Ticket Handling - Why does it matter?

Your product team is constantly in talks with developers over support tickets created and how to patch product instabilities or problems. Both teams have access to customer feedback, but with thousands of tickets, how can developers know which tickets to address and how to prioritize them, especially with the potential for repeats?

Developers and IT professionals have some of the most important and time-consuming workflows in maintaining and building products. Let's dive into some best practices for ticket handling and why it is important to monitor support ticket workflows.

Ticket Handling Best Practices:

The processes for handling support tickets are numerous, and disorganization can mean wasted time, frustration, low morale, and most importantly, churned customers. Here are some best practices to streamline ticket handling for developers.

Prioritize 

Your IT department must have a system in place for prioritizing tickets. Not all problems create equal consequences, and prioritization criteria that suit your industry and company are essential to resolving problems as quickly as possible. 

Set and Monitor Status

Monitoring ticket status and setting phases of resolution is also an important time saver. How do you know what stage a problem is in if you don't provide a designation? Here's an example of the stages of ticket categorization:

• New
• In Progress
• Closed
• On Hold

It is important to remain consistent with your criteria to avoid duplicates and confusion. Ticket organization and establishing consistent criteria are the easiest way to decrease the time spent per ticket and improve departmental efficiency. 

Create a Simple Support Structure

For larger organizations with hundreds and even thousands of IT employees, ticket resolution can be nearly impossible without effective organization and monitoring. Establishing a tiered support system enables the relevant developer/support teams to resolve problems faster.

Create Support Workflows

Creating and sticking to support workflows is the key to reducing the cost per defect. From categorizing tickets, to passing them off to the relevant team, and resolving a problem, building a workflow that fits your organization is key.

Why Does Ticket Handling Matter?

Ticket handling is a chance for companies to take feedback on product deficiencies and fix them promptly. This opportunity can quickly turn into an expensive and detrimental operation if not managed correctly. IT professionals can't resolve every problem in seconds, and monitoring support ticket workflows can expedite the time spent per resolved ticket. 

By monitoring your support ticket workflows and tracking each tier of support via an analytics dashboard, you can decrease customer churn and increase the number of fixes that your developers can perform in real time.