Keeping support teams well-stocked with skilled technicians is critical. Yet the time and cost of hiring a team can add up quickly.
Long ticket queues impede productivity, frustrate employees and customers, and suck up revenue opportunities. Fortunately, there are several ways to reduce IT support ticket volume and resolve issues faster. IT support about issues and their fixes can be found which provides information on how to properly handle your IT difficulties.
1. Automated ticketing systems
Automated ticketing systems help your support teams to personalize customer service at scale by capturing and storing information on previous interactions in a centralized platform. This allows the team to access relevant data and quickly resolve issues, resulting in a higher level of service for your customers and cost savings for your business.
Priority-based ticket sorting automatically categorizes and prioritizes incoming queries based on pre-defined criteria. This allows the team to focus on resolving high-priority tickets and meeting SLAs first.
Many advanced ticketing tools, such as Trengo, offer automation capabilities to streamline repetitive tasks. These features enable the team to set up reminders for important actions, create standardized templates, and automatically escalate tickets depending on their status or customer intent. The system also offers detailed reporting to provide managers with valuable insights and metrics about the support processes.
2. Self-service portals
Providing support through people is expensive, but offering self-service tools can cut that cost drastically. However, those tools must be easy to use for them to be effective.
Self-service portals combine multiple support channels in one interface so teams can find the answers they need quickly. These portals can include knowledge base articles, ticket management features, and community forums.
For example, Fibery provides a portal with a search bar that lets users easily find help materials and a forum where they can ask questions. Their portal also provides step-by-step guides for the highest-ticket-volume issues, including helpful videos. Lastly, their portal is available on all devices, which helps meet customer expectations for an omni-channel experience. Keeping content up to date is important, too; Stonly’s editorial tools allow for fast and easy changes.
3. Segmentation
Segmentation allows businesses to make their IT budget go further without cutting essential services or compromising customer experience. This strategy involves tailoring support channels to user segments so that they are more relevant and accessible. For example, businesses can offer chat or phone support for laptop users and messaging apps for smartphone users.
Network segmentation enables IT teams to create secure zones and restrict access to specific devices. This protects systems against attacks that can be spread from one device to other through the same network connection.
Infrastructure visualization also makes it easier for IT teams to identify and understand both sanctioned and unsanctioned activity on the network, which can help them define microsegmentation policies that address risk factors like environment type, regulatory scope, application tier, and more.
4. Knowledge-based support
A knowledge base is a powerful resource for internal and external teams that empowers customers to troubleshoot issues themselves rather than waiting on support representatives. This reduces downtime and customer frustration while freeing up help desk staff to focus on more complex issues.
Depending on the needs of your organization, knowledge bases can take many forms including FAQs, a forum, white papers, how-to articles, video tutorials, and more. You can also create machine-readable knowledge bases (KBSes) that store information in formats readable by AI software and then use automated deductive reasoning to provide solutions.
IT support providers aren’t just concerned with reducing short-term costs. They can also help you plan for the long term, such as establishing roadmaps for technology upgrades and risk assessment.
5. Tiered support
Tiered support enables businesses to handle customer inquiries and issues efficiently by assigning the right team member with the correct expertise. This is a good option for companies with a lot of complex products and services.
Tier 1 support agents handle the majority of questions and issues and can resolve most basic inquiries, but if they’re stumped, they can escalate to a higher tier. Tiered support models can also help reduce customer wait times by routing customers to the best agent to solve their problems.
A tiering strategy that involves creating and equipping each tier with the appropriate technology can boost efficiency and ensure that the most complex questions are handled in optimal timeframes. This helps eliminate bottlenecks and reduces the risk of long call queues and customer frustration.