HOW TO ADAPT TO CHANGING CUSTOMER NEEDS

Your customers' behavior and technology are constantly shaping each other. As customers grow accustomed to the convenience offered by new technologies, they expect businesses to offer the same type of experience. Consider the shift from telephones to messaging apps for both everyday communication and customer support.

Today, your customers are growing used to the convenience offered by AI, from finding information on any topic within seconds to making quick purchase decisions as a result of personalized recommendations and AI assistants. According to Gartner, "Growing acceptance of AI is setting higher expectations for effortless service."

Taking the past and current customer expectations into consideration, it's essential for you to incorporate the right tools to meet these evolving needs and stay relevant in a competitive landscape. We've taken some time to think about why businesses use a customer support ticketing system and listed the five ways it can help you adapt to the changing customer needs easily.

What is a ticketing system?

A ticketing system, as the name suggests, assigns every customer request a unique number and records it as a ticket. This allows customer support teams to track requests across channels, automate tasks, get comprehensive insights, and most importantly, help customers faster.

Why does your business need a ticketing system?

If you are still using spreadsheets, emails, or social media apps to manage your customer support operations, it's time to revisit your approach. While these applications allow you to respond to customer messages. They often come with their own set of challenges.

Five ways the right customer support ticketing system can help

→ Support customers on the channel of their choice

With multiple channels rising in popularity, customers want to initiate and continue conversations on the platform of their choice. This often becomes difficult when customer conversations are scattered across multiple platforms.

A customer support ticketing system ensures customer-initiated requests from all channels are collected in one place. This reduces the complexity of moderating multiple channels, helps your agents answer customer requests on time, and offers customers the flexibility to seek support in the way that best meets their preferences.

→ Deliver personalized customer experiences

When a customer chooses to purchase from you despite the numerous options available in the market, they expect you to value them. They appreciate when you remember the little details and provide an experience that is in line with their needs. A customer support ticketing system gives your agents the flexibility to revisit previous interactions so they can deliver support that is specific to each customer's needs.  

→ Reduce information overload and increase convenience

Until very recently, search engines were the best tools for making information available at a person's fingertips. Today, AI chatbots have pushed this capability even further. You can provide your customers with quick information by building and maintaining a strong self-service hub through a ticketing system. Moreover, you can build helpful AI chatbots by utilizing the self-service repository built by your team. This also helps your customers get focused answers in one place and avoid information overload.

→ Maintain high standards of customer support

Customers are on the lookout for easier and faster ways to connect with businesses, while businesses have the challenge of handling more tickets in less time. Customer support ticketing system tackles these challenges in two ways.

First, it helps you organize your customer support operations through automation. By setting ticket assignment rules, you can reduce customers from constantly being moved from one agent to another, thus reducing wait times. You can also set up workflows and rules that define the timeline within which a ticket needs to be resolved to ensure you retain your customer's trust by delivering timely support.

Second, an AI-powered customer support ticketing system can help your agents send accurate and quality responses, decreasing response times and helping agents focus on the important.

→ Identify customer needs and improve

Whether it is a customer raving about your company on social media or raging about a bad experience, they always tell you what's going right and wrong with your business. Paying attention to this feedback is crucial but often becomes increasingly difficult considering the huge volumes of tickets and scattered information. You can have all this data in one place with the help of insights offered by an AI-powered ticketing system.

Applying AI in customer support helps you track important insights like commonly asked customer questions, customer sentiment across topics, increase or decrease in ticket volume, and more—so you can make the right decision for your business.

Where should you start?

The first step is to evaluate your business needs. For instance, you might want to reduce agent workload; you can best do this through automation and by opening a self-service channel. In another instance, you might want to improve the relevancy of your knowledge base; the best way to achieve this is to leverage AI in the customer support ticketing system. Listing down your requirements can help you understand what to look for in a ticketing system exactly.

The next step is to explore the available ticketing systems in the market and shortlist the ones that meet your business requirements. To find the best ticketing system, you should evaluate the available solutions on factors like ease of use, features, customization, scalability, learning curve, support accessibility, security, and price.

Most customer support solutions provide a free trial, allowing you to explore the system on your own to make the best choice. You can also schedule a demo to evaluate whether the product and the vendor are the best fit for your business needs.

While you're at it, how about starting your customer support journey with Zoho Desk!