Best Practices for Implementing a Ticketing System

Ticketing systems form the backbone of any efficient customer support function. They help deliver faster and efficient support, leading to happier and satisfied customers. If you are planning to introduce a ticketing system into your support operations, choosing the right ticketing software isn’t enough. 

Planning a ticketing system rollout is an often overlooked process without which you may not be able to achieve the desired results. If you are wondering how to implement a ticketing system the right way, worry not. In this blog, I will walk you through the best practices for implementing a ticketing system to maximize its potential.

16 best practices for a successful ticketing system deployment

1. Know Your Requirement
2. Automate Ticket Assignment
3. Categorize, Set Priority and Tag Incoming Tickets
4. Define and Communicate Your SLA to Customers
5. Enable Alerts for SLA Breach
6. Set Up a Tiered Support System
7. Customize your Support Portal
8. Prevent Agent Collison
9. Standardize Ticket Resolution Process
10. Create a Knowledge Base
11. Create Ticket Templates
12. Build Custom Reports and Dashboards
13. Deflect Repetitive Tickets
14. Use AI  Tools to Boost Agent Productivity
15. Set up Scheduled Tickets for Repeat Events
16. Monitor Trends, Measure and Optimize

1.Know Your Requirement

Let’s kickstart this ticketing system implementation guide by figuring out the answer to a basic question. Are you looking for a ticketing system for customer support or is it for employee support? If your answer is the latter, then you should consider employing a service desk software, whereas for customer support you should choose a help desk. Though similar in many ways, both offer tailored functionalities based on the use case.

2. Automate Ticket Assignment

The efficiency of your customer support depends highly on how fast you assign an incoming ticket to the most appropriate agent. The productivity of agents may take a hit if they wait for tickets to be assigned to them. One of the key ticketing system implementation steps is to set automated rules for ticket routing. Most helpdesk systems allow you to route tickets based on agents’ skill set, availability and existing workload. Ticket routing is not a one-time activity. Set aside time to regularly review the efficiency of your routing mechanism and make adjustments as required.

3. Categorize, Set Priority and Tag Incoming Tickets

Every incoming support ticket should be categorized, tagged and assigned a priority level. A common practice is to organize tickets based on the type of the issue by assigning categories like IT Support, Order Tracking, feature request, and Returns & Refunds. These categories may vary depending on your industry. While ticket categorization helps declutter your help desk and effortless ticket assignment, ticket prioritization allows your team to focus on crucial issues first. 

4. Define and Communicate Your SLA to Customers

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a formal understanding between a company and its customers that sets ground rules for the expected service. Typical parameters of an SLA include the scope of services, requirement from both parties, and the expected resolution time. 

It is important that you do not over promise in the SLA and define only what is possible to deliver.

5. Enable Alerts for SLA Breach

Once you have a SLA in place, your support agents are accountable for honoring it. There may be cases where the agents fail to resolve the ticket within the agreed SLA. Advanced Helpdesk systems like Happyfox allow you to trigger email notifications whenever there is an SLA breach. When you set up an automated SLA breach notification trigger, ensure that you add everyone involved to the receivers list. 

6. Set Up a Tiered Support System

Another important Ticketing system implementation step is to categorize your support agents based on their skill sets and experience. Your highly skilled, experienced agents’ time should be spent on complex, high value tickets. We recommend setting up three tiers of support agents with increasing levels of skills and experience. 

7. Customize your Support Portal

Let’s face it. Customers don’t like waiting. Customers, when anxious, create another ticket just to inquire the status of the ticket they already raised. Happyfox solves this problem by providing customers access to a support portal where they can raise tickets and track the status of the tickets they raised. The portal also features knowledge base articles allowing customers to self-serve their needs, eliminating the requirement for raising a ticket. 

Customize your support portal to reflect the look and feel of your brand and make it easy for customers to search and find what they are looking for. We recommend pinning knowledge base articles that you feel are most relevant to the home page for improved ticket deflection.

8. Prevent Agent Collison

Agent collision happens when two or more agents attend to the same customer ticket. This action is extremely counterproductive, confuses the customer, and paints a negative impression about your service. Help desk softwares offer agent collision features that alerts other agent(s) from responding if an agent is already typing a response to a ticket. 

To avoid agent collision, you can set up an automated ticket routing workflow that triages a ticket as soon as it enters the help desk. You can also educate your team on the agent-collison functionality and always double check before responding to a customer ticket.

9. Standardize Ticket Resolution Process 

Providing consistent, positive customer experiences should be one of the primary goals of your support system. Standardizing the process of resolving a ticket will ensure  that customers get the same service experience, no matter which agent handles the ticket. 

For all tickets related to refund, you can create a series of steps that need to be completed before closing a ticket. A recommended practice is to create a to-do-list (task list) for key ticket categories and assign these individual tasks to each ticket from the category. 

Happyfox Help Desk lets you automatically assign tasks to tickets and allows a ticket to be closed only if all the individual ticket tasks are completed. This ticketing system best practice, along with providing consistent service experience, also minimizes errors in your service operations.

10. Create a Knowledge Base

A successful ticketing system rollout involves creation of knowledge base articles for frequent issues or requests that you get from your customers. All major ticketing systems like Happyfox help desk come with an inbuilt Knowledge base out-of-the box. You can upload all your existing knowledge articles and create new ones as needed. 

Furthermore, you can categorize articles into sections and assign sections to customer groups. The purpose of a knowledge base is to promote self-service among customers, making sure your help desk is free from repetitive tickets that may annoy agents.

11. Create Ticket Templates

When customers reach out to support teams over the phone, agents typically create a ticket on behalf of the customer summarizing their issue. Ticket templates provide an easier and standardized way to create such tickets. You can create templates for each ticket category with predefined values for important parameters like due date, priority, and ticket message. 

Simplifying the ticket creation process for agents can ensure that every customer request gets recorded in the help desk.

12. Build Custom Reports and Dashboards

While helpdesk systems have inbuilt reporting features, advanced platforms like Happyfox allow you to create custom reports and dashboards based on your unique business requirements. By creating custom reports, you can restrict agents from accessing information they do not have privilege to. A common ticketing system setup best practice is to schedule reports. 

After you create your custom reports, you can have them sent via email to leads, managers, or anyone else who needs to see the data. Also, custom dashboards help agents have a birds eye view of their ticket trends, existing workload, resolution times and SLA breaches.

13. Deflect Repetitive Tickets

Multiple studies show that about 30% of incoming support tickets a company receives are repetitive. Most of these repetitive tickets are simple, transactional queries that fill up the help desk system. Lack of self-service among customers is the primary reason for repetitive incoming tickets. You can tackle this by 

1. Employing an automated chat-bot that attends to simple, repetitive questions of customers, providing instant resolutions
2. Encouraging customers to search ‘Customer Portal’ for solutions that can be found in the knowledge base articles

14. Use AI  Tools to Boost Agent Productivity

After a successful ticketing system deployment, it is time for you to employ the power of Artificial Intelligence into your support operations. AI in Customer support offers a variety of tools to boost agent productivity including

1. Automated Ticket Classification and Routing using sentiment analysis which analyzes the seriousness of the issue, prioritizes tickets accordingly and assigns to the most appropriate agent. 
2. Ticket Summary feature that gives agents an overview of the entire ticket history without them having to read through the entire conversation.
3. AI copilot that drafts unique responses to customer queries making it easier for your agents to quickly respond to queries.
4. AI resolve for quick, personalized answers to customer queries through AI. 

15. Set up Scheduled Tickets for Repeat Events

An often overlooked Ticketing system implementation step, setting up scheduled tickets allows you to create a recurring ticket weekly, monthly, or even quarterly. If you are planning for follow-up discussions with the customer every week, you can set up a scheduled ticket that is auto generated weekly. Scheduled Tickets also helps you schedule routine maintenance tasks such as software upgrades, hardware maintenance and data backups. 

16. Monitor Trends, Measure and Optimize

Reading this article this far would have given you a solid understanding of how to implement a ticketing system. Though advanced ticketing systems like Happyfox can be implemented in a few day’s time, keep in mind that your work does not end there. Your goal should be to constantly optimize your ticket management process and improve your service delivery. 

As a first step, monitor incoming ticket trends. Measure data on category wise tickets, repetitive requests, increasing ticket volumes, ticket backlogs, and SLA breaches. Have a review system in place where you measure these metrics periodically and make adjustments to your ticketing workflow. After a successful ticketing system rollout, always look out for ways to automate repetitive actions and speed up resolution times.

Explore Happyfox Help desk Today!

Hopefully, this ticketing system implementation guide covered everything you need to know for a successful ticketing system rollout. If you are still in the fence about choosing a ticketing system, explore all the features or sign up for a demo of Happyfox help desk, an intuitive, robust, and scalable solution that grows with your business.