10 Ways to Streamline Your Support Process

In today’s highly competitive environment, with multiple companies having near identical offerings, it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd; long gone are the days where having the best product or service in the market meant imminent success. As a result, most companies have had to widen their focus from strictly the quality of product they provide, to the overall experience the customer receives. With 80% of customers already saying the experience a company provides is equally as important as their products and services, improving your customer service can translate into not only retaining your current clientele, but can make you stand out to new customers as well.

Below we will look at how the tools and features available from within the Sonar ticketing interface can be used to streamline your customer support process, and ultimately help to provide a better experience for your customers and employees.

To learn more about the items listed below, take a look at the “Additional Resources” listed under each feature, where links to relevant knowledge base documentation and videos are available.

Ticket Groups
Ticket Groups allow you to set groupings of users that will be responsible for specific tickets, and can be used to better segment and identify the various types of tickets that you will be dealing with. By using ticket groups you can minimize confusion among your staff by clearly identifying which tickets are relevant to them and where their focus should be, while also increasing accountability. Ticket groups can also be made private to limit visibility, which can be useful when dealing with tickets that contain sensitive information or content that isn’t meant to be distributed within the rest of the company.

Additional Resources:

• Ticket Groups to Consider (Knowledge Base Document)
• Ticketing – Getting Started (Sonar Cast Video)

Ticket Categories

Ticket categories can be used to better organize the different types of tickets you will be receiving into your Sonar instance. Whether they are used to categorize tickets that are “Pending Bug Fix” or an “Escalation”, ticket categories provide visual indicators for which next steps will need to be taken for a particular situation. Incorporating these into your own internal processes can help to provide better guidance on the appropriate path staff members need to take and therefore ensure issues are being addressed in a timely manner.

Additional Resources:

• Ticket Categories Best Practices & Example Build (Knowledge Base Document)
• Ticketing – Getting Started (Sonar Cast Video)

Canned Replies

When it comes to streamlining your internal processes, canned replies are an essential tool that will help to reduce response time for your customer service representatives. They involve creating template responses that your staff can use to quickly answer commonly occurring customer questions, but can also be used for internal purposes as well. Canned replies are a great way to speed up customer communications while reducing human error and maintaining consistency in the language and responses used by your employees.

Additional Resources:

• Canned Reply Categories (Knowledge Base Document)
• Canned Replies Examples & Templates (Knowledge Base Document)
• Canned Replies (Sonar Cast Video)

Creating Tickets on Call Log Creation

Call logs are an effective way to track customer communications, which reduces the number of people a customer will need to explain their issue to – something that 72% of customers define as poor customer service. For this reason alone, we highly recommend using call logs in your daily practices, if you aren’t already doing so! By also being able to create a ticket based off a call log, your staff members will eliminate the need for duplicate data entry and therefore be able to spend more time tackling the issues that matter.

Additional Resources:

• Call Logs: General Best Practices (Knowledge Base Document)

Using Parent Tickets

The ability to set a ticket as the parent to multiple child tickets helps to ensure better tracking for widespread issues. When you have one issue that is affecting multiple customers, using parent tickets allows you to easily track all affected customers, ensuring no one is left out of the loop and receives updates, as needed. By being able to update and respond to one single parent ticket, and have those changes pushed out to all attached child tickets, you save the time required to update all customers and tickets individually while ensuring everyone is provided a consistent response.

Additional Resources:

• Using Parent Tickets (Knowledge Base Document)

Quick Filters

Although simple and advanced filtering are available in most areas of Sonar, the ticketing interface has the added bonus of preset quick filters. Using these filters, your customer service representatives can narrow their focus into certain subsets of tickets and more quickly find the information they are looking for, all with a simple click of a button. If your staff need to perform more complex searches within the ticketing interface, they are able to build off of the preset quick filters, or can create their own from scratch by using the advanced filters available.

Additional Resources:

• Filtering: Simple vs Advanced (Knowledge Base Document)

Currently Viewing

Within Sonar’s ticketing interface, users are provided a visual indicator to see which additional users are currently viewing a particular ticket. Unlike the other features mentioned, this particular tool is available by default and requires no additional configuration. This feature can be used to help reduce duplicated efforts by staff when working through tickets, and promote internal communication to ensure individuals are aware of what is actively being worked on.

Days to Reopen Public Tickets

This feature allows you to specify the period of time that must elapse before any replies to a ticket will automatically create a new public ticket, instead of continuing to reopen the original ticket. Defining a timeframe will allow for better customer support by ensuring each new issue is handled as its own new ticket and properly documented, rather than continuously lumping multiple different issues into the same ticket, and also provides more accurate reporting for your customer support metrics.

Additional Resources:

• Advanced Ticketing Features (Knowledge Base Document)

Send Auto Reply

For each inbound mailbox you have set up to receive tickets, there exists the option to have an automatic reply sent out for each new ticket received. Automated replies are a great way to keep customers informed of any next steps that will be taken for their reported issue and can assist with managing expectations for response times. And with the time your employees save from repetitively writing out the same responses by hand, they can better focus their efforts on working towards solutions for your customers.

Additional Resources:

• Inbound Mailboxes Example Build (Knowledge Base Document)

Append Signature

With this feature, you can have a customized signature appended to any ticket responses that are sent out from your individual inbound mailboxes. Custom signatures allow you to provide consistency in your messaging, while clearly identifying which user has handled responses and therefore increasing accountability. It also provides the opportunity to inform customers of additional ways support can be obtained, company information, such as a website or phone number, and more.

Additional Resources:

• Inbound Mailboxes Example Build (Knowledge Base Document)
  Hopefully this has helped provide insight into how you can utilize Sonar’s ticketing features to better streamline your support process and ultimately improve the experience your customers receive.