Any business determines its success from the number of happy customers it is able to acquire. Along with reaching customers, the organization should ensure that their customers are satisfied enough to stick to the brand for future purchases. For this to happen, brands should interact with their customers regularly to understand customer needs and resolve their support queries quickly.

However, the monotonous tasks involved in these manual support management can make it difficult for your team to resolve queries. We all have experienced monotonous tasks that never seem to go away. It pops up every day, week, or month and there’s no going away from it. Besides, as the organization scales, the support process will get more complicated. But what if you could automate at least a part of some tasks? Let’s look at how automation impacts customer support.

Importance of Automation in Customer Support

In the post-pandemic world, companies need to design the roadmaps to customer support based on parameters of care, safety, and trust. They need to leverage tech and make use of data to offer better customer experiences.

Many industries across major niches are acknowledging the pivotal role of automation in helping them solve customer queries. According to a survey, 73% of customers think that customer relationships have improved due to automation, while 76% of employees said that automation benefitted their workforce. 

With automation, you can achieve:

• Skyrocketing Productivity
• Increased Agent Satisfaction
• Automatic Reporting
• Personalized Responses
• Seamless Communication
• Faster Response Time

Ticketing automation is playing a huge role in maintaining a successful rapport and is helping revolutionize the support industry. Thanks to modern-day ticketing system software, brands no longer have to manage everything manually. An advanced ticketing system enables brands to track and manage the support queries effectively, thereby enhancing customer satisfaction. So how exactly can an automated helpdesk save time and money? We’ll find out exactly this in this article. Here are some ways in which automated online ticketing systems save time and money for businesses.

1. Perk of Automatic Ticket Registration

2. Bye-Bye to The Manual Ticket Assignment Processes

3. Better Escalation Management

4. Ensures Correct Implementation of SLAs

5. Never Miss to Follow Up With Your Customers

6. Close Tickets Automatically

7. Alerts For Urgent Queries

8. Answers on Your Behalf on Weekends and Holidays

9. It Brings Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

10.  Automated Reports Help Analyze Better

1. Perks of Automatic Ticket Registration

Customers want to use different touchpoints to reach a brand or their support departments. Automating this experience can:

• Reduce the wait time for your customers
• Streamline ticketing at your support end

Depending on your business niche, your query registration process can be swiftly handled by a chatbot or a voice bot. You can also provide a questionnaire or an onboarding form. This will help you understand the customer’s psyche, and then you can work on piloting customers towards the right channel seamlessly. 

Workflow automation with guiding prompts can lead the client efficiently and can enhance the user’s experience while also bringing standardization to the process. This saves a lot of time for your employees and reduces the overall support costs.

2. Bye-Bye to The Manual Ticket Assignment Processes

In 2022, you don’t need a gatekeeper to direct the course of your customer support anymore. You don’t need your support executives to assign tickets manually. Now, with an online ticketing system and ticket automation, you can create triggers. So, if customers submit a ticket via email or any other communication channel, it goes to a specific agent or group directly. For example, you can define a trigger where the subject line contains the word “how” (e.g., how do I change my password) could automatically route all emails to the training group.

An online ticketing system ensures that the queries get sorted automatically based on the defined parameters and that they reach the right agent (one with the right expertise.) It empowers your team to analyze escalations and make reasonable adjustments. It helps you route tickets to the appropriate members from the beginning. It’ll save a lot of time for you and your customers. 

3. Better Escalation Management

No matter how efficient your support workflows are, you cannot please everyone all the time. There’ll be instances when your customers will become stressed, frustrated, or will demand to speak directly with the manager. Most of the time, brands are afraid to give escalation response teams leeway to close escalations. But then the complaint rises even more, and it potentially wastes time. Hence, it is vital to take care of escalations at an earlier stage only. 

If you already have a specific escalation management process in place, you can automate it by using the advanced workflow features. You can also automatically route issues to specific queues based on various parameters and filters. With your escalation management software connected to your customer conversations, you can route more customers for phone communication.  

You can reduce hold time by using the “call customers back” functionality for your support executives. This eliminates some of the friction that can lead to escalation management situations. Besides this, every ticketing system software should have dynamic timers to let you maintain the ticket timeline. It must also have service agreements and escalation rules that can be set up and modified based on their real-world performance. 

You can base your SLA automation and apply them on:

• Due dates
• Response time
• Routing workflows
• Resolution time
• Ticket closing limit

You can enable hierarchical escalations automatically and enforce issue prioritization. It’ll help in reducing the overall delay and helps in keeping the customer involved at every stage of their ticket lifecycle.

4. Ensures Correct Implementation of SLAs

Customer requirements are not always similar. Some niche brands receive more complicated queries than others. Especially if you belong to a B2B industry, then it’ll get more complicated for you to resolve issues at the soonest. For example, government entities need on-premises solutions for security reasons. Some companies (like healthcare companies) might have compliance-related issues. 

Most customer service work on a first-come, first-served model. You cannot prioritize one customer over another. Unless, of course, you have a proper prioritization system in place. This is where SLAs come into the picture. SLAs define the standards of service you expect from a brand. 

Automated SLAs can help you prioritize your support tickets based on your existing support bandwidth, the severity of issues, and their complexities. It also includes the penalties that would be charged when the service levels are not achieved. It includes:

• Lifecycle Tracking
• Simplified SLA Target Creation
• Prevent Potential Breaches
• Custom Alerts and Notifications
• Measure SLA Performance

5. Never Miss to Follow Up With Your Customers

Support teams are, more often than not, always busy. With an automated ticket management system, you can create a trigger so that if you’re waiting for a customer response, you can send an automatic email after a set period of time to remind them. You can also create triggers for your customers to ask them for feedback and ensure that they’re satisfied with their services. 

This prevents the customers from feeling abandoned and forgotten. Who knows, maybe your team missed their last email by accident. Make sure the message you send is friendly and encourages a response from your customer.

6. Close Tickets Automatically

Sometimes, after sending out reminders, a customer may not respond to you. This can be due to multiple reasons. And you cannot leave a ticket open forever; it is easy to create a trigger that closes tickets automatically after the defined number of days. For example, you may use ticket automation to automatically close all tickets that have not been modified for 15 business days. This will help you keep the ticket queues clean and ensure that you provide an accurate assessment of your ticket volume. This accuracy is important when the ticket volume rises, and you need to staff appropriately based on this increase.

7. Alerts For Urgent Queries

Many tickets do not require an immediate response. But urgent tickets can make or break large business deals. Urgent tickets cannot wait until business hours, and you must address them right away to keep your customers happy. 

You can utilize ticket automation to manage internal correspondence regarding the same. Be it an email or text message or any other communication channel; you can simply set the ticket severity level to “Urgent” or other trigger keywords. These alerts will help you manage your support tickets both now and in the future.

8. Answers on Your Behalf on Weekends and Holidays

Not all brands have the financial capacity to offer 24/7 support for all types of queries. Many companies use their helpdesks to create rules that if a non-urgent ticket is created on a certain day (i.e., Saturday, Sunday, or any holiday), the customer will receive an automated email immediately. This email usually thanks them for reaching out and states that they will get a response within a specific time or on a specific date very soon. These instant emails are important because it sets a reasonable timeframe and expectation for customers to expect their issue to be addressed.

On the other hand, many companies hence use other means of support like chatbots and a knowledge base to help their customers when the agents are not available. 

I. Chatbots

Automated chatbots make it easier for customers to get answers on the fly. It also saves a lot of time for the agents as the customers would rather solve their queries on chatbot than raise an issue through other modes of communication. 

Not only do you need to have automated responses as a part of your support team, but you also need to make better use of them. Your chatbots are supposed to hold the conversation with your customers until your agents are available. Make sure your chatbots do not hold them for long and divert them to your teams whenever an agent is available. 

II. Knowledge Base

A knowledge base is vital for any business; that too, an automated one. Traditional knowledge bases are often passive and cater to a generic customer base. Automated knowledge bases are more dynamic and keep learning/changing with every interaction. This is possible through decision tree algorithms that can evaluate, learn, and evolve, making the information accurate.

You can create a support page to post FAQs, other documentation guides, how-to guides, video tutorials, etc. Besides this, a knowledge base is always scalable and always available to help your customers. Plus, it takes a massive load off of your team when it comes to technical questions.

9. It Brings Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

Some key aspects of providing customer satisfaction and improving customer loyalty involve: 

• Faster response time
• Shorter resolution time
• Consistent support across multiple touchpoints 

Automation can provide all these aspects and even more. The outcomes include a positive customer service experience and keeping your customers satisfied. 

Agent Satisfaction

Automation tools like chatbots alleviate pressure on agents who’re overloaded with work and queries. This can happen by automating customer interactions over their preferred channels. Automation tools can take care of high-volume queries and low-value queries at the same time, leaving more meaningful tasks for the support agents. Automation gives agents a unified view of customer data, conversation history, etc. and improves your in-team collaboration, and helps resolve queries quickly. 

10. Automated Reports Help Analyze Better

If you measure your team’s performance manually, it’ll bring unavoidable errors and lead to biases and improper analysis. An automated ticketing system software can help you gather precise metrics and enables you to get a holistic view of your team’s performance. You can automate receiving every day reports and track progress accordingly. 

A helpdesk enables you to gather insightful reports on key aspects like:

• Ticket Volume
• Number of Tickets (open, closed, escalated)
• Average First Time Response
• Average Resolution Time
• First Contact Resolution

The Bottomline

There are not many things left to say except the obvious fact that ticket automation saves businesses a lot of time, effort, and money. Instead of employing extra support executives to monitor and sort tickets, you can simply empower your current teams with automated functionalities. An automated online ticketing system can perform the most tedious tasks without the element of human error. 

Automated customer support:

• It helps you execute complex and manual tasks easily
• It frees up time for your support executive so that they can handle more strategic tasks and complex queries. 
• It enables customers to get answers quickly.

Customer service automation tools also allow you to provide personalized customer service at scale. It makes it easy to test, measure, and learn so that you can continually optimize your customer service experiences. So, are you ready to automate your customer support?