Trouble Tickets Explained

Trouble Tickets Explained

A trouble ticketing system is a sales pipeline process of assigning a lead or prospect towards the means (like personnel and departments within the business) that can appropriately satisfy the needs and objectives of both parties. Tickets can be raised out of different scenarios that include the following.

• During a live exchange (by telephone, live chat, etc), an agent attending to a lead or prospect can not immediately resolve the customer's problem and transfers the case to another department that is not currently available.
• As an agent, you generate a trouble ticket because you were unable to immediately tend to a lead.
• The lead may complete 'offline' ticket form after a missed chat (ie while you are off line). The live chat will usually create and 'open' ticket automatically.
• The lead or prospect sent you an email to which a response must be prepared. For instance, you may need to process an order and put the case on hold during the lead time delay. Perhaps you need to pass the trouble ticket to another agent whose specializes in tending to such cases.
• You opt to manually generate a trouble ticket from scratch. This is common after physical meetings and or based on handwritten notes. For instance, the 'Messaging' tab in tawk.to allows you to create a new ticket from scratch.  

Trouble Tickets Enhances Personalization

Trouble tickets offer personalized service. Imagine people waiting in line at a bank. They are part of the mass production process, ie until an employee comes over and asks what each person needs and takes away individuals to whom they tend closely. The ticketing system is like the action of that employee. It essentially seeks to personalize the customer experience.

Trouble Tickets qualify leads for Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

A trouble ticketing system allows the personalization to occur electronically. For instance, you can establish lead qualification questions in the form of pre-chat contact forms.

If you can actually integrate the live chat into CRM, you can also store a lot of information about each lead / qualified lead (aka prospect).

While the average live chat is a one-off event that occurs like a transaction, opening a trouble ticket starts a relationship with a customer since trouble tickets extend the discussion beyond the initial contact. In short, trouble tickets are are means of introducing leads through your CRM system.

With limited human resources for customer service, trouble tickets are best suited for leads who can be converted into sales prospects through the sales funnel, especially if leads show real buying intent (and who may have come from your Google PLA campaign pages).

Trouble tickets Organize Prospects into Relevant Sales Pipelines

TechTarget appropriately likens a trouble ticket to a hospital patient's charts for a specific ailment. The trouble ticket (aka 'trouble report') keeps the customer issue an 'open' case, ie it remains current in the work queue until being resolved. Until the point of resolution, the trouble ticket helps to coordinate the work of different agents in the network operations center (NOC) (like doctors offering different specialist skills in a hospital).

A key characteristic of a trouble ticketing system is ticket categories. After an agent handles a trouble ticket, (s)he classifies it so that it can be handled with the appropriate level of urgency and by people with the next appropriate skill set in the process of problem resolution.

To set up trouble ticket categories for business efficiency

As mentioned above, 'categorizing' a trouble ticket refers to organizing the customer issue using keywords so that the issue can be resolved as efficiently as possible. Categorize according to how your company is organized. Specifically, while many small businesses find that classifying by the type of customer issue is the best, larger organizations may disagree and prefer to classify by department, simply because entire departments handle specific issue types in exclusion. In short, consider the key issues that require resolution and who should handle them. As organizations become larger, you might need to classify at 2 levels, first by department or product and then by type of customer issue.

Either way, avoid having so many categories and sub-categories that it slows down your processes. As a rule of thumb, it is best to maintain a maximum of 15 to 20 categories.

Example: A typical small online store of finished goods may classify by issue type as follows.

• pre-sale
• order
• shipping
• return
• brand

You may add classify further with more company-specific keywords as illustrated below for an online store that also offers customized consultation services.

• membership
• pre-sale_consultation
• order_consultation
• pre-sale_training ... and so on

CONTENT RELATED TO AN INTRODUCTION TO TROUBLE TICKETS

• Trouble tickets in tawk.to