4 Steps to Build a Customer Support Ticketing Process

In some of our recent videos, you guys have been asking Layla, what are the best systems you're using in your business that you couldn't do without? Well, in this video, I want to dive deep into one of those processes in our business that I just could not do without, which is our customer support process. In this video, I'm going to talk through the steps that you need to go through in order to create a customer support ticketing workflow that you can apply to any product, service, productized service, or information business. If you are looking to have this area of your organization, be a little bit more organized. Now, I know what you're thinking. Shit, Layla, the last thing I want to talk about here is customer support workflows. Tell me something sexy about sales or marketing. I know, but even though customer support is not the most thrilling and in an ideal world, we wouldn't need it because we're so proactive, there never is an issue that needs to be supported. We live in the real world where shit happens, and we need to be able to navigate those issues as smoothly as possible when our customers or clients are facing a challenge. So with that, let's just focus our attention here and let's start building out a customer support workflow. Step one in this journey, as you might have gathered by the name of this channel, is going to have to do with process. In this case, what we're talking about is the ticket and resolution process for how you want to handle customer issues. This is not going to be talking about software or specific people. No. All we want to outline in this step is what do we want to have happen or need to have happen to resolve the kinds of issues that we have come up. Here's an example of one. Up at the very top, we have a client facing an issue. This is the first step of our process. And at the bottom, we have the issue or ticket resolved. We've got our start and our stop of our process. If you're following along right now, please write this on a piece of paper. What's the start? What's the stop of your support process? If you don't have one, just. Just pick. Okay? We'll be filling it in together. Once we have our start and our stop, we can start outlining the steps that get us from point A to point B. That's all this process step really is. So let's think in our mind's eye what we need to have happen. What I have outlined here is currently what ProcessDriven's kind of basic support ticket process is for tickets that are submitted, client faces an issue, they send it in through one of our channels, which I'll talk about in a moment. The support team here, ProcessDriven, tries to validate, meaning confirm that the issue is happening, replicate it, meaning try to figure out what circumstances cause it to happen and then figure out ways to solve it. We've either found a solution or we found a better question to ask and we start going through this loop until ultimately a problem is solved. Once the solution's resolved, we notify the client and close out this ticket for our particular system here. The cool thing about our journey is that we track all of this stuff in one spot. So that way if an issue happens again in the future, we we know to just look up past records and can learn from our past mistakes or past errors so we can identify patterns and quick solutions. If you are looking to build out your support ticketing system, I would suggest creating a chart like this one for yourself. Doesn't have to be complicated. You don't need a cool tool like whimsical like I'm using here in order to do it. Grab a piece of paper and map out these steps. Ooh, and a little pro tip here for anyone who is going to map this out along with me here. Make sure you include a fork in the road or an option for for self service in your support ticketing system. I know today we're going to be talking about, you know, there's an issue, we need to resolve it. But just because it needs to be resolved does not mean it always needs to be resolved by a human on your team or yourself. Figuring out the issue. If a client is facing an issue, there's also a likelihood that they could find the answer themselves if we make it apparent and easy. And if that's something you'd be interested in, these kinds of self service support systems, make sure you factor that into your workflow, which is kind of what I'm showing here. Okay, so given all that, have you been able to map out your process so far? Maybe. Okay. If you need more guidance, we've got a video up here that shows an example of a chart to just dive a bit deeper, but I'm going to assume you're good and we're going to move on to step two. Step two of the process is going to be defining our metrics or figuring out what success is measured by in this process. Some of the common ways to measure success in a support or ticketing environment would be something like tickets per minute, meaning how fast are we moving through these tickets per customer, which is how often do we need to have support happiness or customer satisfaction score, which would speak to the quality of the interaction with the agent and 4 churn, meaning the net result of the support engagement. If you are support on pre sales, did it result in a sale? If you are support on membership renewals, did it lead to a renewal? Those kinds of pieces. If you are a company that really values support interactions as a way to build positive experiences with your customers, if the customer is always right in that traditional sense, it's probably going to be that happiness number. If you're somebody that knows support is going to happen and you're just focused on like let's just get through them and respond as quickly as possible. Maybe speed is what we want to have. When we evolve this process over time, we will probably, probably be tracking all of these in some way. So we've got the push and the pull and see how one influences the other. But because we are human and prioritization helps us, I'd like you to pick just one as the most important for you right now. Next up, we're at the third step of our support ticketing adventure, which is going to be choosing our channels. All this means is figuring out how you'll get to the beginning of the process. So if I go back to this example here, you see how the client faces the issue and then eventually they submit a ticket. How does that happen? That how piece the platforms and functions is what we're talking about with the channels question. While there are a lot of options out there, there are really three primary categories of support channels you can take advantage of. The first one is a message. This is basically like a letter that someone can either text in, email in, write in, that tells you some information and you use that information to treat it like a support ticket. If you are someone that has a support email address and people email you when they have an issue, you are likely in the message category. One common example we might all relate to of what this system looks like is a vet, right? I just had to get my dog's vet records for boarding, right? I just had to contact my vet in order to get my vet records. And to get them I had to just email their email address and say, hey, can you give me the vet records? And they would email it back. That was a messaging system. The second channel we have for support is a conversation. And this is the highest touch, most kind of expensive to deliver option. But it also provides a very personal experience. The conversation example would look like somebody being in communication with yourself or a member of your staff about an issue that they're having. If you are working out at the gym and you go up to the front desk and say, hey, the machine's not working, that's a conversation form of a support ticket. Or to go back to the vet example, if I just called up my veterinarian and said, hey, can you mail me my records? That's conversation. Conversational methods are going to be really helpful for those higher end services or for folks where they're dealing with brick and mortar physically in the same spot or time sensitive issues. Now, the third option, and one you're probably most familiar with in the traditional ticketing sense, is a form. A form is exactly what it sounds like. It is a structured data entry area where you fill in a bunch of information about yourself, your issue, what's going on, and that is what kicks off the support engagement. Support forms are most commonly used by technology companies or anyone dealing with a high volume of support tickets. To go back to that vet example, if there was a form on the vet's website where I could request my vet records by clicking a button and entering my email, that would be a form example. The advantages of forms are that they allow you, as the recipient of the issue, to have consistent context and formatting. It'll make sense to you because you're requiring certain information that you need to know. The last thing you want is for someone to call in with an issue, but then you don't ever get their contact number or you can't understand their address that they rattle off to you. And so you don't have enough info to resolve the issue. With a form, you ensure that you have all of the stuff you need. The problem is with a form, I mean, we all know what it feels like to fill in a form, right? Not exactly the most fun. And a lot of the times this can feel very much like a hassle that it's adding extra work to the customer's plate to have to do something so structured. Ultimately, many methods of customer support will use a blend of these methods. But if you are just getting started with your support workflow, I would strongly encourage you to choose just one. Finally, we have arrived at step four. Now that we know our process, our metrics and our channels we need to use, let's find some spot to bring all this together so we don't have to just memorize it and our clients know where they can actually reach out to us. What this usually looks like for folks is picking a piece of software or some kind of spot to put all this information. Now, while there are so many options available to us for this particular step, there are really five broader categories that I'm just going to talk through briefly so you can find one that works for you. Just keep in mind what I'm about to list off are some examples of some great tools you can use for each category of software, but these are by no means the only tools you can use. And please feel free and empowered to find the right tool for for you if you need help. Have questions, drop a comment below. But let's talk through the five categories we have to shop through. Which might be the best fit based on your needs from the three steps above and unfortunately more likely your budget for this function. The budget for a software company that's dealing with 10,000 tickets a day is probably going to be a little different than you and I, who might have one support ticket a day or month or whatever it might be. The five categories we have to choose from are categories Communication platforms, ticketing platforms, spreadsheets, databases, work management software, and analog. Those are our five categories. And I know they're all very broad, but they can all do the job. And so I just want to present these to you so you can find the one that feels like the best fit for your workflow. The first category, communication platform, refers to platforms and software that are primarily used and developed for for making communication easy. The most obvious example of a communication platform would be Gmail. Okay, like the email address you always use. Create an email address and use that as your channel. Use that as your program. Put all of this process stuff, all of your templates and workflows, whatever, into email templates that will be the easiest path forward. Now of course, email tends to be a pretty personal experience, so if you want to level up from this and go beyond just an email address for support and have a bit more of a powerful feature set, you also could look at a tool like Missive in this communication category. Missive is a tool that allows you to do email as well as some social media platform messaging. All kind of connected together and it could be a nice like level up from a basic inbox. Plus it's collaborative so team users are probably going to find this to be the better communication platform. If you'd like to learn a little bit more about Google Groups versus Missive and kind of the ways to set that up for a group inbox, I do have a video on that up here. Both are going to be free to Try so good option for anyone getting started. Oh and just to be clear, not sponsored by missive for this video, we do use it here and I do really love it. But this is not a sponsored video. But anyway, that brings me to category number two, which is a ticketing platform. A ticketing platform or support desk platform is a tool that is purpose built for the process we're talking about of managing support tickets. The biggest players in this space that many of you will probably know of are Zendesk, Intercom and Head Help Scout. Help Scout tends to skew a little bit more smaller business. So for folks who are considering this option, who are, you know, the smaller teams that we typically talk with on this channel, you're probably going to find that the strongest of the three just because of that price limitation. If you have a larger budget though, Intercom, Zendesk, awesome options, particularly at scale. If you are going to go this ticketing platform route, you're going to get a lot of cool features that you would not have if you just used an email inbox. Things like timers for how long you take to answer a ticket. You might have support FAQ help docs you can create right inside the tool, some really cool stuff. But for most of us who don't have a support staff, it can be a little bit annoying to have to have your inbox for one thing, your ticketing system for another, your task tool for another. And so I would say this ticketing platform approach is going to be best for folks who have a little bit higher volume or just need a little bit more structure. Now, speaking of structure, let's transition to our third category, which is a spreadsheet or data. For this category, what I'm really talking about are spreadsheets, right? Excel sheets, smartsheet, all those things that we all know and love. That's what you could use for your ticketing system. Now, many of you already know what a spreadsheet is like, and so you know what some of the downsides are. It's not particularly pretty, can be a little bit hard to manage, and not the easiest to get information in and out of if you want a spreadsheet. But on steroids, tools like Coda or Airtable could be a nice level up for someone who wants to stay in this arena. However, everything in this category really focuses on managing data and because data is not necessarily the same as a support ticket, you are going to need to take a little time to get these tools calibrated. If you want to make these work like our ticketing systems from before. If you are someone that's already using some of these spreadsheet options, this could be a really nice entry point that could be even easier than the email option. If you are someone that is using a channel of communication that does not rely on email. Okay, if you're using email, might be a little challenging to go from email to a spreadsheet back to email. However, if you're using something that's not email, such as you're in person and someone's just coming to talk to you, having this spreadsheet to track issues could be perfectly ample. But in a NutShell, that's category three. Now that brings us to category four, which is kind of like a hybrid of everything we've talked about so far. And this is a work management software. Work management software that categories one that we talk about a lot on this channel because I find it to be kind of like the multi tool that is just perfect for the small teams in the sub 100 employees bracket that we typically talk to here. A work management tool combines a database like Airtable or Coda and a task list in tools like Asana and Trello and kind of puts it all in one spot because there are more powerful features than what you'd see in an email inbox and you can add integrations or third party connections. You can kind of create a little mini ticketing system inside these work management tools. And because they are tools that can do so many things, we don't have the same friction we have with the support ticketing system. I know that's a lot of words, but just picture this, right? Ticketing systems, you got to go into multiple tools to find it. If you have one work management software and it's your multi tool that your team is logging into every day, having your support tickets inside that tool, pretty easy to keep track of, hard to miss. It's right there when you go into your work for the day. Two such tools in this category that we talk a lot about here on the channel are SmartSuite and ClickUp. I'd say ClickUp is the strong choice if you're looking for something flexible, maybe a little bit more of an agile workflow around your ticketing system, Great for tech companies and so on. If you're looking for something a bit more structured, a little bit more rigid, more data oriented, you might want to give SmartSuite a shot. We do have a video comparing them in greater detail up above. But really anything in this work management arena will be a really strong choice. If you'd like to have everything all in one spot. However, I am not quite done yet. There is one final category we have in terms of our program for putting all this stuff into and that is analog. All analog is referring to is something like what you see over here. It's a whiteboard where when an issue comes up or a ticket or whatever I write it on. Similarly, you could have a piece of paper and every time an issue comes in, you fill out that piece of paper or you print a new copy and you put it on your desk. Now I know for many of you the software talk I went through earlier on in these examples probably made your eyes glaze over. So if that, that was you, remember these two options, paper or whiteboard, Perfectly valid and a great way to get started. Particularly if you're working with an in person team or in a physical retail environment where, you know, everyone can see the same thing. Now for the elephant in the room, what exactly do we do here? I've given you a bunch of options. I've given you the four steps when you're done, what does it look like? Well, here's how we handle support issues here at ProcessDriven. When a client has an issue, they have two options available to them. Kind of like in that process map I showed previously. They can either reach out to us directly by submitting a ticket or they can use the self help articles we have on our website. So that means we have two channels of support. Currently we've got email as an option and a form that we can have embedded that folks can submit. That adds right into our work management system. And yes, that means the way that we are managing most of our tickets right now are through our work management software. Currently what we're using is ClickUp for our support ticketing system. That's not to say other options aren't great. This is just what we're using right now. Inside here we have the forms that you saw above. And what this does is create tasks or tickets inside our work management software for managing each step. These tickets are used internally and externally to communicate with our support team. In this case, you see that we actually have two questions that are internal, meaning other team members need help on something. For the support team here, as issues move through the resolution process, they can get closed out and then they are added into the historical record that we can search for in the future. However, we have a separate, separate track when it comes to email based inquiries and that looks something like this. We use Missive, the tool I talked about earlier to Collect email based inquiries in a collaborative inbox that our entire team can see and work together on. If an issue is going to take more than just one sitting, you know, like a 10 minute, write a quick response. We'll then create a ticket just to be able to track the longer term resolution of it. But in most cases, email based inquiries are resolved right in the inbox and closed out. On the final note of what we use as metrics here at ProcessDriven, we actually do indeed use what we multiple. We track number of tickets per customer, so tickets per month over the customers during that period of time. We track feedback on a per reply basis. And we also have a third metric that is tracking our overall response time. Our goal is to have all tickets responded to in one business day. Our external promise is two business days. But we're overachievers and so if something takes more than 24 hours to be resolved, we'll have a flag go on the file or on the task and that'll track in to to our weekly key metrics tracker. But I should say when I first started our process was much simpler. It was one email inbox. Honestly, we had no metrics other than is there anything in the inbox? And we were just kind of figuring things out. But now, having done it for a few years, this is what our process looks like today. The result of kind of building out this process and defining it, and the result I'm hoping you get by going through these four steps is that you have a clearer sense of what support should look like at your company. You have a way to track what's going wrong so you can see the patterns and identify ways to make things better in the future. And you have measurable goals to reward people or to encourage people to actually achieve so you know whether your support is just there or actually serving its purpose. And of course, all of this is just around one process in your business, one little tiny thing that you can clean up. So if you have other areas of your business that are kind of poopy and you think that they could be cleaned up a little bit by applying the same methodology, go through the same process, or join us inside our program where we go through exactly that. Inside our program, we go beyond what you just saw in this video here and we go in depth over how to define your processes, map out each step, equip that process with things like templates, SOPs and automations, and do whatever you can to really monitor and optimize the systemization of your operations as a whole. Both in support, sure, but also every other area of your business because there's a lot of stuff to do, and there's a lot of stuff we can optimize to get some more efficiency today. If you're someone who wants to turn the chaos in your business into proactive process, check out the description below for info on how to work with us on this. But otherwise, you might want to check out this video next here to learn a little bit more about how you can start equipping at least the basics today. Thanks so much for watching guys, and until next time, enjoy the process.