![What is an Email Ticketing System? [Benefits+Features+Best Practices]](data:image/svg+xml;nitro-empty-id=MzEyOjMwMQ==-1;base64,PHN2ZyB2aWV3Qm94PSIwIDAgNjYzIDQyNyIgd2lkdGg9IjY2MyIgaGVpZ2h0PSI0MjciIHhtbG5zPSJodHRwOi8vd3d3LnczLm9yZy8yMDAwL3N2ZyI+PC9zdmc+ "What is an Email Ticketing System? [Benefits+Features+Best Practices]")
- Introduction
- What is an Email ticketing system?
- How does an Email ticketing system work?
- What are the key features of the best Email ticketing system?
- Benefits of Switching to the Best Email Ticketing System
- How can different teams/departments use an Email ticketing system?
- Best Practices You Must Follow for Using an Email ticketing system
- List of Factors You Must Consider Before Selecting the Best Email Ticketing System
- Ready to Transform Your Customer Support
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Introduction
Inbox overload and rising frustration about emails becoming harder to manage within customer service departments are something we all struggle through every day.
When you just use a shared inbox for customer support, you need folder structures, color-coded tags, and filters to make it look neat and a workable solution. However, as the number of emails increases, managing it becomes impossible.
Before this negatively impacts your customer service, it is time for an alternative.
An Email Ticketing System
An Email-based ticketing system offers a lot of value in terms of simplifying your email support through its engaging and intuitive interface.
To know more about it in detail, let’s dig in…
What is an Email Ticketing System?
Basically, email ticketing software is an email ticketing tool for customer service teams to organize and manage customer queries effectively. A well-equipped email ticketing system converts all the email queries sent to your service team into tickets within the system. You can easily track these tickets from the moment they are generated to the time of their resolution.
Features like converting emails into tickets and replying directly from the system, task management, internal notes, and self-service portals make sure no customer query goes unanswered.
How Does an Email Ticketing System Work?
Emails Get Converted into Tickets
After you configure all the emails into this system, the incoming email queries raised by the customers get automatically converted into tickets. That means you do not have to go back and forth in order to manage your inbox. Every morning, you log in to your email ticketing system and reply to emails as normally as you would use your own inbox. No more missing out on important emails from piles of unread emails.
Priority of the Tickets is Set
Once the tickets are generated, you can set the rules to auto-prioritize them based on certain trigger words/phrases such as “emergency,” “important,” “urgent,” “unhappy,” etc. Setting ticket priorities can help you to focus on crucial queries first and take the rest afterward.
A Deadline is Set to Solve a Query
After all the tickets are prioritized, you can set deadlines. Pre-defining deadlines help your team manage tickets easily. A clear deadline helps you to be on time for faster query resolutions.
Assign Tickets Automatically
After the ticket priority and deadline are set, you can create workflows to automatically assign the tickets to the most suitable customer service agent. The whole ticket assignment process is based on parameters to ensure that the agent finds the best solution for the queries.
Appropriate Solutions
Once all the tickets are assigned, the service agents can focus on solving them as soon as possible with the help of an email ticketing system. With its powerful features like task management and internal notes at their fingertips, the process of finding resolutions for the tickets becomes less complex with increased collaboration among the team members.
What Are The Key Features of The Best Email Ticketing Software?
Auto Ticket Creation
The email ticketing system converts all the queries automatically into easily manageable tickets. You no longer have to create them manually. Since these tickets are stored in one place, they will be easily accessible to the agents without switching screens. This way, missing out on any query also becomes impossible.
Effective Collaboration
The most challenging part when offering customer service is collaboration. Through effective collaboration, tough queries can also be solved easily. The result can be the exact opposite when the service teams fail to do so. Hence, in order to collaborate effectively, your service team needs an email-based ticketing system.
As it helps them to collaborate and communicate easily by offering them features such as shared email inbox, parent-child tickets, cross-team collaboration, creating tasks from tickets, etc. All these features can make your agents collaborate effectively with each other to find quick solutions for the customers on time.
Workflow Automation
Automation plays a huge role in increasing the productivity of your service department. When used properly, agents can reduce their workload easily.
Automation offers a range of useful features such as auto-ticket priority, triggering email notifications, automating the inbox cleaning process, changing the status of the tickets automatically, etc. These features ensure that the service agents save their time and can focus on much more crucial tasks. Let’s see an example of how can an automation feature helps the service agents.
Example: Imagine hundreds of customer queries are generated, and instead of focusing on solving them, your service agents are busy setting priorities for those tickets With a system like DeskXpand. You can avoid such a situation after using the auto-ticket priority feature.
After using it, you can easily know which tickets they need to prioritize first. This way, instead of wasting time on setting ticket priorities, you can utilize that time to find a solution for the tickets.
Shared Team Inbox
Time is everything when it comes to offering quality customer service. And not having a shared inbox makes it hard for the agents to work effectively. The email ticketing system comes with a shared inbox so that all the agents of the customer support teams have access to all the queries.
By using the shared inbox, your customer service department can improve collaboration because multiple team members can send, receive, and manage emails from the same email address.
Benefits of using a shared inbox to offer quality customer service:
- Single point of contact for all customer emails
- More transparency and accountability
- Improve the productivity levels of agents
- Make it easier to divide the workload
- Enhances collaboration among team members
- It helps you to keep things organized
Filter and Categorize Tickets
Filtering and categorizing tickets might be the most underrated feature of the best email ticketing system. It may not be as big as others, but it can be quite effective. Without its help, finding a particular ticket can get as tough as finding a needle in a haystack.
For example, there are hundreds or maybe thousands of queries generated every day. Just imagine how hard it would be to manually search for a ticket among these piles of queries. It could consume hours and hours of your agent’s time. But with the help of filters and categories, these frustrating tasks can be solved in just a few seconds.
How? So, in order to find out a particular ticket, your agents just have to filter the ticket. For example, if they need to find a ticket that was generated one month ago and was categorized as “crucial,” they can apply these filters to find out that particular query. This way, the agents can find tickets with just a few clicks and save a lot of their time.
Self-service Options
Self-service is one of the most convenient ways to allow your customers to help themselves in the absence of service agents. It is also one of the ways in which you can offer 24/7 service to your customers. A lot of customers want businesses to offer them the option of self-service so that they do not have to be dependent on the agents.
The email-based ticketing system allows you to offer exactly what the customer wants. It helps you offer multiple self-service options, such as a knowledge base, FAQs, etc., to the customers. By getting easy access to these self-service mediums, your customers can get timely solutions to their issues.
Note: One major benefit of self-service is that it can be accessed from anywhere whenever your customers face any issue. Making it the most convenient option for them to find a solution on their own without needing to rely upon you.
Analytics and Reporting
To offer quality service or to make constant improvements, businesses need to know how well their customer department and every agent of that department is working. And analytics can help you find answers to such questions.
It can show you reports such as:
- How much average time do agents take to respond to customer queries?
- How much average time do agents take to resolve customer queries?
- How many tickets are generated on a daily basis?
- How many queries are assigned to a particular service agent?
These reports help you to get valuable insights into the data of your customer service department. With its help, you can easily make the needed changes in the strategies to offer better customer service.
CSAT Surveys
How to know if your customers really like your product, customer service, or any other aspects of your business or not? The easiest and most effective way is to ask them about their opinion by sending feedback surveys.
Email ticketing system helps to create these kinds of surveys in just a few minutes that too without any hassle. It offers a customer satisfaction survey feature that allows you to create a survey that includes certain questions that your business needs answers for.
Once you get your customer’s feedback, you can make the necessary changes as per their suggestions. By doing so, you can ensure that your business offering is optimized for your customers, resulting in enhancing their experience.
Benefits of Switching to The Best Email Ticketing System
Seamless Collaboration Among Team Members
Customer support is something that’ll always require the involvement of more than one department. In an email system, you’d get lost scrolling through long email trails and can end up consuming more time. This can directly impact your resolution time and harm the experience of the customers.
In order to avoid such a situation, it’s necessary to switch to an email ticketing system that can make a massive difference to your team and, eventually, to the experience of your customers. It lets you assign an email-based ticketing system to relevant departments. For instance, with just a click, you can assign email queries that are related to the features of your key product to your sales team.
Cut Short on the Response Time
Flooded inboxes make sorting and filtering emails difficult. Sooner or later, you’ll be in a place where you receive far more customer emails than your team can attend. It also means that urgent customer issues will get lost in a sea of emails.
We can all agree that it is impossible to collaborate and resolve customer issues through manual systems. Besides, your team will not be able to segregate the issues as per their priorities. It becomes difficult to follow the SLA rules. Hence, causing more delays in responding to customers. All signs call for only one solution:
Adopt an Email Ticketing System!
An email ticketing system automates numerous processes for you. You have to set the SLA rules, and your queries will be sorted accordingly. The email helpdesk automatically converts email queries into the form of an email ticket management system.
DeskXpand does precisely this. It uses the round-robin method for ticket assignment empowering support teams to maintain the priorities as per the SLA. It improves the overall support flow and productivity. In fact, with DeskXpand, companies have improved their agent productivity by as much as 23%.
Allows You to Offer Omnichannel Support
Interacting with customers through only one channel is just not enough. The sad part about manual email management systems is that they’re just emails. You can’t switch to other channels swiftly. Even if you want to, you’ll have to write back-and-forth emails to share the contact information and agent details. This long and hectic process can consume a lot of your agent’s valuable time.
All this ruckus is not worth it. The email help desk software will let you switch from one channel to another within seconds. You can also enable Support through multiple channels like social media, chatbots, and so on. The email dashboard allows agents to offer 360-degree Support effectively to customers.
Well-Organized Customer Service
A ‘cluttered inbox’ can create a chaotic situation for your customer service team and can end up consuming a lot of their valuable time. With an email-based ticketing system, each query is assigned the most suitable agent based on certain parameters that ensure that the ticket is handled well.
As an admin or Support manager, you can also track the ticket lifecycle from the time it is generated to when it meets complete resolution. Plus, you can use features like label, status, category, and internal chats to have all the information at your fingertips.
Reduce Ticket Volume with a Knowledge Base
Along with improving your current Support, you also need to focus on reducing repetitive customer issues. Your support agents certainly don’t want to answer the same questions all the time. When it comes to self-service, the regular email systems fall flat on its face. But, with the help of an email ticketing system, you can easily adopt a proactive approach to provide the necessary support to your customers.
You can create a knowledge base within minutes and make relevant information available in the form of self-help articles, FAQs, video tutorials, step-by-step guides, and more. These self-service options can help customers even when the service agents are not around. Also, customers prefer solving their own issues without anyone’s help, resulting in a decrease in tickets.
Agent Collison Issue Can Be Avoided
Another primary reason to switch to an email ticketing system is your team’s lack of transparency and accountability. Lack of accountability reflects the loopholes in data acquisition and team collaboration. If your support team does not have the best email ticketing system, agents might face problems like collisions.
For example, just imagine two different agents working on the same ticket and both contacting a customer. After such an experience, what impression would the customer have of your brand? But, if you’re managing customer service through email help desk software, your agents will be able to see what the other agents are doing. This way, potential collisions can be avoided.
Increases Agent’s Efficiency and Productivity
Customer service is the process where being productive and efficient are the most important aspects for customer agents. Without it, agents won’t be able to offer timely and correct solutions to their customers. And automation is one factor that helps agents increase their productivity by a huge margin.
It allows agents to work faster as it automates certain tasks for them. They can easily prioritize, auto-assign, and also auto-respond to certain customer queries. You can also automate processes like ticket registration, categorization, alerts, notifications, etc. This, in turn, helps your agents to save their time and to reduce your service costs.
Integrated Knowledge Base with Chatbots for 24*7 Support
Another benefit of having an email ticketing system is that it enables you to offer round-the-clock service to your customers. A knowledge base can be the most convenient and cost-effective way to provide 24*7 customer service. And to make the knowledge base articles even more effective, you can integrate them with a chatbot.
So, let’s say a customer is searching for a particular answer when all your agents are offline. They’ll naturally turn to your chatbots on your website. So, when the customer inserts their query, the chatbot can directly find the answer and send the link to your customers. This way, the customers can find a solution without any fuss. And in case the customer is still not satisfied with the answer, the chatbot will generate a ticket.
Measure Customer Satisfaction
Many businesses believe that they’re already delivering superior customer support without even knowing if the customers feel the same way or not. The best way to find out what your customers think of our products and post-sales support is by asking them certain questions via surveys.
With the help of an email-based ticketing system, you can easily create, design, and share surveys with customers to measure their satisfaction rates. The survey responses will help you gain insights into how well your product is or how well your support team is performing.
Note: This survey can also give you an idea about which areas of your product or Support needs improvement. So that you can make the necessary changes as soon as possible for better results; this way, by taking timely actions on customer feedback, you might effectively enhance their experience as well.
Reduce the Chances of Error
Using manual spreadsheets and emails for data management will make it very hard for you to make sure that you meet every timeline. This will cause a tone of flaws in your workflow. Hence, with the best email ticketing system in place, you can easily collect all the essential information of the customers.
And as they possess secure data centers which are protected with firewalls to store the data, you do not have to worry about the data anymore. Your email ticketing system will also ensure that everyone follows the deadline and the customers receive day-to-day updates regarding their queries.
How Can Different Teams/departments Use an Email Ticketing System?
Customer Service Team
Customer service teams can be benefited a lot after using the email ticketing system as it streamlines the process of customer service for the team and allows them to offer quality service to the customers. With its powerful range of features like omnichannel Support, customization, canned responses, self-service, automation, live chat, etc., your agents can do more in less time.
IT teams
The IT industries adopt a lot of technologies on a daily basis to keep up with the trends. Certain employees might find it hard to adapt to the new technologies and might face some issues. In such situations, they might reach out to the agents for technical Support. In order to solve the technical queries of the employees, the service teams might need the assistance of a technical person.
With the help of an email ticketing system, they can easily collaborate with the tech team and add them to the ticket. This way, the tech team can easily get to know about the issue. It helps the service teams to easily solve queries and provide timely solutions.
HR Department
As customers are important for every business, its employees are also equally important. And it is very important to keep them happy as well and provide them with a great working environment. Hence, your business needs to offer them a way to connect with a system that helps them reach out to the HR department.
With the HR ticketing system, your HR department can effectively manage your employee’s queries. And can help them to find out a solution. This way, an email ticketing system helps your HR department create a better workplace environment for your employees.
Education Department
As the demand for online education is rising day by day, having an email ticketing system in place becomes extremely crucial. Students from all over the world can seek knowledge with the help of online education. And as this mode of education is relatively new for students, they might have a lot of questions related to it.
In such situations, an email ticketing system can do wonders, as it offers the students the assistance that they need. For example, a student from India wants to learn about a course or a degree from a university located in the USA. The university has to ensure that they offer 24/7 service so that students in other countries having different timelines can also get necessary and timely help.
Best Practices You Must Follow for Using an Email Ticketing System
Have a Proper Understanding of the Email Ticket Management System You Choose
Having a proper understanding of the email ticketing system can help your agents to assist your customers effectively. As your agents know it’s every single feature, they can provide timely solutions to your customers and can get the best results. This way, by knowing the email ticketing system from the inside out, they can offer quality support to your customers.
Using Automation Wherever You Can
Customer service is a time-consuming process. Hence, it is very important to use automation wherever possible to save time. With its help, the service agents can focus on more crucial tasks and can complete more work in less time. Automation plays a vital role by helping you to stay on top of your customer service game and be productive.
Define Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
SLAs are the agreements between you and your customers that define the quality of your customer service. They are based on particular metrics and the quality of service your business offers.
Here are a few common SLAs that you can mention in the agreement:
- Business operational hours: Customers should know at what time your service agents are available.
- The average time taken to respond: How much average time do the agents take to respond to a customer query?
- Maximum time to resolution: The maximum amount of time that will be taken to find out to proper solution for the customer query.
By mentioning all these parameters in your SLAs, you can avoid unnecessary frustration that is caused to your customers. These SLAs can set specific expectations among your customers and also helps your service agents to prioritize their tasks.
Categorize and Prioritize Emails
By categorizing and prioritizing email tickets, your agents can easily manage their workload. This helps them to know which tickets are crucial and need their immediate attention. Prioritizing also makes sure that your agents complete their work on the given deadline. This way, organizing and managing the tickets gets less hectic, and agents can stay on top of every customer query.
Create Canned Messages And Templates
Customer service is a never-ending process. Hence, your agents are the one who needs to upgrade their skills or use such features that help them to be more productive in order to work effectively. And canned response is one such feature.
They are pre-defined answers that can be used as a solution for customer queries. It helps them avoid the unnecessary hassle of typing the same reply over and over again, eventually resulting in saving a lot of their time.
List of Factors You Must Consider Before Selecting the Best Email Ticketing System
The email ticketing system is used to streamline the customer service process, as it offers a number of powerful features. These features help the agents to offer quick solutions to the customers. But it is important to select the most suitable email ticketing system for your organization. So, to help you out in making the correct decision, here are the few things you must consider first:
- How many emails do you receive?
- What specialized features your team needs to offer quality service?
- How many people can access the email ticketing system at once?
- How effective are its automation capabilities?
- Can your service team collaborate seamlessly after using the email ticketing system?
- Can it keep the data of your customers safe and secure?
- Does the email ticketing system offer a free trial?
After finding answers to all these questions, you can easily make the decision to select the right email ticketing system for your business.
Ready to Transform Your Customer Support with DeskXpand
DeskXpand is an email ticketing system that is used by businesses of all sizes from various industries. Especially by businesses that belong to eCommerce, IT, insurance, education, hospitality, etc. industries. It helps the customer service department of these businesses to streamline their service process and offer quick solutions to their customers.
It has features that increase the agent’s productivity and efficiency by a huge margin. Features such as one-page ticketing, omnichannel support, self-service, customization, automation, live chat, task management, canned responses, etc.
These features allow agents to cover all the necessary platforms that your customers prefer to reach out to, offer 24/7 support to your customers by allowing them to help themselves, can save a lot of time by automating tasks, offer quick solutions with pre-defined answers, manage the task more efficiently, etc.
With the help of DeskXpand’s email-based ticketing system, your business can also transform its customer service and take it to the whole next level in just a few days. Offering quality service to your customers can result in enhancing their trust and building a strong relationship with them that helps your business in the long run.
Let DeskXpand Transform Your Customer Service
Learn in detail about the features of DeskXpand’s email ticketing system; hurry up, and get a free demo today!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is the Difference Between a Regular Email System And an Email Ticketing System?
The difference between a regular email system and an email ticketing system is that an email ticketing system offers a lot of powerful features that streamline the customer service process. By using a regular email system, your agents have to go back and forth in order to access the email queries.
But with the help of an email ticketing system, all the incoming mails are directly converted into manageable tickets and get gathered in one place. Making it easy for the customer service agents to cover them all without missing out.
What’s the difference between cloud-based and on-premise email support systems?
One major difference between a cloud-based and on-premise email ticketing system is that a cloud-based email based ticketing system needs a third-party provider to host it for you. While with an on-premise email ticketing system, you can host it yourself.
What Equipment is Needed For an Email Ticketing System?
The email ticketing system does not need any equipment; it only requires you to have a little knowledge of technology and a fast internet connection. With so few requirements, it offers you various benefits that help you offer quality customer service.
