How to Delight Customers & Streamline Helpdesk Support with Smart Ticketing

Heldesk-Support

Customer support is an integral and pervasive part of the business and it is crucial for the helpdesk support team to deliver the best service possible to customers. But this is easier said than done! Picture a day in life of a customer support representative (CSR) and imagine the level of stress that an overflowing inbox with support tickets can result and eventually hamper the work efficiency.
It goes without saying that to deliver a memorable customer experience, the helpdesk support tickets must be resolved promptly and correctly. This obviously increases the pressure on support agents and results in an eternal dilemma of “Which Support Ticket To Be Addressed on Priority to Ensure Maximum Service Efficiency?”
Furthermore, the growing number of interaction channels over the last few years and the increased amount of data inflow has added to this dilemma. Now, it has become a challenge to prioritize the huge influx of support tickets to speed up response and resolution times.

What Factors Affect Helpdesk Ticket Prioritization

Multiple factors have a say when it comes to deciding the priority in which support ticket management is addressed. Each customer believes that her query should be taken up on priority, but for a support agent the prioritization can vary depending on SLA, type of customer, technical difficulty of the raised issue and many such factors. For instance,  if a critical ticket like processing request from a high value client is missed out, it would result in the loss of an opportunity. Hence, ensuring prioritization is the key to deliver better customer experience.
Prompt and efficient Helpdesk Support can be ensured by intelligent ticket prioritization based on several aspects such as-

  1. Severity of the problem/request mentioned in the ticket
  2. Pendency of the ticket since it’s created/registered in the system
  3. In case of New or Re-Open Tickets, what is the committed SLA or timeline to the customer
  4. Is the ticket pending on the customer’s end to provide more information
  5. Is the customer available to answer the queries at this time

Need for Automating Ticket Prioritization

In businesses where helpdesk support team receives large number of tickets, or processes wherein tickets resolution time is high – prioritization is much more complex. In such scenarios relying on a agents’ manual capability alone to prioritize is not feasible because :

  1. It is a waste of agent’s time and effort. He/She would be doing that on daily basis without much value additions
  2. It is error-prone. A human is not efficient everyday and can misjudge under fatigue, pressure or due to plain complacency
  3. It may not be a data-driven decision because of the sheer number of data points involved. It’s not feasible to extract all the tickets and do an excel calculation to decide several times a day.

Thus, there is a need for a customer experience system which could take various factors affecting ticket prioritization into account and automatically prioritize case management tickets for agents to take action upon. So, no more time is wasted on manual decision making while prioritizing service-related tickets.

Intelligent Ticket Prioritization With Ameyo Heat Map

Ameyo’s help desk software solution’s Heat Map feature employs intelligent calculation across multiple parameters to come up with a single “rank” of the tickets. Hence Heat map assists the agents by delivering the next best ticket by assessing various factors like ticket status, ticket priority, etc. The heat map solution takes such factors which are relevant based on the industry and creates a color coded heat index. The heat index represents the importance or criticality of the ticket and how urgently it needs to be resolved.
Ameyo Heat Map

Heat Index Color Coding

The above snapshot shows the agent interaction history and various tickets being handled by them. The tickets displays the details of source, customer & agent name, ticket SLAs, and other factors – along with the associated color-coded heat index. The heat index comprises of red, orange, yellow, or Green color codes signifying the importance and criticality of the tickets in the descending order.
With Ameyo’s Heat Map feature businesses can customize various key factors according to their respective industry verticals and processes to derive the overall heatmap analysis. For example, in case of e-commerce industry, the frequency of purchase of an individual is an important factor and will have to be taken into consideration while addressing support tickets from frequent buyers.

Ameyo’s Heat Map by default analyzes following ticket related factors to help the agents pick the next best ticket to be addressed-

  • Status – Status of the ticket can be New, Open or Closed depending the resolution of the customer query
  • SLA – Service Level Agreement for every ticket needs to be communicated to the customer regarding the Ticket Assignment, First Response and Final Resolution.
  • Priority – Ticket priority (High, Medium, Low) can be based on certain industry specific factors like customer type, criticality, etc.
  • Number of Messages Not Answered – Business can define the limits of number of un-answered messages (0-1, 1-3 and >3) for escalation metrics within the organizational hierarchy.
  • Sentiment AnalysisBased on text analysis, a value between 0 to 1 [Angry (1), Disgusted (0.20), Neutral (0.05), Happy (0)] is assigned considering whether the customer query has aggravated text or is pleasant

The businesses can assign weightages to each of these factors based on their importance and as per the status of the ticket, these factors are internally rated on a scale of 0 to 1. A weighted average of these factors, a value between 0 to 1 is pushed to the system to assign a heat index color code. The tickets are refreshed in real time and the heat index gets updated every 5 minutes. As soon as action is taken, the heat index is changed and the color code is assigned accordingly.
Delivering impeccable customer service is not an option in today’s highly competitive business world, rather it’s the only way to to win and retain customers. Therefore, intelligent ticket prioritization is a smart way to delight customers and streamline Helpdesk Support for better agent efficiency.
 

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