Your help desk software must be a goldmine (and not a minefield) in all aspects. But in this article, we will focus on the help desk ticketing system for small businesses.
The last two decades have seen these systems evolve so much that they are threatening to replace help desk professionals in addressing customer issues. In essence, they are now the core of most help desk operations worldwide.
What to Look for In a Help Desk Ticketing System for Small Business
So what are some of the must-have properties of your help desk ticketing system when looking to choose a tool to rely on?
SLA (Service Level Agreement) status info
Anytime staffs look at a ticket; they try to gauge its level of urgency to prioritize it appropriately among other tickets. With SLA information embedded in the ticketing system, it becomes much easier to prioritize different tickets and stay safe from SLA violations.
Ticket tags
With ticket tags, it is much easier to organize tickets and identify common issues. These tags can also be of help by tickets by automatically suggesting informative and guiding articles per the assigned tags.
Ticket automation
Regardless of the sector, you are in; ticket automation remains a must-have feature. Automation allows you to carry out many tasks, from setting reminders for any pending ticket responses to routing tickets to particular users, and much more.
Personalizable ticket templates
Because you want to have many different tickets, it makes more sense to go for a system that can allow you create multiple templates that you can load by a few clicks to ease the process of responding to tickets. The best tools should allow you to combine these templates accordingly if a ticket has numerous questions.
Separate ticket queues
Though most companies still rely on a single ticket queue all the time, using separate queues, can help staff to organize their tickets better and monitor the queues of their colleagues to offer assistance where needed.
Customized ticket pages by customer
The more info your staffs have about your clients or customers, the better ‘they’ll be able to fix their issues. Personalized ticket pages can provide valuable info including the satisfaction levels of a customer, the number of tickets they have open, etc.
Private and Public permissions on tickets
Some ticket conversations should remain private— not visible to a customer. But that is not to say they should occur internally. It makes more sense to air ticket chats in the system but add private actions/permissions until you’re ready for actions by public customers.
Product & inventory management
For firms that deal with virtual or physical products, product and inventory management is a must-have option. It is easier to track info to a customer if it appears on their ticket page than dig through piles of external documents.
Ticket deflection
Some customer requests are better answered with an informative or guiding article? But it can be annoying to leave them the burden of searching for the link. ‘That’s why you need an in-built ticket deflection feature on your ticket pages to help you suggest the correct link immediately.
Personalizable ticket status options
Do not limit your ticketing options to “open and closed.” Pick a help desk ticketing system that allows you to add status options that fit the needs of your business. You can also trigger your emails to send automatic notifications to customers anytime ticket status changes.
Related Tickets
It is not uncommon to experience multiple repetitive requests which require you to follow the same long process to respond to all of them separately. Related tickets can simplify this process of integrating these requests and giving one response for all.
Customizable ticket submission forms
Though not directly within the system, go for a tool that enables you to add customized fields in the customer ticket forms when you need to capture some info. That way, you can significantly reduce query follow-up time and pace up ticket resolution.
Conclusion
Let’s face it; the help desk ticketing system for small business is built to increase productivity in the different ways discussed above. Otherwise, you have no business seeking help desk software that will not improve and streamline your ticket system.
Look for the above features and more when searching for a tool that will save you both money and time.
