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For a seamless customer experience, you must get your request management processes right. With 60% of customers expecting a response within 10 minutes or less, organizations have no time to waste on lengthy customer journeys or inefficient internal processes.
As Slack gained widespread popularity as a customer service platform, it faced new challenges in effectively managing incoming tickets. Although Slack offers a variety of tools to handle customer journeys, its built-in request management capabilities fall short. That's where Thena comes in to assist organizations.
By using Thena, businesses can easily assign categories and tags to each customer request, guaranteeing that no tickets will slip through the cracks or experience unnecessary delays.
If your service agents handle a large volume of inbound requests via Slack, managing these can be a hectic experience. But there’s an easy solution; applying Categories and Tags to individual tickets can significantly improve customer experience and speed up ticket escalation.
Categories and Tags carry additional information that can be assigned to tickets and requests. Through built-in capabilities, categories and tags give customer service representatives a quick overview of the urgency or escalation stage
Configuring Categories and Tags on Slack is a straightforward process and can be done in a few clicks with Thena.
You can access various options to personalize your process through the simple command of /Thena Global Config from within your Slack channel. After activating the Slack command, you can access features such as Service Level Agreements (SLAs), working hours, and ticketing integrations.
You can also easily configure your request management specifications through the pop-up window with a few straightforward steps.
When you navigate to the Request Management tab, you'll have the ability to easily access and modify existing categories and tags, as well as create new ones as necessary. It's crucial to ensure your categories and tags are concise and easy to understand, so your team can select the most appropriate options without any hesitation.
While it's helpful to establish a few distinct categories to streamline the ticket escalation process, it's important to strike a balance and avoid creating an excessive number of categories, as this can lead to confusion and unnecessary delays.
As you fully integrate Thena into your request management process, some specific categories and tags can greatly assist you, such as priority levels or product types. However, it doesn't have to stop there! Depending on the type of service you provide or the audience you engage with, you have the flexibility to assign tags related to subject matter experts, sales cycle stages, or project steps. The possibilities are endless!
Furthermore, you have the freedom to choose whether your tags should be single-select, multi-select, or even incorporate a sliding scale, allowing for added complexity when necessary. With Thena's Request Pro feature, you can create up to five categories that align perfectly with your team's needs and preferences.
Allowing your agents to select categories and tags with a simple click can significantly speed up the triage and escalation process as part of your customer experience journey. They no longer need to forward information to other team members or struggle to find meaning in complicated ticket escalation processes.
With slick and straightforward click-through options, your team will be able to identify what needs to be done quickly and efficiently.
Combined with conversational ticketing, Slack Categories and Tags can help you achieve better, faster customer service and, ultimately, a happier customer base. With the use of tags, request management processes will be more structured, flagging tickets to the right teams and individuals with a click of a button.
Through the Kanban board view, team members will be able to easily identify what needs to be done and what ticket escalation or sales cycle stage the request is in.
If your service agents handle multiple clients with varying SLAs or support different products simultaneously, it can be challenging to identify what tickets should be prioritized first. Assigning categories and tags to requests can remove doubt from the process, helping your team feel confident about the best approach.
Clearly defined prioritization processes can also help with team morale, and process speed and help you to sustain strong relationships with your most valued clients in the long run.
Shortcuts are one-click solutions integrated within Slack that can be linked to particular tasks and actions. When a request is first detected through conversational ticketing, Thena’s system will treat it as unassigned, automatically showing up in the Request Triage channel and flagging it to all relevant agents for action.
Users can select shortcuts once the ticket is created by clicking on Slack emoji reactions linked to relevant tasks. The actions can be accessed from either the notification section of the message itself within the Triage Channel through Slack UI or the Kanban board through Thena’s web app.
There is a wide range of Slack shortcuts available for your team:
🎫 (ticket) Create New Ticket. This emoji will trigger the creation of a new ticket that will be automatically sent to an email-based ticketing tool, alerting relevant service agents. Important to note that this option is not visible if integration is not configured.
👀 (eyes) Looking Into It. This Slack shortcut illustrates that a member of the service team acknowledged the request and took responsibility for handling the ticket themselves.
⛑️ (person-frowning) Assign to someone. This Slack emoji indicates that the ticket was flagged to a particular team member to manage.
🌂 (umbrella) Close. This option shows that the ticket completed the request management cycle and is now resolved and closed.
Individually actioning tasks can be a labor-heavy job. Mistakes can be easily made by moving across different platforms and dragging tickets or data cards across relevant sections. Figuring out the appropriate order of steps can confuse new recruits and be lengthy to train.
However, with the help of Thena’s shortcuts, this process can be quickly streamlined into a foolproof action plan. With the use of clearly identifiable and easy-to-remember Slack emojis, your agents will no longer have to spend their valuable time jumping across different tools!
Another frequent issue in request management systems is that tickets often get stuck in the ‘no man’s land’, clogging up ticket resolution queues and causing frustration for the customers. The longer they stay unclaimed, the more likely these requests will be forgotten, not meeting your service expectations.
With the use of Slack emojis and shortcuts, service agents can easily avoid this issue, claiming open tickets with a click of a button or assigning it to relevant team members. With actioning these shortcuts, requests will be allocated to an individual's workstream, removing the element of doubt and saying goodbye to lost tickets forever.
Let’s be honest, managing customer requests is not always the most exciting experience. With the help of Slac emojis, your request management process can be humanized, creating a more accessible and approachable environment for both your team and your customers.
Long gone is the era of chaotic conversations; today’s customer expects a smooth and quick customer journey with a bit of a flair. Handling ticket requests through Slack can help you connect with your customer base, creating long-term partnerships.
If you use Slack to provide B2B customer support, you understand the critical role effective customer request management plays in driving satisfaction and loyalty.
To optimize this process, you must leverage the best tools and features available. And that’s where Thena’s Slack Alerts and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) come in.
In this blog, we’ll explore how Thena’s Slack Alerts and SLAs work and how to make the most of them to deliver a truly superior customer experience.
To begin, we’ll cover the basics.
Alerts are scheduled or triggered messages that help you stay organized, save time, and automate tasks in Slack. They can be configured through the Thena Slack App or a specific channel.
Examples of how alerts benefit your B2B customer communication include receiving notifications for pending customer responses with the First Response SLA alert and getting alerted about customer requests on your preferred channel.
Let’s now take a look at these one by one to see how they work in practice as well as how to configure them with Thena.
Imagine this scenario: you run a successful SaaS business and rely on Slack Connect channels to support your customers. One day, a client reports a bug in your software, but unfortunately, it goes unnoticed or gets lost in the conversation. Not an ideal situation, right?
Thena can pick up these customer questions thanks to its intelligence request management capabilities, ensuring that no customer requests are ever ignored. How does this work in practice?
A customer reaches out to you with a question. Thena then uses request detection (its own AI and OpenAI’s capabilities) to identify if the message qualifies as a request. If you have configured alerts, Thena takes action and sends an alert containing the request to the appropriate channel. Typically, this would be your designated triage channel, ensuring prompt attention and efficient handling of customer inquiries.
What happens next?
All in all, thanks to Thena’s Request Detection, you can stay on top of every customer message, without ever missing a beat. You have the flexibility to either centralize all the requests or segment them according to your company's size and current strategy.
Businesses understand that causing customers to wait for assistance or resolution of their queries is unacceptable.
With Thena, you have the power to receive immediate notifications whenever a customer message remains unanswered beyond a predetermined time frame known as the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Thena offers flexible SLA options, ranging from as short as 30 minutes to as long as 48 hours, allowing you to tailor it according to your specific needs.
Finally, we’ve got Ticket Closure SLA which is a useful alert notifying that a particular request has been opened beyond a predetermined SLA time frame. Thus, with Thena, you have the option to set up an alert that will be promptly sent to a channel of your choice whenever a customer request exceeds the designated resolution time according to the SLA.
Creating an efficient request management system is crucial to the customer experience journey. With the help of Thena, you can easily streamline your request management processes with a range of categories and tags, use shortcuts and setup Alerts with SLAs.
Signup with Thena today and never miss a ticket again!
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