Today nearly any business can provide outstanding customer support services with the numerous tools available on the market. The help desk helps in managing the messy and nonlinear processes, so your support specialists get customers’ requests and fix them as soon as they can. Besides, customers are aware of the status of their tickets, and support agents pay more personal attention to complicated issues.
The support service automation with multiple and changeable workflow rules (including ticket routing) gives your agents to do more work while devoting less effort and time. Think that’s an ideal environment? To some extent, it is so. You should run your service on the help desk (not spreadsheets) and set up the corresponding options to automate the ticket assignment process properly to meet your business and support team demands.
Once the customer service has gone bad
When dealing with the huge volume of tickets, you should assign them to the right support agents or even other departments (if that action is required.) In that way, you will meet SLA requirements and leave customers satisfied.
Manual ticket routing and reassigning is a slow, ineffective, and error-infested tactic. However, some companies still opt to do this manually instead of using an automated ticket routing tool. They waste a lot of time on ticket distribution instead of resolving customers’ issues which results in poor sales and reputation.
Often there are three types of delays:
- A holdup of the assignment. It is when a ticket takes a long way inside the support team to reach the right person that can fix the request.
- Another nasty situation can happen when a support agent understands that they can't resolve a ticket, but doesn’t care to reassign it to another agent.
- In case, a ticket is assigned to the support team instead of another team, the resolution will suffer another exacerbating delay.
The customer won’t be wowed by such service quality, and you at the same time miss your service goals. Here is where automated ticket routing solves the ticket assignment phase and creates “wow” customer service moments.
What is ticket routing?
To talk a bit more about automation, and precisely about ticket routing - this option turns out to be very useful. Why? The ideal support specialist can solve any problem, but in real life, this agent will most likely be a Jack of all trades (and probably a master of none).
To deliver exceptional service, you can route tickets with product or service questions to one of your support managers, setting up issues to another support manager, and marketing or sales requests to the corresponding departments. The team works quickly, customers are happy. But what does it mean - routing tickets? Let’s figure out.
Every system has administrative settings, and once a ticket is created, it can be routed to selected departments or assigned to a team or an individual support manager, hence the name, ticket routing. Also, incoming tickets can be left unassigned. Such tickets may be assigned manually, by claiming, or by responding to customer issues.
If you set up particular automation rules, you can route tickets by topic, tag, country code, language, or other ticket filters both retrospectively or in real-time (depends on your system of choice). These filters apply configurable rules to match some information from ticket details. Once the ticket goes with a few filter options, it may be rejected, routed to another department, team, or agent, set the priority or SLA as well as get a canned response.
Enlisting ticket routing rules
Automation of some actions drives a part of your routine on autopilot and leaves time to handle more critical tasks. A well automated ticket routing system can be a kind of life-saver as it can assign tickets in times when few people are working. You can set particular rules and use ticket category, priority, tags for assigning tickets to a team, support agent, or another employee with the necessary knowledge. All this works great if sufficient data is collected. Otherwise, the ticket might be assigned to the wrong person, especially if it is all running in real-time.
The rules for routing tickets vary. Here are a couple of automation ideas you can apply to your performance.
- Category based routing. If your help desk automated ticket routing system supports the option that allows customers to choose a category, grab this advantage and exclude a manual ticket routing. Set up rules for assigning the ticket to a particular support manager for every category inside your company.
- Top priority. Let's say you have many C-level customers, which means - no time to decide where each ticket will go. Create a rule that CEO requests are critical and assign them all to a support agent to handle them.
- Location and department routing. Your customers come from all over the world and the time zones and languages differ. Save time and set rules that will assign tickets to particular agents who will be responsible for resolving issues from a specific time zone or language.
- Keyword-based routing. This type of automation allows you to assign tickets to a support agent who has skill or knowledge in a narrow area. For instance, there are several tickets for payment. Create a rule to route tickets based on the word “payment” to the service manager who specializes in this question.
A skill-based routing strategy
A customer-focused help desk always leaves the place for real-time customizations. You can use this option to apply a skill-based routing. Moreover, you can match the customers’ requests to the most suitable and qualified support manager. The benefit of this strategy gives you:
- More focused agents who deal with ticket solving rather than rerouting them to other managers. Apart from productivity increase, you receive a faster first-time response and satisfied customers.
- Streamlined workflows as the tickets assigned to the customer support service specialists with a particular skill set.
- Spare budget and time on resolving the complex tickets.
Help desks with ticket routing automation feature
Dozens of help desks are trying to win the ballgame and get more customers. They offer helpful and efficient features. They are automated ticket routing, knowledge base tools, and highly customizable solutions for various businesses and industries. If you consider a solution with ticket routing, check up the following:
Freshdesk allows us to set up business rules for the categorization and direction of incoming tickets. Everything is automated, no need to do it manually.
SolarWinds Service Desk (Samanage) comes with the automation of ticket routing, approvals, alerts, and more. The solution helps to automate routine and build business rules on your own. The tool also helps you route tickets based on your people's ability to solve it.
Help Scout also enhance productivity with the workflows for conditions, operations, and actions. It as well automates the ticket routing, assignment processes, and can be used to send follow-ups to customers, as well as alerts to service agents.
Zendesk is another help desk that ensures that your tickets are assigned and routed to the right service managers, and nothing got in the cracks. It also can help you create tickets based on a specific term, category, and other specifics.
What are the perks of ticket routing? Support service agents spend more time resolving customer support issues. The escalation is minimized, and managers answer the questions faster as the ticket assignment process is now followed by a category, a tag, a location, a language, a keyword, or some other criterion. All that significantly improves the quality of customer service and wows your clients.
