5 ways to handle high ticket volume in customer service

Good customer support is all about being able to deal with requests quickly. On social media, for example, customers expect responses to their support questions within 24 hours.

Every retail support team out there eventually hits a point where the volume of support tickets it receives becomes too much. If your team hasn’t yet, it will in the future. And when that happens, you might not be able to respond as quickly as your customers expect you to.

So, what’s the best way to handle high volumes of tickets?

You can scale up your support or you can simply try to reduce the overall volume of tickets that you receive. How exactly can you do that? Here are five easy ways.

1. Use Freshdesk to get a grip on high ticket volume, like beyond retail did!

UK-based Beyond Retail sells kitchen, bathroom, and heating products. The company’s retail website attracts more than two million annual visitors and found it difficult to handle the volume of customer support emails they were receiving.

They lacked the structure they needed to route and track ticket flows. This meant they had a ton of lost tickets, could not set ticket priorities or status, and no means to monitor agent performance. That was when Beyond Retail decided to switch to Freshdesk.

With Freshdesk, Beyond Retail was able to get a better handle on ticket workloads, ensure that tickets were being distributed fairly between agents, and also prioritize tickets more efficiently.

The company can now track tons of metrics they could not before.

Individual reports helped the company track agent performance and to also identify agents who needed more help solving certain problems. Overall, Beyond Retail found a huge improvement in the overall quality of their customer service with Freshdesk.

Here’s what Elliot Lees-Bell, the founder and managing director of Beyond Retail, says:

Elliot’s team says that they plan to try new Freshdesk features like chat channels, skill-based ticket assignment, advanced reporting, and integrated responses.

2. Use Omni-Channel support software to cut back on ticket resolution time

In today’s world, support requests can come from any medium. Customers reach businesses over phone, through email, on social media, or through live chat. Managing each of these channels can be a challenge and a hassle, especially if your team isn’t in one place.

Omni-channel support software consolidates incoming ticket requests from different channels and creates tickets for each request that you can find in one location. This reduces the need for any kind of data entry since tickets are created automatically for each request and agents can instead spend their time dealing with tickets that they automatically receive.

In Freshdesk, you can combine email, phone, chat, website, Facebook, and Twitter support to cut ticket resolution times in half.

For smaller teams, it might be best to assist customers on a first-come, first-serve basis. That means that you should tackle older tickets before moving on to new ones. But, it can also be beneficial to pick and choose tickets to prioritize based on the attention they need. It’s simple to set ticket priorities in Freshdesk, no matter the support channel.

3. Lower ticket volumes with knowledge base articles

Customers want more self-service options from retailers and businesses. In one study, 91% of respondents¹ said that they would gladly use a self-service knowledge base if they had access to one. 40% of people check for a knowledge base before calling a support team, and 75% of people consider a knowledge base to be a convenient way to solve a support problem.

You can avoid receiving a ton of support tickets by creating knowledge base articles for common issues that many customers ask about. Then, all customers have to do to find what they need is head to your knowledge base and search for a keyword that relates to their issue.

Boss International Group² uses Freshdesk to manage their knowledge base, which looks like this:

It features a search bar at the top along with a list of different categories of articles underneath. You could also set up your knowledge base as an FAQ page, like this one from Orvis³.

4. Track ticket volume trends

If you don’t understand the flow of your helpdesk, you won’t know the best way to allocate your resources and agents.

And if you don’t know how you’re doing in comparison to your peers, you won’t know what needs to change. In Freshdesk, you can track ticket volume trends for hour, day, week, month, quarter or year.

You will even be able to get a visual of metrics with a graph that shows the number of tickets created, the number of tickets resolved, and the number of tickets left unresolved.

You can toggle between a view of this data for the day, week, month, quarter, or year by using the buttons in the upper right-hand corner of the graph.

You can filter tickets that you received and solved based on the properties of each ticket. For example, you can view tickets by source, urgency, agent, and more.

Then, you can use this information to switch up your support plan.

For example, if you are receiving a high volume of phone support requests that aren’t being resolved, you might need to allocate more resources toward amping up your phone support channel.

When it comes to retail, one of the best ways to prevent high ticket volumes is to hire and train associates who can deal with support issues right from the sales floor.

5. Prevent tickets by hiring and training associates that deal with issues on the sales floor

When it comes to retail, the retail sales associates or team members on your sales floor are the first employees that your customers (usually) interact with. You can’t just hire anyone. They have to be trainable and willing to adapt to the high customer service standard bar that you have set.

Working as a retail associate also means dealing with the best and worst of customers. They have to be able to handle snarky shoppers without taking it personally. If they can’t, don’t hire them.

Set daily sales goals for employees that are reasonable. They need to be able to help multiple customers, while also having the time to build trust with them. The best way to achieve this is to introduce a sales training program that gives employees the guidance they need to give great customer service.

You can even use exceptional customer service as a marketing tool like Zappos does. Recently, the company surprised residents of a town in New Hampshire⁴ with 1,900 packages of free products. They also ran a campaign in the past where they accepted unwanted Christmas gifts in exchange for $100 gift cards. Then, they donated the gifts to charity.

The backbone of these efforts is the customer training that Zappos invests in. They even have a customer service training channel on YouTube⁵.

Invest in hiring great employees and training them to provide exceptional customer service on the frontlines of the sales floor to reduce the number of tickets you receive in your helpdesk.

Conclusion

When you receive a high volume of support tickets, you won’t be able to respond as quickly as you would like to. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to lower your ticket volumes and get your helpdesk under control.

Use Freshdesk’s ticket management system to get a grip on high support tickets like Beyond Retail does. They use Freshdesk to manage more than two million site visitors each year.

You should also use some kind of omnichannel support software to cut back on ticket resolution time. This kind of software creates tickets from several channels at once, making it easy to keep track of and solve every request.

You can also lower ticket volumes with a knowledge base where customers can find answers to their support questions on their own. Don’t forget to track ticket volume trends to find out the best way to allocate resources and agents. Then, when your ticket volume rises, you’ll be prepared.

You can also lower the number of tickets you receive by hiring the right sales associates and giving them the training they need to deal with customer issues from the sales floor. Try these tips today to lower your ticket volume and get a grip on your approach to retail customer service.

Source:

1 – http://grouplink.com/blog/3-help-desk-trends-2017/

2 – https://bossaudio.freshdesk.com/support/home

3 – http://www.orvis.com/s/orvis-frequently-asked-questions-retail-stores/2281

4 – https://www.shopify.com/retail/7-retailers-who-are-embracing-modern-customer-service

5 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3CVgI4JzVw