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When your organization handles a large volume of tickets daily, getting lost between the lines is easy. Demands are pouring in, your IT help desk is overwhelmed, and your support team suffers.
Without an effective strategy for tracking IT tickets, even the best-performing business can quickly buckle. IT ticketing systems are great for streamlining your workflows, making your users happier, and boosting the efficiency of your IT support team.
So, if you need help understanding the ins and outs of tracking IT ticketing systems, we are here to help. In this article, you can gain insight into best practices, challenges, and the best IT ticketing systems in the market.
Let’s get started.
IT ticketing systems can help companies track internal IT help desk queries and ensure their IT support team has access to the most efficient tools to tackle them. These tools track an IT ticket from when it's first submitted to when it's resolved. They make sure that every request is easily seen and managed through a central platform with a simple, user-friendly interface.
Ticketing solutions also help to enhance productivity and efficiency through automated ticket assignment, status tracking, and end-user feedback. The best IT ticketing systems boast many vital features, such as intelligent workflows, third-party integration, knowledge base support, and in-depth analytics.
There are several benefits to an IT ticketing system, both to your IT support team and your end users:
Better insights: With an optimized tracking process, your organization can perform to its maximum potential. With the help of customer service metrics and service desk KPIs, you can better understand how your company performs and plan for long-term success.
Metrics are really important for maintaining the health of your organization. Studies have found that by using help desk metrics effectively, you can make your operations much more efficient.
In fact, you could save as much as 670 working hours every year, just by boosting productivity. So, the big question is, what kind of data should you be keeping an eye on?
Resolution time measures how long it takes your IT support team to fix an issue from start to finish. This information can tell you whether your team is quick and efficient. It's also useful for spotting big issues, like if your workflows are clunky or if your service agents are spending time on tasks that aren't needed.
Quick resolution times are important because they can make your customers happier and reflect how well your organization operates.
Ticket volume is the number of tickets submitted during a specific period. Volume numbers can help business leaders understand workload demand and develop better human resources and coverage strategies. Ticket volumes can also identify trends in demand, such as quiet or extremely busy periods.
The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) comes from the ratings your customers give in surveys after their IT issues are resolved. To keep these satisfaction scores high, your operations need to be quick and efficient, and you should aim to meet customer expectations.
The Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance rate is the wellness check for your customer service processes. SLAs should be upheld wherever possible to ensure you are meeting expectations. This metric illustrates the percentage of cases resolved that meet your SLA standards. Decreasing data points can often mean that your IT support team's workload is unmanageable or your workflows are inefficient.
For effective ticket tracking, good training is essential. Even if your software is easy to use, there will be times when people need extra help. Make sure to train both your staff and your users properly so they can get the most out of the tool.
Training can vary; for example, you can offer several training sessions and refreshers for your team, or create detailed knowledge base articles to ensure all questions are answered in a centralized place.
Your chosen tool might be an all-rounder, but it can always use some customization. In most solutions, you can easily modify dashboards or interfaces to improve efficiency, automate existing processes and protocols, and add custom fields and tags or stock responses.
Research shows that IT service desks capitalizing on machine learning-enhanced technologies can free up to 30% of support capacity, so don't hesitate to explore all capabilities.
Customized notifications and alerts are important for the success of your IT support teams. These notifications help ensure that tasks are addressed promptly and everything runs smoothly.
That said, notifications and alerts must work alongside clear categorization and priority levels, allowing your system (and your agents) to categorize requests without having to read through every single IT ticket.
While most IT ticketing systems have a range of great functionalities, they must integrate with third-party systems and applications to achieve maximum functionality.
Collaboration is critical to streamlining support operations, so tools like Thena that seamlessly integrate with Slack will grant access to various functionalities to enhance that. IT support teams can receive instant notifications and ticket updates straight within Slack, utilize video chats with end-users or within teams, or even send video tutorials or knowledge articles in a range of formats in one platform.
You can empower end-users to resolve their issues through integrated knowledge bases, freeing up time for your IT support team and lowering ticket volume.
While you might assume that people value personal contact above all, research shows that 40% of users prefer self-service over human contact. Self-service portals are also helpful for your agents as they can be used as a resource guide for problem-solving.
It can be hard to find the right help desk software to fit your needs, but here are our top 3 choices:
Thena's next-generation solution that seamlessly integrates into Slack can help organizations tackle help desk challenges and maximize productivity. With the help of our tool, you can ensure that no ticket will ever go missing with straightforward categorization features, streamlined ticket escalation processes, and workflow automation.
Thena's intelligent ticket management system utilizes Artificial Intelligence to provide the best possible service for your business. Our conversational ticketing solution identifies potential IT tickets straight from Slack conversations and routes them through a Triage channel where agents can address them efficiently.
Moreover, Thena's built-in automation can speed up IT ticket processes, auto-assign tickets, track ticket statuses through emojis, and consolidate subsequent requests. Our operational powerhouse is enabled with knowledge base integration and in-depth analytics to ensure you can cover all aspects of help desk requests.
Freshdesk is another ticketing platform that consolidates all customer communications into a unified, shared inbox where service agents can tag tickets and collaborate. The tool offers a range of automation features, such as outbound ticket notifications and status updates, complemented by a streamlined team dashboard for monitoring crucial metrics.
While Freshdesk delivers excellent service, some of its features are less customizable and can be difficult to tailor, which may ultimately affect the experience of both customers and service agents.
Last but not least, Hiver is a ticketing tool designed to help agents streamline customer ticket requests. It offers a shared inbox solution with features like routing, tagging, and internal notes, providing a unified omni-channel experience. However, Hiver lacks an auto-assigning function for IT tickets, and its analytics often lack depth.
Tracking IT ticketing systems are essential to the success of your business. IT ticketing systems can enhance productivity, increase customer satisfaction rates, and speed up processes by providing an easy-to-access platform for your end-users and IT support teams.
At Thena, we are committed to bringing out the best in your business and helping you tackle all of your help desk concerns straight from Slack. Try Thena for free now.
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