For support teams and CX leaders today, conversational ticketing may be the way forward, and an excellent method for streamlining the support process. Why, you may ask?
Customer service is often viewed as a hassle – a necessary chore to check off the list when something goes wrong. For instance, our State of Customer Service Benchmark Report revealed that 53% of respondents reported that telecommunications companies are the most dreaded customer service calls to make. This is why more emphasis on the conversational side of support is welcome. Conversational ticketing makes it easy for people to get the support they need as they carry out their day-to-day activities. In this post, we’ll cover all you need to know about conversational ticketing, including:
- What is conversational ticketing?
- How does conversational ticketing differ from conventional support?
- What are some pros and cons of conversational ticketing?
- What role do chatbots play in this process?
What is conversational ticketing?
Conversational ticketing, also known as conversational support, refers to support provided in real-time to a user by support agents or self-service bots. By treating conversations as tickets, this streamlined system helps support teams easily view and resolve all incoming requests within these platforms. What’s more, all of this is completed within collaboration platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Conversational ticketing is becoming more common. Today, more than 65 of the total Fortune 100 firms are paying Slack for business communication, while the number of Slack users is growing by 12 million each day. In 2021, average Slack users invested a total of 10 hours on the platform per week! Meanwhile, in 2022, Microsoft Teams reached 270 million users, up from the 145 million it reported in 2021. With their global growth and prominence, providing support within these conversational platforms that are widely used in today’s remote and distributed workforce seems like the logical path forward.
How does conversational ticketing differ from conventional support?
What makes conversational ticketing systems truly unique is their reliance on dialogue – a dialogue between a customer and a support agent (human, virtual, or a combination of both). It eliminates the delays that are common in more conventional support interactions, such as waiting for hours to speak to an agent, or emailing a support line and then receiving a response the following day.
What are some pros and cons of conversational ticketing?
The Pros:
A common ground – conversational ticketing meets users on the channels where they are, on the platforms/apps they are familiar with and frequent on a daily basis. As support is delivered directly within the app, this eliminates the time as well as loss of context involved in switching apps.
Support, at speed – allowing for back-and-forth exchanges to occur in real-time, it dramatically speeds up time to resolution, so issues are submitted and resolved quickly.
The best of both worlds – it offers support with a combination of both automation and human support. By leveraging the power of AI-powered virtual assistants, which can handle many repeatable queries, human agents are free to tackle more complex tasks.
Adding a touch of humanity to the support process – its conversational element makes receiving support as simple as chatting about troubleshooting issues with a coworker.
Affordable – through ticket deflection, conversational ticketing allows teams to decrease their IT support volume, and reduce operational costs of support.
The Cons:
Keeping up with a steady flow of requests can be difficult – with a greater number of support requests entering ticket queues, there is the possibility that some may fall through the cracks. For instance, there may be times when there is a software glitch or systems upgrade, and users are encouraged to reset their passwords. In such cases, support teams should expect an influx in tickets!
Tracking of important metrics is limited – while metrics are key to gauge success, platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams were simply not designed to open and close tickets and track time to resolution.
Accounting for other self-service options – nearly half of employees want to take a DIY approach to their IT fixes. This is why integrating such resources within the support platform is key, to give users the option to follow this resolution path – more on that later!
When two worlds collide: conversational ticketing meets AI
For technology, integrations are powerful – integrations with other solutions (such as Netomi!) that can enhance the power of each. Automation takes conversational ticketing to a whole other level – making the entire process effortless for both support teams and the customers they serve.
- Used in parallel with knowledge base tools, AI-powered virtual assistants allow companies to harness the extensive information contained within their knowledge bases to accurately provide customers with the exact information that they need, and when they need it.
- Additionally, taking a more structured and streamlined approach, AI can help with the ticket triaging process to identify and categorize recurring service requests, ensuring tickets are resolved faster and transferred into the right hands for review. AI agents can first gather information and contextual data from back-end systems such as order management or CRM platforms prior to passing the ticket to a human agent, so that they will have the necessary information to make an informed decision.
- AI swiftly handles common and repeatable queries, such as password resets and basic troubleshooting issues, allowing human agents to focus on tasks that carry greater complexity, or those that require a personal touch. The result? Significant boosts in the capacity of support teams.
Due to their pure convenience, customers today are favoring options that allow them to easily chat with support teams to quickly receive the support they need. In a shift towards conversational customer service, live chat is on the rise. In 2021, customer inquiries over live chat channels jumped by 36%, representing the highest increase of any other communication channel. In order to successfully bridge the gap between support teams and their end-users, there is a need for an integrated solution, one that offers real-time support within platforms where users spend their time. It is time to remove the hassle often associated with customer service, and make it more conversational.
