So what must-have features make a great customer support ticketing system that ensures success with your customers? 

1. Ticket automation – You can’t go far without robust automation capabilities in today’s world, regardless of industry. Automation can perform many tasks, streamline your support operations, and significantly boost the effectiveness of your customer support team. Basic automated operations vary from reminders to routing tickets to specific agents.

2. Service Level Agreement (SLA) status information – The first time your support team looks at a ticket, they have to gauge the urgency of the ticket and prioritize its solving among others. This can be cumbersome and all too prone to human error. With direct help desk SLA information right in the ticketing system, it’s easier to prioritize tickets and avoid any potential SLA violations.

3. Ticket tags – With tagging you can easily organize tickets and quickly identify common issues. Ticket tags can also be of great use smack in the middle of tickets by enabling you to automatically recommend Knowledge Base articles – depending on the specific tags assigned.

4. Customizable ticket templates – Not all tickets are the same. Choose a customer service solution in which you can create and customize templates. You can then load these templates on command to vastly improve ticket response times. For great solutions, these templates can be combined in any myriad of ways if the ticket has multiple separate questions.

5. Individual ticket queues – Even now, many business’ teams are all working out of the same general ticket queue. With individual queues, your employees can organize their tickets by priority, difficulty, and so on so they can achieve greater efficiency and efficacy. Your team can even look at the queues of other colleagues to see who needs help.

6. Customizable ticket status options – Life isn’t “open and closed” and neither is ticketing. Make sure you have a ticketing system with status options that you can customize for your business. Support software should also be able to trigger emails automatically to send to customers when a status changes.

For help choosing the right software for your business, download this easy to use checklist:

7. Public and private actions on tickets – Not all ticket conversations need to be seen by a customer. That also doesn’t mean they should happen internally over IM. Keep ticket conversations in the system with private actions until you’re ready for a public customer action.

8. Product and inventory association – Product and inventory management is a lifesaver for any company that deals with digital software products. Instead of digging through files and deep document abysses, it’s easy to track this information for each customer so it shows up directly on their ticket page.

9. Personalized ticket pages by customer – The more employees can know about any one customer, the better they will be at resolving a particular customer’s issues. An ideal ticketing solution can display information including customer satisfaction, their distress index score, ticket history, expansion opportunities, and much more.

10. Related Tickets – All help desk professionals know what it’s like to experience a slew of simple, repetitive requests and the long process of answering these all one by one. With related tickets, it’s easy to aggregate these requests and provide fast and accurate answers. Want to do even better, chatbot automation can instantly spot and direct frequent questions to the associated information. 

11. Ticket deflection – What if your employees spot a customer request that can be easily answered with a Knowledge Base article? Don’t make them go find the link, have built-in ticket deflection capabilities on ticket pages to grab the right link quickly. Once again, chatbots can save the day here. 

12. Customizable ticket submission form – Find a customer support system that allows for customized fields in customer-facing ticket forms. This is vital for capturing the information you need to better your customer experience. This can drastically reduce the amount of basic follow-up questions and accelerate ticket resolution time.

In short, there are several must have features for help desks to have in their customer service ticketing systems. Ranging from complex pre-configured automation rules to easy ticket page information grabs, these solutions save time and money and make you better at what you do best.