With the rapidly growing technology, IT support services are at the brink of significant evolution. As per a survey by Research and Markets, the IT industry is slated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14% between 2016 and 2021.
Organizations today have a wide range of tools as part of their IT infrastructure. It includes a combination of third-party applications, security services, databases, and so on. When you have multiple tools to manage at once, the systems might become a little complex. Organizations need to monitor the uptime of all their services to ensure continuous business availability.
All it takes is one critical service disruption to bring down your employee productivity, customer service, customer experience, and eventually brand reputation. But just investing in the monitoring tools alone won’t solve the problem. IT teams rely on monitoring tools to constantly keep a watch on their IT infrastructure.
It has become absolutely essential for companies to think about the future of their IT support and understand the existing and upcoming challenges. They need strategies on how these IT helpdesks will have to overcome to be on top of this technology wave.
Modern IT customer support teams need a tool that can monitor and identify service disruptions. Without a proper system, support teams would drown in a puddle of alerts and spend too much time going through each alert manually. They need necessary insights and enable them to act upon them on time. And, not just this! In this article, we’re going to discuss the potential challenges that companies face and how IT ticketing software helps companies overcome them. Here’s a gist:
What is an IT Ticketing Software?
An IT ticketing system helps businesses manage all the incoming IT-related requests from both customers and other departments in the organization. It is designed to convert every support query into a unique ticket. It makes the support process easier through ticket management, improved collaboration, automation, and other features.
IT ticketing software is more like a ticket management system that allows organizations to implement robust and effective workflow for IT support departments. Ticketing software serves as a point of contact for all the issues of an organization. It enables the admin and the support staff to keep track of issues raised by users and reassign these queries to the relevant department, generate reports, metrics, and more.
Why Should You Implement IT Ticketing Software?
IT ticketing software also involves setting a universal standard for query handling and customer engagement. It serves as a communication channel between customers and the organization. An IT ticketing software can help you achieve the following:
- Analyze and improve the overall team performance. Identifying and pursuing infrastructure and service improvement initiatives in an organization.
- Managing complaints and suggestions. Making sure that the issue reaches you and that queries don’t slip through the crack. It also helps you ensure that the tickets are registered from all the channels seamlessly.
- It helps you understand and respond to customer satisfaction metrics and ensure that the queries reach a relevant agent or team.
- Training agents and team analysts on how to deliver customer service and make the overall support culture more customer-centric.
- It helps companies send auto-responders or canned (but personalized) messages to keep customers involved at every stage of the journey.
- A support manager or admin’s role includes request fulfillment support. This means that admins need to ensure that their support tools, processes, etc., are maintained adequately.
- Automated self-service options proactively reduce service requests and help maintain agreed service levels.
- Support roles also involve logging and categorizing service requests based on their type and priority. A ticketing software can help you conduct this segmenting automatically.
- It helps you verify the customers who are submitting the support requests. This can be done by comparing their customer history. Managing and storing this data for further communication is also a must.
- It helps you with request model execution, which means fulfilling requests in an appropriate and agreed time frame as per the decided service level agreements (SLAs)
- Staff members need to work together to ensure that service levels are not breached. And IT ticketing software enables teamwork within the staff.
- It also helps you identify trends and roadblocks in your support. If any problems or errors occur that require further attention, you can pass them on to the problem management team and conduct a root cause analysis.
- So these were some of the essential tasks that IT ticketing software can help you achieve. Every business needs modern helpdesk software to perform effectively and efficiently. The bare necessities of a ticketing helpdesk are that they must be intuitive, enhanced with ticket automation, and must properly integrate with other tools. DeskXpand is an intuitive, automated IT ticketing software. It is designed to overcome all the latest industry challenges. Take a demo to know more.
Challenges Faced By The IT Industry
The demand for IT ticketing software increases faster and creates a series of problems that stifle the customer experience. The first step towards making an efficient support process is acknowledging and addressing the most common challenges. Tackling would be the next step, but first, you need to find the common loopholes in your support and act accordingly. Here are some common challenges faced by the IT industry:
1. Multiple Requests (from different channels) and Interruptions
More or less, IT services are costly. So you need efficient systems in place to address queries in a cost-efficient way. Cost-efficient does not mean you compromise on the quality. The more time your agents spend answering the phone or going through the requests manually, the less time they get to focus on ironing out the issues.
Besides, phone calls are time-consuming because they flood queues quickly and take a longer time to resolve. It can be bad for your business because customers usually expect resolution at lightning speed. So if they have to wait on the phone call for long, it might get frustrating. It eventually leads to rifts in the service experience.
2. Long Resolution Times and Lost Queries
It takes an average of 24.2 hours to provide the first response to an internal support ticket.
Every system needs instant troubleshooting methods. When your IT ticketing system receives too many requests and doesn’t possess the necessary communication tools, your support may fall apart. It can also happen when you handle your support manually and do not have automation tools at your support.
For example, a survey states that up to 43% of IT help desks use email to track user requests manually. It can stall your team’s productivity upto a greater extent. A well-structured ticket intake process and request tracking tools always help. You will also need tools to capture the customer data to help you identify common issues and ultimately speed up the resolution time.
Lastly, your queries may remain undetected and get lost if you do not have an automated ticket registration process. Pick a solution that offers an automated system for ticket registration and ticket assignment.
3. Wasting Time on Recurring Issues
This issue can be directly tied to the previous challenge mentioned above. Long resolution time can also be because of repetitive issues. Without an excellent record-keeping system and data analytics tools, you will not be able to identify systemic problems. It will also lead to wastage of time and company resources.
Besides, support agents do not like to answer the same question again and again in a day. They may get frustrated. It would be best if you came up with a plan to address these hiccups and reduce the number of tickets to tackle the origin of common problems that users report. There’s only one solution to this challenge: A self-service knowledge base. An IT ticketing software can help you build a comprehensive knowledge base and FAQs. You can include solutions to repetitive issues in the knowledge base and empower your customers to find solutions themselves.
4. Keeping Track of Customer Data
Every time a customer reaches your customer support, your agents have to start from the beginning. Agents should spend a lot of time understanding the customer’s issue and finding the best solution. If your agents do not have customer data and the history of their support journey on hand, it may take way too long to reach the point of resolution. Besides, tracking the data manually on spreadsheets and outdated tools that can generate unreliable information is the same as not tracking the data.
5. Manual Tasks: Time-Consuming Tasks
Typically, there are a variety of tasks that are conducted manually. It includes ticket registration, ticket assignment, ticket escalation, feedback, and surveys. It means that agents waste a lot of time doing the same processes time and again.
Your support agent’s only goal should be to focus on resolving the customer’s problems! If your team has access to the right tools, you can eliminate the manual processes. Turn the laborious processes into automated ones and relieve your agents. Relieve them of the unnecessary burden and see how it works wonders for your organization.
Simplify Your Support With DeskXpand
How to Implement an IT Ticketing System
It cannot be clearer that every organization needs IT ticketing software to manage all the issues and requests diligently. Follow these simple steps to implement an IT ticketing system today.
Step 1: Set Up Clear Goals
Every industry and business niche comes with its own set of challenges. Therefore, it is important to have a clear understanding of what you will need to overcome these challenges. Set clear and attainable goals.
Of course, your primary goal would be to offer reliable support to the end-users. But, think about more specific goals, like resolving maximum requests at the first contact or lowering your support response time. You’d want to cultivate a customer-centric culture, or you would want your end-users to use self-service more. It could be anything. It entirely depends on your business.
Once you’ve decided, then you can plan a course of action to achieve them. Let your support agents and staff be in on this decision too. After all, they’re the ones who face the customer and would know the issues better.
Step 2: Understand End-User Pain Points
Dive deep into your customer’s pain points and expectations. For instance, if your customers expect an appropriate solution within an hour, you must address it in the said time. Addressing their concern beyond the said time frame would lead to an unhappy customer. You can carry out a survey and ask common questions to your end-users like:
Common Questions You Should Ask Your End-Users
Once you find the answers to these questions, you are ready to alleviate user pain points. You can offer a wholesome customer experience that exceeds their expectations.
Step 3: Build a Customer Focussed Culture
Before implementing an IT ticketing software, you will have an important thing to tackle: Building a customer-centric culture. Your teams must align with a set standard for customer service. Only then can you promise a consistent experience. Study your customers and user base and the type of requests you typically receive every day. Go through your customer’s feedback and see what they’re lacking.
You also need to train your team members for the same. Train your staff and make them aware of the nitty-gritty of IT ticketing software. Set aside a relevant budget and time to train your support representatives and prepare them to serve in a customer-centric environment.
Recommended Read: 5 Customer Intimacy Strategies That Never Fail
Step 4: Become Efficient: Define Your Service Level Agreements
Efficiency is the most critical aspect of IT ticket handling. You can automate simple manual tasks and make sure that they comply with the predefined service level agreements.
Most ticketing software uses the round-robin technique to assign query tickets. It automatically assigns tickets to the available agents. You can assign these tickets based on relevance and expertise as well. Set predefined time rules to perform the desired action after a certain period. For example, you can set a time rule that automatically shares a feedback email with the customers right after their resolution is met.
SLA Rules: SLAs define the level of services that a company promises to deliver to its end-users. These rules ensure that agents adhere to all the requirements while managing IT support tickets. For example, if you have an agreement that declares that users must get a response from the agents within four hours of their query registration, your ticketing software can remind your agents about the same.
Step 5: Self Service is A Must
Customers are comfortable with the idea of self-service. There are no two ways about it. By offering an extensive knowledge base, you can significantly reduce ticket volume and support costs. Here are some hacks to ace the self-service feature:
DeskXpand Knowledge Base
- Make searching and navigation easy by implementing various filters and categories.
- Keep your content fresh and updated.
- A vast proportion of customers search through their mobile phones. So, make your knowledge base mobile-friendly.
- Connect your chatbots with the self-service. This way, whenever a customer turns to a chatbot, it can directly provide the link for a known and repetitive issue rather than registering a ticket.
Recommended Read: Retain More Customers With Self-Service Feature
Step 6: Pick The Right Features
Following are some of the primary features of an IT ticketing system:
I. Omnichannel Support: An ideal ticketing system can trace customer requests from multiple channels (such as email, live chat, social media) through a single unified interface.
II. Incident Management: This includes basic ticketing features like incident registration, ticket assignment, and so on. It enables you to manage with ease and ensure they have a limited impact on your business reputation.
III. Knowledge Base: With IT ticketing software, you can create a knowledge base that can host content in various forms like FAQs, help articles, videos, and how-to guides.
IV. Post Support Surveys: This feature is mainly automated. A survey form is triggered once the issue is resolved. You can capture their feedback in real-time and later take action upon it if needed.
V. Third-Party Tool Integration: You can integrate your IT ticketing software with your favorite business tools and save the time of your support agents.
VI. Reports & Analytics: When you implement an IT ticketing software, you can track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and measure performance against SLAs through the reports and analytics features.
VII. Scalability: Organizations keep growing by the day, and hence you need scalable tools. Leverage a highly flexible and scalable tool that can match your growing business needs.
Step 7: Target the Right KPIs
Track and improve your critical metrics for consistent and practical support. You can gauge the overall efficiency of your support reps and discover where you need to improve. All this with simple analytics and reporting tools.
Track key performance indicators (KPIs) viz. average response time, first contact resolution, first response time, overall user satisfaction, etc. These metrics will give you a clear-cut idea about your IT ticketing software’s success and create accountability among your team members. You can schedule automated reports on these metrics to help your support managers stay on the right track.
Step 8: Take a Trial
Never move forward without taking a free trial, no matter what software you pick. The main goal behind this is to reduce the compatibility risks. A free trial will give you a clear idea of how exactly the system will work for your business niche.
The success of your support operations depends on how well-versed your team is with the technological tools. Let your agents explore the software, its features and find out if it solves all of their problems or not.
Congratulations! You’re ready to go live and resolve IT support challenges at lightning speed.
DeskXpand: The Best IT Ticketing Software
IT support management can relieve the pesky challenges and revolutionize an under-performing support process into a modern and efficient department that can instantly respond to issues or requests.
The benefits of IT ticketing software cannot be more apparent. It helps you streamline procedures for better productivity through automation and enables a consolidated data repository. Besides, it empowers you by implementing data analyzing tools and customer self-service. Backed by a stellar performance and excellent reviews, DeskXpand can revolutionize your help desk. The right software can transform your organization into a cost-efficient powerhouse.
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https://www.deskxpand.com/blog/implement-it-ticketing-software-in-eight-steps/
