How To Set Up & Optimize a Help Desk Ticket Workflow

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You’re in a busy workday when you receive a support ticket. You immediately notice it’s from a frustrated customer having trouble with your product. As you read through a long string of messages detailing their issue, you realize it will take a lot of time and effort to resolve. Sound familiar? If you’re like most support agents, you’re accustomed to handling help desk tickets and doing what you can to assist customers. But the process can be tedious and stressful. A help desk ticket workflow helps to organize and automate the process of resolving customer issues so you can focus on what’s important: delivering excellent 24/7 customer support. This article will help you create an efficient, automated help desk ticket workflow that ensures faster issue resolution, reduces manual effort and improves overall customer satisfaction.

One way to improve your help desk ticket workflow is to implement AI customer support from ChatBees. This tool can help you achieve your objectives by automatically addressing common customer queries, reducing repetitive tasks, and allowing you to focus on complex issues that need human intervention.

What Is a Help Desk Ticket Workflow?

A help desk ticket workflow is a structured system for managing customer support requests. Consider it a roadmap with all the steps categorized—from receiving a ticket to resolving it. Help desk workflows organize your help desk operations and transform them into a more organized, efficient structure.

The Benefits of an Optimized Ticket Workflow

When optimized correctly, it enhances client satisfaction and overall business performance. Nevertheless, many businesses need help building an effective workflow in their help desk operations, leading to disorganization and delays. If you're among them, don't worry. We will equip you with knowledge related to ticket workflow so you can turn your support struggles into a seamless job.

6 Benefits of Using Help Desk Workflows

Adding workflow to your ticketing system can revolutionize your customer service. Support workflows have numerous advantages, from improving efficiency to ensuring client satisfaction.

Here’s a quick list of some of the top benefits of adding an effective workflow to your ticketing system processes:

1. Faster Resolution Times

Customer support workflow automates repetitive tasks:

Eliminating manual efforts

Reducing the time spent on each user query

This results in reduced ticket volume and faster resolution times, which is a plus, given that 88% of clients prefer fast assistance after contacting a business.

2. Enhanced Customer Satisfaction

By providing quicker and more effective solutions, you’ll improve the customer experience. Happy customers will likely be more loyal and recommend your services to others, supporting business growth. As many as 89% of customers will buy from a company again after just one positive support experience.

3. Increased Productivity

91% of support agents think a help desk system boosts their productivity by default. With a structured ticketing workflow, queries can be managed and resolved systematically, contributing to better organization and work efficiency among reps.

4. Increased Efficiency

Automation is like having an extra set of hands that never sleep. By streamlining routine tasks, your team can handle requests faster and more consistently. No more juggling or manual sorting; tickets get routed to the right person instantly, so response times are slashed, and resolutions come quicker.

5. Improved Compliance and Accuracy

Staying compliant and accurate is crucial, especially when dealing with sensitive data or complex processes. Automated workflows ensure that every step follows predefined policies and procedures. This reduces the risk of human error and deviations, keeping everything on track and in line with regulations.

6. Scalability

As your organization grows, so do the demands on your service desk. Automated workflows are your cheat code for scalability. They allow you to manage more requests without hiring a small army. This means you can scale up your operations smoothly, meeting increased demand without breaking a sweat.

3 Help Desk Workflow Examples

1. Organize Tickets

Managing your tickets properly means sorting them into categories that make sense for your help desk, which can be done using various means. Organizing your tickets makes them more meaningful and easier for agents to find particular tickets when searching your help desk.

Using Labels to Organize and Prioritize Tickets

You can use labels to highlight necessary tickets or group similar tickets together. For example, if multiple customers report a bug with your software, these tickets might be labeled “frequent bug.” Labels make it easier to see when you are receiving the same issue repeatedly and prioritize your support operations accordingly.

Prioritizing Tickets for Effective Support

Next, you can prioritize your tickets according to urgency to understand which tickets need to be dealt with immediately and which can be left on the back burner. For example, suppose a customer contacts you about a billing problem and is at risk of losing your service. This can be classified as more important than a customer wanting to know when a particular product will be back in stock.

Using Statuses to Track the Progress of Tickets

You can also set the status of all the tickets in your help desk. In Keeping, every new ticket will be assigned as “open.” When someone starts working on it, the ticket may be “pending.” When the problem is solved, it’s marked as “closed.” Using the statuses on tickets tells your agents what stage the customer’s problem is and whether it has been fixed.

2. Automatically Assign Tickets Flowing Into Your Help Desk

If an agent has to personally read and tag each ticket that comes into the help desk, this can be demanding and take up a lot of time. The right help desk platform will automatically read incoming tickets and tag them according to keywords in the email's subject line or body, speeding up your support process.

For example, in Keeping, if you have a billing issue and the word “billing” is included in the email, this email can be tagged as “billing” and assigned to Brenda of the billing department. This happens automatically, so your agents don’t have to waste man-hours assigning tickets.

3. Combining Identical Tickets

Customers sometimes email you multiple times, creating duplicate tickets in your help desk. Dealing with identical tickets wastes your agents’ time and slows down the resolution that should be delivered to the customer.

Handling Duplicate Tickets and Avoiding Overlapping Work

Suppose your agent is already working on a particular ticket sent in by a customer, and duplicate customer emails are sent in again. In that case, you can order the help desk to combine the tickets so that two agents won’t handle the same request simultaneously. Another approach is to close the identical ticket to avoid anyone picking it up.

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How To Set Up & Optimize a Help Desk Ticket Workflow

Tailor Your Help Desk Ticket Workflows to Align with Your Team’s Unique Practices

Help desk solutions come with automated workflows that you can design according to your team’s personal needs and requirements. You must choose the right automation tool that is flexible enough to allow you to create workflows that mirror your team's practices. What your workflows look like will be different for every business.

Set up your help desk to support your workflows, such as creating tags or email response templates. Your help desk is only as helpful as you make it. Tailor your workflows to your unique requirements.

Create Service Level Agreements Backed By Real-Time Data

Service level agreements are documented agreements between a brand and its customers that mention the number of services to be provided and their quality. They are a collection of promises made by the brands to their customers.

Here’s some insight on how SLAs can be useful:

Establishes a realistic turnaround time to resolve customer complaints.

Describes the role of various support executives.

Explains how queries are captured and distributed among agents.

Defines parameters for ticket distribution.

States communication protocols for severe incidents.

Creating strong, realistic SLAs is only the first step. To ensure a smooth ticketing workflow, encourage your support staff to meet these SLAs. Key points to consider:

SLAs should be realistic and achievable.

Real-time data and analytics must back SLAs.

Support staff should be able to meet SLAs while handling customer requests consistently.

Avoid overpromising and under-delivering with SLAs.

Think about how these factors can improve your ticketing system's efficiency.

For instance, if you promise your customers their issue will be resolved in an hour and your team doesn’t respond for days or weeks, you might set the wrong expectations for them.

Implement Automation for Ticketing Systems Workflows

A study states that 40% of IT decision-makers foresee automation having the most significant impact on their businesses. Gone are the days when your agents used to pick up support tickets for themselves manually. They no longer need to type emails asking for customer feedback manually. This is for obvious reasons.

Manual processes bring inconsistencies and can take the edge off your productivity. OTOH, an automated ticketing system workflow, can help your team achieve more in a time-crunched environment.

Here are some automation capabilities that you can implement for your ticketing system workflow:

Automate the ticket assignment process

Share emails automatically for feedback or query rating

Set automated emails and notifications

Prepare a ticket escalation structure

Design a Real-Time Escalation Matrix

Customer service is a team effort. So when some agents cannot resolve an issue or are unavailable, you need to aid them by jumping in and backing them up. This is precisely the reason you need a thorough escalation structure. There are two types of escalations:

Functional: Where tickets need to be escalated due to the lack of knowledge or skills.

Hierarchical: Where tickets demand managerial attention or need their approval.

Escalations sometimes become inevitable. Therefore, the goal should be to carry them as swiftly as possible.

Here are some tips on improving your ticket escalation processes:

Train your support staff to enhance their skills and help them fill the knowledge gaps.

Resolve tickets promptly; consider automating the resolution process.

Ensure that your ticket routing processes are working fine. Route your tickets to the appropriate support executive from the start to minimize escalations.

Evaluate escalated tickets regularly to identify patterns and opportunities for process improvement.

Encourage consistent communication across different tiers of your support team.

Conduct root cause analysis for every escalation and optimize processes accordingly.

Create & Update Your Internal Knowledge Base

Every business has ample workflows and processes that everyone should and must know. This is also true for customer support executives. Given so much information, support agents might sometimes feel stuck when encountering a new customer issue. They might need help finding the correct answers at the right time. Due to this, training an agent on the nitty-gritty of every process becomes essential.

Nevertheless, you cannot have a one-to-one interaction and ensure everyone is always on board. As a solution, you can opt for an internal knowledge base so your employees can always be closer to the correct answers and access them whenever needed.

Here are some things that’ll help you create a better knowledge base:

Make it simple to find articles and guides by implementing filters and categorization.

Keep auditing your knowledge base content regularly.

Conduct training sessions on how to use the knowledge base.

Get feedback from those who read it. Ask them what should be included and what should be avoided.

Ask if your employees face any challenges while accessing the knowledge base and work towards annihilating these challenges.

Make sure these articles are easily shareable between employees.

These practices can speed up your ticketing workflow and equip support executives to deliver outstanding customer experiences.

Track Trends by Implementing Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics is an advanced trend that can help optimize your ticketing system workflow. Due to the abundant data in the company workflow, support executives only sometimes have the time to review the data and extract relevant insights that motivate them to make proactive decisions.

An integrated analytics feature (with your helpdesk) can help you track trends. This is beneficial for multiple reasons:

It tracks frequent issues and roadblocks.

It brings out the problems from the core and enables you to address them before the issue arises.

It makes informed recommendations that save time and identify significant trends you would otherwise have not recognized.

Organize Your Help Desk Ticketing Processes

To ensure an efficient change in your ticketing system workflows, you must adhere to the following best practices:

Set Ticket Priorities: Support executives can prioritize tickets as ‘High,’ ‘Low,’ or ‘Normal’ based on urgency. You can set the default priority for any support ticket as ‘Normal.’

Add Labels: Use labels to separate essential tickets. You can also group similar tickets by using the same label. For instance, if several people have encountered a similar login issue, such tickets can be labeled as a ‘login bug issue.’

Ticket Merging With Parent-Child Hierarchies: Let your agents merge multiple tickets with similar queries. Once you do that, your tickets will be sorted chronologically. The first ticket becomes the primary ticket, and the rest become secondary tickets.

Add Attachments & Notes: Let your executives add attachments for internal communication while responding to a ticket. They can also send documents, sheets, images, knowledge base articles, etc., to the customer.

Optimizing RAG for Internal Operations

ChatBees optimizes RAG for internal operations such as customer and employee support. Key features include:

Highly accurate responses that easily integrate into a low-code or no-code approach.

Agentic framework that automatically chooses the best strategy to improve response quality for various use cases

Improved predictability and accuracy, enabling support teams to handle more queries.

No DevOps is required for the deployment or maintenance of the service.

Try our AI customer support software to 10x your customer support operations today. Get started for free, with no credit card required. Sign in with Google and start your journey with us today!

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5 Benefits of Automating the Help Desk Ticket Workflow

1. Higher Efficiency: Speeding Up Help Desk Ticket Workflows

An automated help desk workflow significantly reduces time spent on manual and repetitive tasks. Automating different help desk features allows tasks such as response and resolution to be performed quickly and accurately.

When these repetitive tasks are automated, company support agents have sufficient time to concentrate on fixing urgent and complex issues, which increases the support team's efficiency.

2. Increased Agent Productivity: Boosting Performance with Help Desk Automation

When you automate your help desk workflow process, agents get more organized task schedules, which helps them resolve issues faster. Automating repetitive tasks also enables agents to focus on resolving higher-priority issues requiring urgent attention. Lastly, it saves time and increases their general productivity rate.

3. Time-Saving and Reduced Operating Costs: Help Desk Automation Saves Money

Completing tasks tends to be time-consuming, prone to human error, and confusing. Automating the help desk workflow defines the processes and leaves less room for error, saving time and costs. Setting repetitive tasks to complete automatically reduces the expenses of agents’ time spent doing those tasks over and over.

4. Error-Free Outcomes: Help Desk Automation Eliminates Mistakes

Companies opt to automate the help desk workflow to reduce procedural and resolution errors. Automated ticketing system workflows define procedures and the right ticket routing and assignment process. Therefore, they streamline task performance. Also, the automation reduces possible errors. They let your agents work with more confidence that everything is present.

5. Improved Customer Experience: Boost Customer Satisfaction with Help Desk Automation

Customers have more confidence and trust in a product or company when they receive immediate responses acknowledging receipt of their tickets and timely updates. Automating the ticketing system workflow makes this confidence easy to instill and encourages customer loyalty.

Automate the dispatch of acknowledgment emails and set reminders to update customers promptly. Your customer satisfaction rate and customer experience will increase as they see your support team taking their issues seriously.

Use ChatBees’ AI Customer Support Software to 10x Customer Support Operations

Help desk operations are stressful. Customer inquiries come in fast, overwhelming support teams and creating a chaotic environment. ChatBees' AI customer support software improves help desk ticket workflows with lane and assist features that automatically generate responses to common inquiries. These responses help support agents resolve tickets faster, improving team accuracy and performance while reducing stress.

Improve Help Desk Ticket Workflows with AI Optimization

ChatBees optimizes RAG for internal operations like customer support, employee support, etc., with our AI customer support software. This software provides the most accurate response and easily integrates 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.