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Customer service can become incredibly fatiguing and overwhelming when a strong organizational strategy that prioritizes faster response times and problem management is not set in place. When help requests build up, it overwhelms support agents, increases the amount of time customers have to wait, irritates customers, and ultimately leads to your business losing money. All of this can be avoided by keeping your ticket management queue structured in an efficient manner. So where do you start? Let’s look at a few helpful tips that will make it easier for you to enhance your ticket management queue, alleviate the stress your customer service agents might face, and lead to happier customers. 

1. Stick to The First-Come, First-Served Basis: No matter how tempting it may be to try a seemingly better, fancier, or more technical approach to your ticketing queue management, sticking to the standard, no-frills first-come, first-served method is best. Why? Because when you try to prioritize one person over another person because their problem seems bigger or more pressing, it means the earliest person in line is going to end up spending more time waiting. Not only is this unfair, they’ll know it is unfair and become frustrated for having to wait long periods of time, thus making it more likely that they will look elsewhere to do business. Generally, most people who are waiting for help expect that they will wait no longer than five minutes for help. While it isn’t possible to achieve this every time, it is more likely that everyone will be waiting for less time when you stick to helping people first-come, first-served instead of trying to implement a VIP strategy.
2. Implement a Plan for Self-Service: Self-service is become increasingly more familiar to both businesses and customers and it has now gotten to the point where the majority of customers with a help request now expect that business websites have a self-service strategy. Why is self-service such an asset to businesses? Not only is it efficient, it can save your business a substantial amount of money. Self-service is an excellent solution for businesses who notice repeat problems customers are having and repeat questions that they are asking. If you are getting the same tickets regarding the same problems multiple times over, you will save time, money, and resources by allowing customers to resolve the problem on their own. This starts with building a system that asks the customer one question at a time and ultimately leads them to the solution which would be found in a knowledge base. Reserve your person-to-person customer service for people with unique and urgent problems.  
3. Create Categories For Your Tickets: One of the most straightforward ways to keep your ticket queue management organized is by segmenting your support tickets with categories. Start paying attention to the different types of support tickets you receive and which ones are similar. After that, you can begin creating categories accordingly and assigning specific support agents who are best able to help the customers with their help request. Keep in mind that there is no one way to decide how to categorize your support tickets. You could separate them by priority, type of issue, product type, or by the customer. It’s also a good idea to segment your help tickets according to department. For example, have a sales category for customers with help requests related to product or service price inquiries, purchasing questions, or information on discounts. Additionally, you can create an “unassigned” category. In this category, tickets would include customers with an urgent request, an unanswered request, or an immediate need for action. 
4. Equip Your Support Agents With The Right Resources: A business can’t expect their customer support team to do a great job if they don’t have the tools and resources to do their best. If you want to experience faster response times and resolutions, you need to make sure that your customer support agents have two important things: the right tools and the right information. The more knowledgeable your customer support agents are, the easier it will be for them to quickly and concisely resolve a customer’s problem. In addition to being armed with knowledge, you need to make sure your customer support agents have all the tools they need. Such tools would include information on the following: something that shows them the due date on the ticket (the date that the problem needs to be resolved by), the level of priority, the ticket status, and ticket categories.
5. Make Sure That The Ticket Requests Provide as Much Description as Possible: It is difficult to deliver a customer sufficient support when the support ticket doesn’t provide much detail about the problem and other important elements. Whenever a support ticket is being delivered from one support agent to the next, descriptive information including client and order IDs, names, and phone numbers should be provided. Say, for example, that a support agent is helping a customer who had problems checking out of an online store. They need to provide as much detail as they can as well as a step-by-step analysis of how they resolved the problem so that other support agents can replicate that process themselves.  

Looking for more advice on ways to enhance your ticket queue management? Don’t hesitate to contact us today with any questions you might have. You can also visit our official website to view our extensive list of software programs, products, and services and keep reading our other blog posts for more free resources.