Ticket Deflection and Routing Can Improve Customer Service | #customersupport #supporticket

Even a fantastic customer service team can be plagued by poor ticket deflection and routing. Your stellar agents may be equipped to answer many customer questions, but if they need to sift through dozens of issues that range from simple inquiries to complex matters, then they aren’t maximizing the ways in which they can help customers. This is where ticket deflection and routing comes in: to maximize the time and effort of your customer service agents.

It’s time to be more efficient with how your customer service team operates. By deploying excellent ticket deflection and automatic routing strategies, your team can do more work on complex matters and devote less time and effort on simple requests. Here are four ways ticket deflection and routing can help customer service teams:

1) Automated ticket routing improves efficiency – When using intelligent automated ticket deflection in a customer support system, there’s no need to have a person dedicated to “routing” (or sending) tickets to certain employees or departments. Instead, tickets containing certain words in the title (such as “password” or “slow”) can automatically be sent to specific agents that deal with the log-in system or software stability.

2) Ticket deflection increases self-service usage – Many customers prefer self-service options and companies aren’t complaining. When a new ticket is submitted, companies can customize their confirmation emails based on the ticket subject so it points to specific self-service pages that empower the customer to solve their inquiry on their own. For example, a ticket containing “Users” in the title will get links to self-service pages that discuss how to manage users or change their access, so they can hopefully answer their own question.

Ticket deflection is great because it also decreases customer service agent workloads; allowing them to prioritize complex matters and solve them faster. 

3) Quick self-service access makes it easier to meet SLAs – With so many tickets being submitted every day, the more that get deflected the better. This lets agents focus on the more time-sensitive tickets that are critical to meeting and maintaining service level agreements (SLAs). To optimize time even further when the SLA clock is ticking closer to deadline, agents can get through the basic tickets quickly by using a customer service software solution that lets you natively search your knowledge base content right inside the ticket response window. This makes it easier to find the relevant self-service content right away and get issues at risk of violating SLAs resolved faster.

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4) Sentiment analysis makes for smarter routing – More customer service teams are now relying on sentiment analysis to determine exactly how a customer “feels,” without necessarily reading about the entire write-up. For example, a rookie agent that receives a long ticket from an important customer with an “angry” sentiment may choose to reassign the ticket to their manager right away instead of reading all its contents. This improves efficiency and lets the agent tackle the more basic questions they can understand and answer.

In short, ticket deflection and routing can help customer service teams by making them more productive. Automation is essential as it places the right tickets in front of each agent. Self-service is another staple of a good ticket deflection and routing strategy as it streamlines the total number of ticket interactions required of your team. By prioritizing these two facets of the ticketing process, you’ll notice that your customer service team will also feel less frustrated. And we all know that happy employees lead to happy customers!