A support ticket system is an essential component of customer resource management, something that defines the overall experience and quality of service, with the potential to turn displeasure into delight. This makes having robust systems and processes for an email ticketing system all the more crucial for organizations big and small.

While support systems have evolved in recent years, one thing that has been a constant is email as a medium of communication, or notification. As a result, email continues to play a critical role when it comes to delivering support services, and in this article, we provide a brief primer on setting up an email ticketing system.

Create A Shared Inbox

The first step in setting up an email ticketing system is creating a shared inbox, either with help@yourcompany or support@yourcompany.

Users or customers across segments will send in their queries or support requests on this address, from where team members can assign or divide the requests based on their nature, priority, or to whomever it concerns.

How the tickets are resolved and stakeholders are consulted depends largely on each individual organization, but with the right planning and collaboration, just a simple Gmail client can serve as your shared inbox.

Setup eMail Ticketing System

While an inbox can work quite well as a ticketing or support system, most modern organizations use a help desk solution that converts email requests to the specified ID discussed above into a support ticket. 

This ticket can then be assigned a status, a priority, as well as to the right team or team member who will be responsible for the satisfactory resolution of the same. Such a tool helps with tracking, collaboration, and analytics, all of which can be very cumbersome when done directly from an inbox.

You can read more in this post on email help desk software, the various features they offer, and the range of customizations possible to suit your workflows.

Assign Roles

Once your system is up and running, the next order of business is to assign the right roles to your team members, to make delegations easier as and when customer requests and tickets start rolling in. 

Most help desk solutions come with options to invite your team, along with the ability to assign permissions, access controls, and more. The number of roles you create, and how you plan delegations to work depends entirely on the size of your organization, and the volume of support requests you expect to receive. 

Create Automations 

The burden on the support team can be reduced substantially with the effective use of automations, integrations, and auto-reply solutions. In most support desks, a vast majority of tickets are similar to one another, and can broadly be classified into certain categories.

Following this, a simple knowledge base response, or an automated response containing standard instructions can help customers just as well. This way the support staff can be freed to take on requests that are actually critical, and require substantial time and effort to solve.

Track & Analyze

Tracking and analytics are core functions of an email ticketing system, that not only helps ascertain the performance of the support team and satisfaction of customers, but even helps product teams understand customer pain points, aiding in the design of better experiences.

Here again, most modern ticketing systems provide a robust in-built analytics solution that can cover most basic functions. With the right usage, analytics in your support function can help guide resource allocation, automations, and even knowledge base construction to best serve customers.

Final Words

Help desks and ticketing systems have come a long way over the past decade, and now aim to provide support to customers across all touchpoints, including eMail, WhatsApp, phone calls, and more. This is what is expected of a modern organization, and fortunately, there are tools and solutions that help deliver the same.

This article was provided by José Luis Martín Cara