5 Tips for Better Ticket Triage on Your Customer Support Team
When your business constantly faces an onslaught of new customer support tickets, it’s easy to fall behind and become overwhelmed. But if you have a service desk ticket triage system in place, it changes everything. Suddenly, you go from chaos to systematic organization.
What is Ticket Triaging?
The best way to understand ticket triaging is to understand how it works in another setting that many people are familiar with: healthcare. More specifically, think about how triaging works in a hospital’s emergency room.
Hospital emergency rooms are full of different injuries and illnesses. Some are legitimate emergencies, while others aren’t super urgent. From a busy hospital’s perspective, the challenge is determining which patients have the most serious and urgent conditions and to prioritize them over the ones that have less serious and less urgent situations. In order to do this, they have a triage system.
Every emergency room department has its own triage rules, but most group patients into one of five levels:
Level I: Resuscitation
Level II: Emergent
Level III: Urgent
Level IV: Less Urgent
Level V: Non Urgent
Anyone who is in need of resuscitation automatically gets moved to the front of the line. Emergent cases come next (usually people who are experiencing heart or brain-related issues), followed by urgent cases (serious issues that don’t have to be dealt with right this second), and then non urgent cases.
A hospital’s ability to properly classify patients when they walk through the door allows them to be as efficient and effective as possible. And the same goes for your call center or help desk’s triage process.
While you might not have as much on the line as an emergency room, your approach should be just as intentional and strategic. Some tickets require immediate attention, while others are far less urgent and can be fit into your schedule as space allows.
Why Does Ticket Triaging Matter?
Proper ticket triaging matters for a variety of reasons. And the more you embrace a systematic approach, the more you’ll enjoy benefits like these:
- Confidence. This is an under-appreciated benefit of ticket triaging, but it’s very important. When tickets are properly routed to the correct support agents and departments, it gives way to confidence. From a top-down perspective, management gains more confidence that support is being handled properly. And from an employee perspective, there’s a greater sense of confidence that you’re being properly utilized in your role.
- Productivity. Good ticket triaging results in greater efficiency. And greater efficiency results in more productivity. This ultimately gives your organization the ability to do more with less. And, when you consider that a growing business also sees growing support tickets, having a highly productive approach bodes well for the scalability of your operations.
- Speed. Automatic ticket triaging helps resolve tickets faster. In some cases, you can even solve simple issues in a minute or less. Not only does this enhance your productivity, but it makes customers happy.
- Less frustration. When your support desk is loaded down with an endless stream of support tickets, everyone becomes frustrated. Customers are angry because their tickets aren’t being solved as quickly as they’d like for the topic or urgency. Employees are stressed because they have no time to catch their breath. Management is frustrated because things are moving at a slow pace. It’s tough on everyone! But with the proper triage of tickets, everything flows much faster. This reduces frustration and eliminates the emotional component.
- Trend identification. A good triage system does more than just assign tickets to the right department or support rep. It also tracks tickets and helps identify major trends. From an organizational perspective, this shows you which issues are most resource intensive and which ones are simple fixes. Over time, you can iterate your strategy and tier of support for greater efficiency and productivity.
- Improved CSAT. Truth be told, nothing matters more than customer satisfaction (CSAT). If your customers are happy, they’re going to be loyal. And if customers are loyal, it’s easy to grow your revenue and scale in a predictable way. One of the big perks of ticket triaging is that customers come out feeling happier and more satisfied.
These are just some of the benefits you enjoy when you start taking ticket triaging seriously. The reality is that it will have a positive impact on every aspect of your business – impacting everything from sales to support.
5 Tips for Better Ticket Triaging
Clearly, having the right ticket triaging system in place matters. The question is, where do you start? Here are several helpful tips that will allow you to move forward:
1. Think in Terms of the Eisenhower Matrix
It helps to think about ticket triaging through the lens of the Eisenhower Matrix. If you’ve never seen this matrix, it’s basically a 2×2 box that’s split into two rows and two columns. The two columns are labeled Urgent and Not Urgent (from left to right), while the two rows are labeled Important and Not Important (from top to bottom).
Any ticket that enters your support desk should fit into one of the four boxes (urgent/important, not urgent/important, urgent/not important, or not urgent/not important). And based on where it falls, you either address immediately, schedule immediately, schedule as able, or ignore.
While you’re obviously not going to manually run every single support ticket through the Eisenhower Matrix, it’s helpful to have this framework in your mind as you develop workflows and processes. It’ll help you divide between high priority and lower priority in tasks.
2. Observe the 80/20 Rule
The 80/20 Rule is a universal principle that says 20 percent of the inputs typically produce 80 percent of the outputs. This is true whether you’re creating a workout regimen or trying to manage IT support tickets for your business.
With support tickets, the goal should always be to the other 80 percent of tasks that are a waste of your time. This ensures most of your ticket management is hands-off, while you’re manually addressing the ones that matter most.
While this makes sense on an intrinsic basis, it can help to put some dollars and cents behind it. Research shows that self-serviced tickets cost an average of $2 to handle, while tickets that require IT support cost $104 on average. And if a ticket requires field support, you’re looking at an average of $221. By addressing the simplest tasks via automation, you can save $100 or more per ticket!
3. Track and Utilize Data
You know what they say – assumptions make an…well, you get the picture. If your ticket triaging is based on assumptions, prepare for inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and lots of frustration. In order to thrive, you must let the data tell you what to do.
Make sure you’re constantly tracking data and using it to help iterate your workflow and processes. If the data says you’re off, you’re off – it’s as simple as that! Data doesn’t lie. Your opinions and preconceived notions do.
4. Allocate Agents and Define Roles
Getting the ticket to the right person requires you to have the right person trained and waiting for the tickets to arrive. In other words, it doesn’t matter if you send a ticket to the “network connectivity bucket” if there’s nobody there who is equipped to handle it.
To ensure your triaging works, allocate agents and define roles. Every person on the team should know what tasks they’re responsible for, as well as what other people are responsible for. This eliminates confusion and gives everyone a more complete picture of what’s happening at all times.
5. Use AI Ticket Triage Software
If all of this sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. If you attempt to tackle ticket triaging with a manual approach, you will fail. It’s imperative that you automate with machine learning models and streamline to lower the amount of inputs required and to reduce the risk of human error. The best way to do this is through the implementation of AI ticket triage software.
Automate Ticket Triage With Aisera
Aisera’s Ticket AI is one of the most advanced triage solutions for helping growing and established organizations manage high volumes of tickets. The system leverages intelligent automation to classify and route tickets, improve resolution times, and strengthen employee and customer satisfaction. Some of the specific features and benefits of Aisera Ticket AI include:
- Auto-resolve support requests across channels
- Automatically assign and route tickets and cases to the right agents
- Recommend next-best-actions for ticket and case resolution
- Automate knowledge resolution and ticket/case resolution notes
- Agent coaching with AI-driven recommendations
With Aisera Ticket AI, every repetitive and time-consuming process can be automated for maximum efficiency. And with agent-assist, the proper IT, HR, and customer service teams are only sent tickets that align with their skills and abilities.
Best of all, anything that can be addressed using existing knowledge articles, templates, or past ticket or case resolutions are automatically resolved without any human involvement.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Aisera can deliver exceptional employee and customer experiences while also reducing service costs, request a demo today!