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When customers submit questions or complaints, they want a speedy resolution. The longer they wait, the more frustrated they become. A ticket not routed to the right team or individual can further prolong their wait. Automated ticket routing tackles this challenge head-on.
This blog will help you understand how automated ticket routing works and how to set it up within HubSpot Help Desk Software. Let’s explore the benefits of automation for your customer support team and their performance. ChatBee's AI customer support is a valuable tool for achieving your objectives.
What Is Ticket Routing & Why It Matters to Customer Service
Ticket routing guides customer inquiries to the correct support department or agent. Efficient ticket routing means faster response times, reduced customer wait times, and improved customer satisfaction. When a customer submits a support request, they want help resolving their issue quickly. The longer they wait for a resolution, the more frustrated they become. Efficient ticket routing directly impacts how quickly a customer receives assistance and improves service quality.
How Ticket Routing Works
Ticket routing assigns support tickets to the correct department or individual agents. Routing tickets is based on several criteria, such as:
- Inquiry’s topic
- Urgency
- Language
- Support level
- Others
Automated ticket routing systems have primarily replaced the manual process of ticket routing, where help desk agents sorted through tickets and assigned them to the best-qualified department or individual. Today, intelligent routing systems automatically determine the order in which tickets are allocated and which agents are best qualified to handle them.
Use Cases of Ticket Routing in Customer Service
Escalate Top-priority Tickets
With automated ticketing AI, you can create rules around specific tickets to ensure they are immediately assigned to the right agent. For example, suppose a ticket contains keywords indicating a severe product defect or performance issue. In that case, the system can escalate the ticket and assign it to an agent who can help immediately.
Provide Appropriate Support Levels
You can apply support level tags (e.g., 1,2,3) to each new ticket. For example, GoCardless implements this system effectively. Here’s how it works:
- Tickets with the tag 1 need immediate attention and are routed to the next available agent.
Example: Organic Basics, an eCommerce fashion store, prioritizes customer tickets from subscribers as they are more likely to make a purchase. These tickets would be tagged one so they can get eyes on them as quickly as possible.
- Tickets tagged as 2 are of medium priority and are handled once all level 1 tickets are resolved.
- Tickets tagged as 3 are the lowest priority and can be addressed after levels 1 and 2 are resolved.
Skills-Based Routing
You may have tickets that require a specific skill set, like language or technical skills. Create tags for each skill set and set them to be automatically routed to the correct agent who can help. For example, James Villas, a villa holiday company, utilizes tags to route tickets to the agent who can best help. Whether it be booking issues or questions about pricing, the automated routing had decreased their first reply time by 46% in the first few weeks.
SLA-Based Routing
Let's say you have an SLA set for each ticket. The response time is 24 hours. Create an automated routing rule in which these tickets are tagged with an “over SLA” tag and routed to the next available agent. Or perhaps an entire queue of tickets that are over SLAs.
Sentiment-Based Routing
Angry customers are wrong all around. They're more likely to leave bad reviews, and they're more likely to churn. Sentiment-based ticket routing would help you prioritize irate customers and ease their frustrations.
Team Insights Routing
Many companies share support insights across departments to improve the customer-centricity of their products and processes. Routing can be perfect for this. For example, product teams love to get insights and feedback from customers. Work with them to understand what insights they'd like, then set up an inbox that receives all relevant tickets. You must route them to your customer service team's inbox to ensure they're handled.
How to Optimize Ticket Routing
If your ticket routing processes are not up to the mark, you will send your customers through a maze. You don’t want your customers to spend an hour hopping across seven agents before they finally reach someone capable of resolving their issue.
Routing tickets to the right agent the first time reduces your customers' effort to find answers to their questions. It increases customer satisfaction and could improve metrics like your First-Contact Resolution Rate.
What Are the Benefits of Effective Ticket Routing?
Here are the most significant advantages of optimizing your ticket routing process:
Speed
Since cases are assigned automatically, your agents don’t have to spend time picking their next ticket.
Balanced Workloads
You don’t need to worry about some agents picking only the easy tickets and dumping the complex ones on the other agents.
Increased Agent Productivity
Agents are assigned tickets that they can handle and resolve. They don’t need to waste time, only tickets they cannot resolve, only to transfer the conversation to another agent.
Reduced Customer Effort
Customers do not have to spend time and energy explaining their problems to multiple agents, only having them passed on to the next agent. Sending them directly to an agent who can help them would minimize customer effort and frustration.
Higher Customer Satisfaction
Optimizing your ticket routing can increase customer satisfaction rates. Customers can get immediate answers without navigating through multiple support agents.
Related Reading
Key Differences Between Manual and Automated Ticket Routing
Ticket routing, also known as ticket triage, is the process of delivering an inbound customer support request to a:
- Particular individual
- Team
- Queue location
For example, many companies have teams trained to handle complex requests. A ticket routing system would help identify complex support tickets and send them to the right queue. Setting up routing rules is the easy part. You decide which topics or characteristics to prioritize and implement (available in most help desk software).
The Challenge of Manual Ticket Routing
Identifying the tickets that fit your rules is where things get complicated. Reading and understanding one customer support ticket is easy for us humans. But at high volumes (say 10,000 to 100,000 requests each month), this becomes an eye-watering task for an agent or two to complete manually.
Automated ticket routing vs manual ticket routing char Automated routing would leverage an AI-based ticket tagging technology to apply tags like:
- Topic
- Sub-topic
- Sentiment
A manual process means higher response times and room for error. 58% of American consumers will switch companies because of poor customer service, so it is more important than ever to provide a stellar customer experience. Fast, accurate ticket routing helps deliver a faster, more tailored response to the customer requests you value most.
The Benefits of Automated Ticket Routing
How does automated ticket routing work? "There's no middle man with automated routing. A lot of teams have one or multiple people manually triaging tickets to the most relevant or available agents. However, with AI these team members can work on tickets instead or work on more scalable things like helping to build out new help center articles or FAQs." Kirsty Pinner, head of product at SentiSum Automated ticket routing, can use an automated ticket routing AI, automatically assigning tickets to the correct agent or team.
For example, James Villas, the international holiday letting agent, leverages automated routing to reduce first response time to frustrated and worried customers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The team struggled with customers reaching out due to:
- Uncertainty
- Frustration
- Necessary cancellations and travel date changes
“The challenge was to prioritize tickets in a way, so that urgent cases were handled as quick as possible so that our customers could travel at ease.” Johannes Ganter, head of CRM AI-based ticket tagging, identified customers in need and routing rules and added their requests to a "priority" inbox.
They are reducing the first reply time by 46%. First, reply time is reduced by automated routing AI, which is a powerful addition to a computerized routing setup. Machine learning-based AI uses data and algorithms to imitate how humans learn, gradually improving accuracy.
Optimizing RAG for Internal Operations
ChatBees optimizes RAG with our AI customer support software for internal operations such as customer support, employee support, etc. This software provides the most accurate response and is easily integrated into workflows in a low-code, no-code manner.
ChatBees' agentic framework automatically chooses the best strategy to improve the quality of responses for these use cases. This improves predictability/accuracy, enabling these operations teams to handle more queries. No DevOps is required to deploy and maintain the service.
Try our AI customer support software today to 10x your customer support operations. Get started for free; no credit card is required. Sign in with Google and start your journey with us today!
Why Set up Automated Ticket Routing and How to Do It Right
Automated ticket routing speeds up the process of assigning customer issues to the right people, improving both agent and customer experience. With automated ticket routing, you won’t have to wait for an agent to manually assign a ticket before they can start working on it. Instead, identifying and delegating the issue to the right team member happens automatically. Customers get quicker responses and resolutions, two things every customer wants.
Studies show that 33% of customers expect to hear back from customer service within 30 minutes or less. Automated ticket routing helps you meet (and exceed) those expectations.
Reduces Human Error
Routing tickets manually leaves too much room for human error. Even if your support reps mean well, they can make mistakes when assigning tickets, ultimately delaying the resolution process. For instance, a customer submits a ticket about a technical issue.
Ensuring Accurate Ticket Routing
When routing the ticket manually, an agent may accidentally assign the ticket to someone who specializes in billing instead of the correct person. With automated ticket routing, you can create rules that ensure tickets are routed accurately based on specific criteria like skill sets, ticket priorities, and more to reduce resolution times and improve customer satisfaction.
Improves Team Efficiency
Not only does automated ticket routing help improve the customer experience, but it also boosts team efficiency. With automated routing, customer support managers can spend less time manually assigning tickets, freeing them up to focus on more strategic tasks.
Reducing Burnout
Automated ticket routing helps eliminate repetitive tasks that bog down customer service teams and can lead to burnout. Instead of starting from scratch every time a customer opens a new ticket, automated ticket routing allows agents to quickly pick up where the last conversation left off, improving team and customer morale.
6 Benefits of Automated Ticket Routing
1. Boosts Team Efficiency by Balancing Workload Among Support Agents
Automated ticket routing helps organizations make the most efficient use of their resources. With this system in place, tickets are automatically distributed to the most qualified support agents based on set parameters. This relieves pressure on team leaders and prevents support burnout by ensuring that agents evenly distribute tickets.
2. Distributes Tickets Intelligently to Prevent Backlog
Automated ticket routing reduces the chances of backlog by ensuring all tickets are resolved promptly. The system intelligently distributes tickets based on set parameters, such as the specific issue and the support agent’s skill level. This prevents delays in resolution and improves overall ticket management efficiency.
3. Prevents Support Teams from Cherry Picking Tickets
Another advantage of automated ticket routing is that it minimizes the chances of tickets being overlooked. When tickets are distributed manually, there’s a chance that support agents will pick and choose the issues they want to resolve. This can lead to some tickets being neglected, especially if there’s a backlog of topics.
Automated ticket routing reduces this risk by ensuring tickets are assigned immediately and distributed based on specific criteria rather than the preferences of support agents.