Why do businesses need ticketing software?

In today’s hyper-personalized market, customers are seeking to be understood. Quick resolution, regardless of the issue, and emotionally intelligent service staff are paramount to small and medium business success. Investing in tools that facilitate an efficient agent experience and a frictionless customer experience will elevate your business.

To accomplish this, consider your ticketing or customer relationship management (CRM) software and how well (if at all) it can integrate with your customer service software. In the short term, your customer service staff need to solve customer issues fast. Looking at the midterm, you need to track customer interactions with your brand and derive insights from those interactions. Monitoring patterns of customer behavior and agent “hacks” or workarounds to overcome points of friction in your systems and workflows can make a huge difference in customer experience. From a long-term strategy viewpoint, the insights from one quarter can inform forecasting to scale staffing, product, or support activities in the next.

In any case, a ticketing system coupled with a customer service solution will help enable you to find where customer relationships can improve and to position your business for continued growth.

Benefits of integrating your ticketing system and contact center

Consider critical tools used in other areas of your business: accounting software, inventory management, point of sale, and so on, each to manage a certain function of your business and give you insight as to what is happening. A ticketing system helps you manage internal or external issues that need resolution. For external customer interactions, that ticketing system coupled with an integrated contact center platform or customer service workspace will enable you to receive, process, and resolve customer inquiries. With robust integration between these two systems, the following are just a few examples of the benefits:

• Single source of truth and synchronized data across systems
• Efficient and effective business processes
• Improved agent experience and satisfaction
• Reduced duplication and errors
• Insights for agent coaching
• Historical data to inform forward-looking strategy

Who would benefit from integrating ticketing system and contact center

In general, any business that interfaces with customers would benefit from a ticketing system. Some signs or symptoms indicating you might need to make the investment could be:

• You frequently apologize for not getting back to customers
• Email is your customer service system
• Currently you have no way to calculate average issue-resolution time

If you currently have dedicated staff or agents for customer service inquiries and you do not have a ticketing system, your business is a prime candidate.

For support teams utilizing a multichannel approach—meaning your contact channels (phone, email, text, WhatsApp) are distinct or siloed, or you have to “swivel chair” from system to system to manage communications on each channel—a unified omnichannel customer service platform integrated with a ticketing system can be a game-changer for your business.

Contact center features to look for when integrating with ticketing systems

For businesses that are just beginning to unify and mature their customer service—perhaps from that multichannel approach to an omnichannel approach—or for businesses that are evaluating a system upgrade or replacement for their long-standing customer service practice, there are really two primary features to consider:

• API integration: Does the ticketing system provide an application programming interface (API) that can integrate with your customer service workbench?
• Automations: Are time-saving automations possible with my customer service, e.g., callbacks, sending reminders or notifications, queues, and routing

Why Contacto’s integration with ticketing systems can help

When considering the benefits of this type of integration, those most directly impacted are undoubtedly the customer and the agent. But simply tracking issues is not enough. You need a system to interface with customers and track those interactions for internal use. Let’s take a look at how a ticketing system coupled with a contact center can not only alleviate pain points, but offer added value as well.

Customer

Above customer satisfaction and net promoter score, customer effort has the most direct impact to top line revenue. The following pain/gain approach illustrates the benefits of various customer conversation channels coupled with a ticketing system:

Agent

Streamlined agent workflow makes efficient use of precious time and resources and increases agent satisfaction as a result. There are many agent experience enhancements a business might prioritize, but we recommend the following as the top two pain points to alleviate:  

Conclusion

No matter where you are on the journey to improving, scaling, or maturing your customer service motion, a ticketing solution coupled with a contact center platform will drastically improve your business workflows, employee performance, and customer satisfaction.