Workings and Features of an on-line trouble ticket system, the types of trouble tickets, what are they, and how do they work.
Understanding a Trouble Ticket
A trouble ticket is another term used for a support ticket submitted by the customer or employee to the IT team when they face an issue. The team notes down relevant information in the ticket and uses it to communicate with the customer or employee. Trouble tickets, like support tickets, are used in a help desk operated by the IT team. Upon submitting a ticket, a service representative is assigned to resolve the issue on the ticket.
Trouble tickets were earlier paper cards used by the IT team to track the tickets they were handling. Now it refers to the digital records stored in a powerful and feature-rich ticket system.
Types of Trouble Tickets
A trouble ticket is of four types: Incident tickets, Problem tickets, Incidents, and Alarms. Customers raise an incident ticket when they encounter an unexpected problem while using a service or product. Every issue is counted as a unique incident, which is small and easy to fix. Customers raise incident tickets themselves, or monitoring tools that are triggered by automatic processes raise them.
Problem tickets deal with bigger issues than what is dealt with in incident tickets and issues that require permanent change. If multiple incident tickets revolve around the same set of problems, they are combined into one problem ticket. Problem tickets stay open for longer and require deep investigation and process changes that may take time to implement.
Alarms trigger the creation of a ticket by the trouble ticket system to warn of potential issues in the event of an error or incident. Alarms help companies identify problems before the customers do, analyze and rectify them.
Correlation or parent-child ticket allows companies to mark hundred of tickets received while the system was down into one set. Other tickets can be marked as duplicates of a ticket, and a single issue can be resolved accordingly.
On-line trouble ticket systems: What are they, and how do they work?
A trouble ticket system catches the customers’ requests, generates trouble tickets accordingly, and tracks them till they are resolved. It cuts the need to constantly move through tickets by streamlining the IT help desk, which allows customers to find the solutions for most of their problems themselves without raising a ticket. The ticket system can be automated to manage a part of the entire process with features to automate the generation, track and route a ticket, and obtain customer feedback.
A trouble ticket system can capture tickets from multiple channels like email, social media, and live chats. They can also track the time spent on each ticket and alert if a ticket resolution is prolonged. A fully automated trouble ticket system can automatically assign tickets and enable assignment changes. By doing so, technicians can spend more time resolving an issue, increasing the overall productivity of the employees. Moreover, the online trouble ticket system can monitor the real-time response time and the support team’s performance. Help desk agents can collaborate over an online trouble ticket system using internal notes and comments.
When trouble ticket resolution is automated…
When trouble ticket resolution is automated, it reduces the time taken for ticket resolution by almost 80%. This is done when the trouble ticket system breaks down the parent ticket, i.e., the ticket raised from a customer’s request into child tickets assigned to appropriate teams. These teams resolve the minor issues they are provided with and ensure that the customer’s issues are solved soon, leading to increased customer satisfaction.
With the rise of internet-based software, online trouble ticket system becomes possible. Having an online trouble ticket system means that the software to track tickets is not restricted to one device but can be accessed anywhere.
Tracking the trajectory of a ticket is essential to determine when to communicate to a customer. A series of definitions representing the stages of the lifecycle of a ticket can be set up for this purpose. Upon the creation of a workflow, automation can be introduced to reduce manual intervention and can be tasked to perform specific tasks like notifying customers about the progress in their tickets.
After the tickets are registered…
After the tickets are registered, they are sent to a workflow that tracks the stage of the ticket. Then the management has to focus on the presented information and the action that has to be taken. The process of management can be simplified if it is automated. Workflow automation can be set up to perform specific tasks by programming certain criteria. Once the criteria are met, the automation does the task. Moreover, workflow automation need not be restricted to a single task; multiple automation can be created, leading to complex automated management with little setup.
Features of an online trouble ticket system
A centralized knowledge base in the online trouble ticket system is advisable for companies as most customers prefer to get their issues resolved with the knowledge base rather than escalate every issue to a help desk agent. Companies can choose a ticketing software with a built-in knowledge base or create one. Having a built-in knowledge base is resourceful as it would auto-suggest questions based on the few inputs of the customer and recommend knowledge base articles accordingly, making it easy for customers to get their problems resolved.
SLAs or Service Level Agreements fix the maximum time taken by a company to respond to and resolve the service request. SLA metrics help online trouble ticket systems prioritize tickets and ensure that SLAs are met. Delays in SLAs can significantly impact customer satisfaction. Therefore, an online ticket system with SLA management helps win the loyalty of customers for a company.
An on-line trouble ticket system…
An on-line trouble ticket system has or should have built-in software and hardware inventory. Having an online inventory is helpful, as it helps link trouble tickets to specific assets. The company’s support staff can review the asset’s history on recurring issues and try to fix the problem.
74% of Internet users do not speak English, and 65% of Internet users prefer to access something in their native language irrespective of the quality of the content. An on-line trouble ticket system that can support multiple languages helps companies stand out from the rest.
Customer feedback helps understand the level of customer satisfaction with the performance of the customer service. Having an insight into this area is crucial as it enhances brand loyalty and customer retention rates. Requesting customer feedback while handling a ticket is an easy way to get feedback. Having a ticket system that has a built-in survey system is an easy way out. It is also an essential input in generating reports and modules for help desk agents to improve their performance.