Ticket management systems are a great tool for tracking customer data. Without it, sales reps will be lost in thousands of questions and comments, without the information they need to give top-level service. But a ticketing hub isn’t just for improving brand perception and buyer experience. Performing analysis will unlock information that will pave the way for smart business decisions.

So, what kind of analysis can you perform with a ticket management system? Just like anything that has data, these numbers can be used to understand buyer behavior, team productivity, and campaign performance. When leveraged correctly, you will be able to reap benefits you didn’t know existed.

In this article, we discuss everything you need to know about ticketing systems, as well as its application for businesses of all sizes. Read on to learn how to factor customer information into your business analysis.

What Is a Ticket Management System?

Also referred to as a helpdesk, is a centralized hub that allows businesses to keep track of consumer issues. When businesses start receiving a high volume of queries, comments, questions, and buyer requests every single day, a ticketing hub can mean the difference between neglect and organization.

This type of platform allows teams to easily manage relationships with individual buyers. Ticket management platforms are designed to make the process of interacting with customers and leads easier. With customer information from various channels already stored in a single profile, customer representatives can spend less time looking for pertinent personal information, and more effort into creating a great customer experience.

It’s a great way to:

• Keep track of ongoing queries
• Review backlogged or overdue queries
• Improve relationships with clients and leads
• Provide personalized customer support
• Answer queries in a timely manner
• Make sure queries are automatically assigned and never neglected
• Manage team/individual member performance and workload
• Understand client satisfaction and brand perception
• Promote brand loyalty
• Store previous customer interactions
• Evaluate individual interaction channels

Useful Features of a Ticketing Hub

• Customer Profile: When it comes to providing the best level of service, having an answer to your customer’s concerns is equally important as how you address them. Brands with a personalized brand of service win over generic responses every single time.

With a ticketing hub, you’re able to serve your clients better because you know exactly who they are. Information such as name, age, gender might be simple facts of life, but they’re crucial in building relationships with customers. At the very least, buyers expect you to know the basics about them. It reflects the business’ professionalism and level of organization.

• Interaction History: Here’s where helpdesks really shine. This platform has the capacity to record every single interaction a patron has had with your business, whether it’s on call, social media, text, or email. By pulling in information from your customer relationship management (CRM) software, your ticketing hub can give you an overview of the company’s relationship with the consumer.

It does this by letting customer reps know the last time the customer has shopped/subscribed, how often they use the product or service, previous customer issues or requests, as well as existing and pending transactions.

It’s a great way to understand a patron or lead’s existing relationship with your business, which will help you provide a more informed brand of service.

• Customer Preferences: Cold hard data isn’t the only thing your ticket hub can save. Sales reps can put notes on every interaction and use this to record customer preferences. Do they tend to take calls on the weekends only? Do they prefer emails over texts? Recorded patron preferences can tell you exactly how they like their service.

But it’s not only interactions that this knowledge hub can keep a history of. From product/service preferences to shopping behavior, you’ll get an understanding of their buyer persona. In turn, you can evaluate how profitable they are to your business and categorize their queries accordingly.

What Is On a Desk Ticket?

A desk ticket is what reps see when they log in the helpdesk software. This contains references they need to understand the customers’ needs and wants. The most common elements include:

1) Ticket Number

The ticket number is a string of numbers the software uses to interpret and store individual tickets. Smart helpdesks can automatically assign tickets to respective departments and team members just with the ticket alone. Think of it as the official identifier of every query, making it easier to distinguish it from thousands of other queries.

2) Department

Is the query installation, purchasing, or service related? The department provides a context for the query and allows easier categorization of each concern.

3) Subject

Customers are usually asked to write a short subject whether they’re using online web forms or email. It’s a preview of the customer’s concerns and gives the sales reps an idea of what each ticket is about.

4) Status

Is the ticket ongoing, resolved, pending, or unopened? The status reflects the action taken on each ticket.

How Does an IT Ticketing System Work?

Helpdesks aren’t just for your clients – they also work well for keeping your organization running efficiently. IT ticketing exists to help your IT department keep track of department requests – from simple computer fixes to major infrastructure reboots.

IT helpdesk exists so the support team always has the following pertinent information ready:

• Context of request: what issue is the user experiencing?
• Common errors: What are the most reported issues, bugs, and anomalies by users?
• Recommendations and suggestions: How do users view the current IT system, and what recommendations have been given to improve it?
• Desk ticket information: Who sent the request, which department is it from, when was the request sent, is the request urgent?
• Service satisfaction: Do users find the resolution helpful?

Does every business need a helpdesk IT? That depends on the volume of their IT requests. Small to medium sized businesses receiving one ticket to twenty five tickets won’t usually need their dedicated IT helpdesk. But when this number grows to the hundreds, it’s worth considering to incorporate the software in your operations.

A customer support system is a different story. Your buyers are the lifeline of your business, and being prompt and attentive with their requests is necessary for growing your business. If you’re planning to get only one at a time, prioritize getting a customer support helpdesk first, and then an IT ticket hub second.

Best Helpdesk Analytics and Metrics

Just like every other part of a CRM platform, ticket requests are rife with information and data. All it takes is a little digging and analysis to uncover insights.

Even if your CRM doesn’t offer automated reporting, you can still perform manual analysis to project future workloads, manage your team better, and with some insightful applications, increase your monthly sales.

1) Helpdesk Load

This reflects the number of hours your team has worked answering tickets. The helpdesk load also shows how many tickets are ongoing, how many of those are assigned to teams and individual members, and how many tickets you receive on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

It’s a useful metric in understanding productivity as well as the volume of tickets. When performing an analysis, it’s usually best to study it alongside other metrics, which will give you a better understanding of future workloads and team efficiency.

For instance, you can study query volume as a way to measure ad campaign success. Do you tend to get more engagements after publishing an ad on Facebook? This must mean it works. If your numbers stay flat after paying for ads, you might consider better ways at targeting prospects or moving on to a different platform entirely.

Are you running your service reps to the ground? You can look at the helpdesk load to understand the current work distribution scenario, and how to optimize it.

2) Customer Satisfaction

At the end of every session, your buyers will be asked to rank their satisfaction ratings, whether it’s on call, email, or social media. If this feature isn’t available, reps can simply take note of the customer’s tone after the interaction and record whether or not they were satisfied.

The point of customer satisfaction ratings is to understand how your business is performing on the service end of things. Are your reps doing a great job representing your business? Are they providing the best resources, help, and assistance your buyers require?

A strong customer satisfaction rating means your process is efficient and useful to customers. When satisfaction ratings begin to dip, it’s a tell-tale sign something needs improvement.

Customer satisfaction ratings are crucial because they help you perceive if buyers see you as valuable or not. It’s common to see sales and subscriptions dip following a barrage of poor customer ratings. Performing a regular analysis can help you project a more accurate leads/cases quota each month.

3) Average Resolution Time

This metric refers to how much time tickets usually take to resolve. Anything within the 1 minute to 5 minute range is a pretty efficient time. Of course, this depends on the nature of the query. For complicated high-level concerns, issues can be resolved for as long as 7-10 minutes.

You might think that a longer resolution period reflects your team’s dedication to answering each and answer carefully, but this isn’t usually the case. In fact, a long resolution period isn’t always positive. Sometimes it points to a lack of available resources reps can refer to on the fly. Maybe the flow of information is not optimized.

Keep in mind that the longer it takes to solve an average ticket, the less tickets your team can go through as a whole. Aim to shorten your resolution period so your team can diversify their tasks.

4) Average Response Time

The response time refers to how fast your team is able to respond to a query. Research shows that buyer interest drops with each passing minute, which is why it’s important to respond in a timely manner whenever possible.

In order to make the most out of your response time, you can prioritize tickets according to category. Time-sensitive tickets like installation issues, subscription problems, checking out concerns are things you would ideally solve within 30 minutes to an hour. Buyers can get frustrated easily, and letting them wait can mean losing their business altogether.

The longest response time you should have for any issue is 24 hours; at the very least, let buyers know you’re looking into their issue. We suggest setting up an automatic acknowledgement email to keep buyers at ease.

5) History of Helpdesk Load

The helpdesk history involves all backlogged, ongoing, pending, as well as active tickets. This essentially reflects every single interaction your business has had with a prospect or buyer.

Aside from understanding previous customer interactions, the helpdesk history is useful when developing your knowledge base. You can look at the frequently asked questions and create a page where users can easily find consistent answers and solutions in a timely manner. This eliminates the need for a sales rep, allowing your customer support team to focus on more advanced queries.

6) Ticket Volume By Channel

It’s common for organizations to have one more type of customer support channel. From email to text messaging to social media to calls, it’s important to have different ways avenues for communication, because not every client will prefer the same platform.

Performing an analysis on your ticket volume by channel will reveal which avenues are most profitable. It will give your business the opportunity to close down the least popular channels, and open up additional ones that may be more profitable to your business.

How Machine Learning Improves Customer Service

On the outside, it seems like incorporating a ticket hub will only make matters more complicated. In reality, it’s a lot easier than you think. Thanks to machine learning, tools like these are becoming more uncomplicated, which translates to seamless integration into your daily operations.

Here’s how smart tools can help shorten the ticket cycle, with the help of machine learning:

• Tickets can be assigned automatically and accurately 

Instead of managing each and every ticket manually, your software will eventually figure out the pattern of designation. In time, it will be able to decide the right people or department to assign that ticket to.

• Resources can be distributed accurately, without fail 

You created a resources for a reason: so customers can go through them and get the solutions they need, eliminating redundant questions and low-level queries. With a smart tool, emergent patterns will be used to decide which articles, ebooks, resources are best for specific scenarios.

• Repeat answers can be addressed automatically

After receiving hundreds of tickets, machine learning will eventually help your smart ticketing tool discern the context of the message using the subject line, keyword combinations, and other elements.

In time, it can suggest templates to your service reps, or can be programmed to send those out automatically. This will improve response times, without taking away precious time from your team.

Use Ticket Analysis to Improve Sales, Improve Brand Perception, and Encourage Brand Loyalty

In a competitive market, good customer service can make a world of difference. By using a CRM software, embracing machine learning, and performing regular analysis, you can continue to improve how you interact with prospects and existing clients.

Want to learn how to strengthen your daily operations? Schedule a free demo today and learn more about Commence CRM.