Better team collabartion and customer response times

Something as simple as a ticket system can help increase the team collaboration and response times

How it started

It started as it does most of the time in many companies. The Support team needs a way to collaborate, so the shared folder feature of the mail server is used and the inbox for the support mailbox is shared with multiple people from the team. Unfortunately, this is not a feasible solution which led to the call that started this transition.

The call

“Cristian, we have a problem. We can all see the emails in this mailbox, but nobody knows who’s actually responsible, who answered the mail, or even what was answered without having to waste a lot of time searching through the sent folder. Clients call us to ask if we received the email, we can’t create any notifications or trigger alerts if SLA is not fulfilled, we need to solve this!”

Sounds familiar? The shared folder approach could work for a very small team, but even there the advantages a support ticket system brings can be big, for a large team however the advantages are huge and indispensable. Just imagine having a critical support case, the colleague who responded is on holiday, and the response can’t be found because it was deleted by accident or because it was moved in a location nobody thinks to check.

XKCD Comic, what have you seen

The requirements

To simplify the everyday work of the support team, a few requirements had to be met:

  • Notifications once the ticket is received
  • Assignments of tickets to other people from the team
  • History of the ticket must be created automatically
  • There must be an option to add internal notes
  • Definitions of SLA for clients
  • Ticket escalations if SLA was in danger
  • Templates for responses
  • Data must be stored in Europe

A ticket system brings all these features and with a strong and powerful API, it enables developers to add automation to the system if it’s required.

The solution

By moving the processing of support emails to a ticket system, anyone from the team is always able to take a ticket, see everything that was discussed with the client, every internal note every attachment, and can continue. This is especially useful if someone from the team is sick or on holiday. Now when clients send an email, they instantly receive a ticket number and can respond to that ticket with additional data, no more searching for the email that was sent about an issue or question. Team leads now have an overview of all open tickets, who has which ticket assigned, define SLA with notifications for critical contracts, and react on time. This is just the tip of the iceberg of features a ticket system brings, but just these few features alone make a ticket tool a necessity and I can’t imagine a team going back to shared email folders after using a support ticket tool.

essential