What is a ticketing system and how does it improve your business?

Many customer issues and questions about billing, service changes, or product questions that enter the contact center require several conversations and follow-up tasks across agents or even departments to resolve.

A recent internal study by Talkdesk Research™ found that 3 in 4 customer issues entering the contact center are not resolved at first contact.  When issues aren’t solved in the first conversation, agents are responsible for coordinating and collaborating across departments to find an answer for customers.

The process used to manage customer follow-ups can impact the customer experience, agent experience, and overall business. If done well your customers are satisfied, agents are productive, and the business runs at peak performance.

If you’re looking for a way to make sure your business provides fast and personalized answers to customers, you should consider using a customer ticketing system seamlessly integrated with your contact center. Ticketing software that is integrated with the contact center platform allows agents to access all customer conversations and follow-up tasks in one place, so they can easily track customers and solve issues.

A contact center and ticketing system integration also improves communication between employees, no matter what department they work in. Let’s dig into the basics of ticketing software, how they integrate with contact centers, and how such integration can improve customer support for your business.

What is a ticketing system and how does it integrate with the contact center?

A ticketing system is a customer service tool that enables businesses to manage and track customer support requests through to resolution. When integrated with the contact center,  customers can submit support tickets through multiple channels or agents can manually create tickets during their customer conversations so the support teams can then track, collaborate on, and resolve these tickets in one centralized tool.

How does a ticketing system work?

Ticketing software allows customers to submit support tickets through a variety of channels, such as email, phone, or online. Once a ticket is submitted, it is routed to the appropriate agent who can then manage the ticket, easily collaborate with others, and see it through to resolution. Many ticketing systems integrate with a contact center platform to allow agents to manage customer support requests more effectively. At a basic level, the ticket management features to expect in a ticketing system include:

• Tracking. Agents can track the progress of each ticket and see when it has been updated or resolved.
• Assignment. Agents can assign tickets to other agents or departments for further resolution.
• Categorization. Tickets can be categorized based on the type of issue or problem being reported. This makes it easier for agents to find and resolve tickets quickly and for supervisors to have a clear understanding of the types of requests coming in.
• Notes. Agents can add notes to tickets to provide additional information or updates about the ticket.
• Filters. Agents can use ticket filters to quickly find and resolve tickets that meet specific criteria.

Key features of a contact center platform and ticketing system integration.

Brands can take control of the conversation and follow-up process if the  contact center and ticketing system are seamlessly integrated. Managing follow-up conversations is an important part of contact center operations and a ticketing system integration enables contact center agents to reduce resolution time and improve the customer experience. Some of the more advanced features beyond ticket management that come with a ticketing system and contact center integration include:

• AI and automation rules. Agents can work more efficiently by automating tasks like ticket creation, ticket assignment, ticket routing, and issue escalation. In addition, a ticketing system can also pull in relevant customer data, which can be very helpful in resolving issues.
• Omnichannel ticket routing. A ticketing system and contact center integration helps you to meet customers where they are, whether that’s on chat, web forms, email, social media, or over the phone. It consolidates each channel into a single view to allow a support team to communicate with customers and solve their problems regardless of channel.
• Team collaboration. A ticketing system integrated with the contact center platform can help different parts of the company work together because it keeps track of each customer interaction in one spot. That way, everyone knows what is going on with each customer and they can help solve the problem more quickly.
• Reporting and analytics. Admins and supervisors can bring together the data from different areas of customer interactions together by leveraging dashboards and reports to monitor support team performance and ensure they’re achieving key metrics and service level agreements (SLAs).

5 reasons why companies integrate ticketing system software with their contact center platform.

If you’re finding that manual tracking of customer follow-ups, incident reports, customer escalations, or service requests put your company at risk or hinder productivity, it may be time to integrate a ticketing system with your contact center. Here are some of the top reasons why companies invest in ticketing software integration:

1. Improve visibility to track issues.

Without a clearly defined customer follow-up process, support teams are responsible for tracking and documenting every detail of customer interactions. This means teams across the organization may not have full visibility of escalations or service requests. A ticketing system integrated with the contact center  can minimize risk by providing a central repository and record for all of your company’s customer interactions.

2. Streamline operations for quicker resolutions.

Integration between a ticketing system and the contact center provides support teams with processes and structure in how to manage complex customer follow-ups. Agents have a clear understanding of how to track, manage, and resolve a customer issue which eliminates the time lost when support teams are tasked with tracking down help on an issue or repeat themselves to other departments when they reach out for assistance.

3. Facilitate collaboration between departments.

Ticketing systems that integrate with the contact center facilitate collaboration between departments by consolidating the entire customer interaction in a single source of truth. Teams outside of the contact center can quickly gain context on the issue and provide input directly within the ticket. Teams no longer have to email back and forth with agents or feel out of the loop as more experts are brought into the escalation.

4. Automate manual tasks.

A contact center and ticketing system integration can reduce repetitive work for support teams and create workflows with automated tasks. Automations can include—but are not limited to—automatic ticket generation when an inquiry comes from a specific channel, sending alerts to others across the organization when their input is needed on a case, and sending status updates to customers as their inquiry progresses to resolution. The type of automations available varies based on the ticketing solution.

5. Assign tickets to the right agents.

Agents spend the major part of the day organizing and identifying the customer conversations they can help resolve. Ticketing software, integrated with the contact center platform, can streamline this process by routing each ticket to the best-fit agent based on skills or channel.

Benefits of integrating a ticketing system with the  contact center platform.

A contact center ticketing management system integration facilitates the follow-up process for complex customer issues that can’t be resolved at first contact. The integration enables support teams to gather all information related to a customer question or issue to provide an accurate and fast resolution.  Regardless of the reason for the customer contact, an effective customer contact center and ticketing system integration streamlines the support process to improve agent efficiency and customer service.  As a result, important metrics, such as customer satisfaction (CSTA) and first call resolution (FCR) have a significant increase.

The top three ways a contact center benefits from using a ticketing system.

1. Improve customer support.
A ticketing system integration allows contact centers  to manage and track customer support requests more effectively. This improves customer satisfaction as customers receive faster and more accurate service.

2. Improve cross-departmental collaboration.
A ticketing software and contact center integration help keep track of customer issues in one central repository. This makes it easier for another agent or expert outside of the contact center to provide input on the case and see all the important information about the customer and past interactions.

3. Improve agent productivity.
A ticketing system and contact center integration can automate workflows to streamline processes, track service requests, and speed up resolutions. Combining ticketing software with contact center tools ensure fast and effective solution to customer queries while optimizing the agent’s work.

How does Talkdesk support customer ticketing systems?

Empowering agents with the skills, tools, and information they need to anticipate the needs of customers and solve their questions on the first contact is key to making them more confident and efficient.  A cloud contact center solution plays a vital part in empowering the agent—it helps agents by automating routine tasks, easing workflows, offering valuable customer history data and smart insights on live calls, enabling self-service tools, offering customer experience analytics, and supporting the seamless and easy transition between support channels.

Talkdesk CX Cloud™ is a complete contact center solution that automates every step of the customer journey to ensure efficient, meaningful, and personalized customer experiences. Expand CX Cloud capabilities with a set of powerful ticketing system integrations to extend contact center capabilities whenever and wherever your business requires. When paired with ticketing software, agents manage the customer conversation from start to finish. Agents can solve cases faster and more efficiently—delivering an excellent customer experience regardless of the channel. Talkdesk seamlessly integrates with some of the best ticketing systems on the market:

Freshdesk.

The Talkdesk and Freshdesk integration allows you to bring your contact center with your helpdesk ticketing system together. This integration allows you to leverage automation rules, provide self-service, manage SLAs, and measure metrics—so you can stay on top of all things customer support. Your support team will be able to deliver more personalized and productive customer interactions by displaying relevant customer information when a call is connected, eliminating the need for agents to search multiple screens for relevant customer information. It’s all on one screen. Automated workflows and two-way synchronization ensure maximum agent efficiency.

Microsoft Dynamics 365.

The Talkdesk Microsoft Dynamics 365 Connector pairs the power of Talkdesk CX Cloud with Microsoft Dynamics 365 to boost customer support team efficiency, streamline operations, and provide customers with highly personalized engagements. Leverage call controls directly inside Microsoft Dynamics 365 and automatically synchronize data between the two systems without leaving the familiar Microsoft environment.

Pega.

The Talkdesk Pega Connector combines the capabilities of Pega CRM and Talkdesk to deliver optimized and personalized customer experiences. Maintain up-to-date contact information, and empower agents with the insight necessary to provide quick and positive engagements. And all from a single view, with no application switching required.

Salesforce. 

Talkdesk for Salesforce  adds comprehensive contact center functionality to the Salesforce experience. We offer the deepest Salesforce integration in the industry by pairing the power of Talkdesk with Salesforce to boost efficiency, streamline operations and provide customers with highly personalized engagements.  It boosts agent productivity by automatically creating customer cases and triggering automated events based on the case’s instructions. Talkdesk for Salesforce empowers sales teams to close more business and support teams to address ever-changing customer needs.

What’s more, we have broadened our Salesforce portfolio with Talkdesk for Service Cloud Voice. It integrates digital channels and CRM data with voice communications—all in one single view embedded within the Salesforce UI. This empowers your agents to be more agile and productive while providing supervisors and admins with the oversight and insight necessary without having to leave the full Salesforce experience.

ServiceNow.

The Talkdesk ServiceNow Connector integrates Talkdesk and ServiceNow to scale your contact center operations with digital workflows and automated processes including automatically synchronizing data between your call center and service desks, eliminating manual and repetitive tasks, and empowering agents to focus on delivering exceptional customer service.

Zendesk.

The Talkdesk Zendesk Connector pairs the power of Talkdesk CX Cloud with Zendesk, so your support team can solve cases faster and operate more efficiently. A seamless integration gives agents access to features such as click-to-call and screen pops, plus time-saving automation on a wide range of Zendesk tasks, including ticket and user creation, ticket and user updating, data entry, and more.

Zoho.

Talkdesk integrates with ZohoCRM to empower your marketing, sales, and support teams with a toolset that helps them keep customers at the center of everything they do. Talkdesk provides an enterprise-grade, end-to-end cloud contact center to make it even easier to delight your customers on their channel of choice. From prospect to payment and everything in between, advanced automation turns your complex business processes into efficient workflows.

Before you go.

A contact center and ticketing system integration greatly simplifies the process of providing customer support. If you are considering ticketing software to support customer service, be sure to:

• Learn how  Talkdesk CX Cloud platform improves every step of the customer journey.
• Learn more about Talkdesk contact center and ticketing system integrations.

Ready to find out more about the Talkdesk cloud contact center integrations? Reach out to us today for a demo.