Help Desk Ticketing Systems: An Explanation for Non-Techies

help desk ticketing systems

Did you know that manually dealing with a help desk ticket costs businesses $22 per instance?

Costs like this are a huge reason businesses use help desk ticketing systems in the first place.

However, not all employees may be familiar with how such a system works. They may not even see a need to change the way things are done. How can you help them adjust to a new system you’re implementing?

What Are Help Desk Ticketing Systems?

First things first, you need to explain to employees what this new system is.

Simply put, a help desk ticketing system takes issues, complaints or comments from customers and stores them in a central database. Ticketing systems do this by creating tickets, which represent the customer’s support case. From then on, all communication between help desk representatives and customers appears in that ticket.

What Are the Benefits of Help Desk Ticketing Systems?

Now that your employees understand the basics, you can communicate benefits this system brings to them–and your business.

Streamlining Operations

Help desk ticketing systems organize and automate request flow, categorization and status. This process improvement gives support analysts more time to deal with customer issues, resulting in a higher volume of problems being solved and higher-quality service.

Externally, that service could result in more business. Approximately 86% of buyers will pay more for a product if they know they will receive better customer experience. 

Personal Connections

Some help desk ticketing systems include personalized information in newly-created tickets that offers insights, background details or otherwise helps analysts improve customer experience. It’s a recipe for repeat business–or at least positive engagement.

Ticket Organization

Ticketing systems can categorize and prioritize tickets, making IT analysts’ jobs easier.

Organizing tickets by category can allow you to assign all tickets to an employee who specializes in that category topic. This makes resolving issues an easier experience, with faster resolution for the employee and the customer. 

Creating Better Customer Service

A help desk ticketing system lets you see what type of questions are often asked. With this information, you can create a knowledge base or an FAQ page that answers commonly-asked questions.

Resources like this can also improve customer experience: they may be able to find answers on their own, and IT can spend more time on complex problems.

Performance Tracking

Perhaps an support analyst is taking a longer-than-expected time to resolve tickets. Why is this happening? Is the issue individual performance, lack of resources, broken process or a larger organizational problem? Performance tracking could provide some insight into how problems are being solved and if improvements can be made.

Service Level Agreements

Service level agreements (SLAs) promise customers that they will receive a certain level of service, and your help desk ticketing system can stand as an illustration of this. What does this look like in practice? Your system may do something as simple as prompt a support analyst to respond to a customer in the next 30 minutes.

Integrating SLAs into a ticketing system helps align the process with business standards. They also increase customer confidence when you deliver on promises.

Best Practices for Using Help Desk Ticketing Systems

Once your employees understand a help desk ticketing system’s benefits, you can introduce them into specific processes your business plans to use.

Automatic Responses

There are a couple of automatic responses you can set up. A popular one is to send a message to a customer when the ticket is initially created. You can also set up an automatic response for a longer-than-expected wait time. This response lets the customer know their issue hasn’t been overlooked.

Message Templates

Your employees will probably find this to be one of the most helpful features of a ticketing system. Message templates allow them to compose a prewritten message with placeholders for things like the customer’s name. 

Customer Feedback

You can include a customer feedback survey within your help desk ticketing system.

Feedback from the survey can help employees improve their quality of service and fix weak spots before they become larger issues. It can also help you cull information from customers about service, technology products and pain points you haven’t defined.

Improve Your Business With Tikit

This guide should serve you well as you introduce your workforce and new hires to a help desk ticketing system.

If you’re still looking for a help desk ticketing system and use Microsoft Teams for work, consider using Tikit. Tikit is a ticketing system built to integrate with Microsoft Teams. Your employees won’t have to learn new software to operate it!

Watch our demo video to learn how Tikit could be the perfect fit for you!

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