Real-time support is an increasingly important aspect of customer service, resulting in the emergence of conversational ticketing as a means to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Both agents and bots can provide this capability for collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack.
Conversational ticketing is so named for its ability to allow users to open a ticket by simply having a conversation, resulting in a streamlined process for creating, processing, and managing tickets. In this way, organizations can treat conversations as tickets.
Microsoft Teams and Slack account for the vast majority of collaboration platforms in use, at least among large organizations. Demand Sage reports that Microsoft Teams has over 280 million active users, including 91% of Fortune 500 companies. It lists Slack at 20 million daily active users, including 9% of Fortune 500 companies.
Integrating a ticketing management system into these messaging platforms allows support teams to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their customer support. This guide examines ways conversational ticketing transforms customer service, including the use of AI-driven solutions, to provide real-time support.
What is conversational ticketing?
Conversational ticketing is a support system that allows users to communicate with support staff in real-time through platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack. It’s also known by other names like conversational service, conversational support, or simply ticketing.
Conversational ticketing allows users to create, manage, and comment on tickets within a seamless workflow, significantly increasing the throughput of tickets. Once the system converts a conversation into a ticket, it routes the ticket to the appropriate agents for resolution.
The process supports employees by reaching them where they already work, eliminating the need for them to leave their platforms when handling tickets.
Traditional ticketing vs. conversational ticketing
Traditional ticketing systems manage customer support requests with one dedicated platform. A user with an issue submits a ticket and waits for a response while the support team manually reviews and prioritizes incoming requests.
Traditional ticketing systems are still in wide use, although conversational ticketing solutions are increasingly replacing them. This trend is especially prevalent in sectors where fast, personalized support is a routine expectation for customers.
Conversational ticketing offers several benefits over traditional ticketing systems, such as real-time support for users. This capability allows agents to respond to queries and tickets much more quickly, thus improving user experiences.
Conversational ticketing also supports conversations between agents and customers, creating a greater personal connection. This advantage is crucial for modern businesses, which are increasingly likely to compete on customer service quality rather than product quality or price.
Another reason for the rapid adoption of conversational ticketing is the ease with which it integrates into existing collaboration platforms. Agents can manage incoming requests from customers without leaving the platform they’re currently working in, saving time and improving efficiency.
Conversational ticketing solutions also lend themselves well to further enhancement with artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies for more personalized support. This feature is particularly important for businesses driven by a need to improve user experience.
Benefits of conversational ticketing
The benefits of conversational ticketing generally relate to the automation it provides. They include faster help, more personalized customer experiences, continuous learning to improve customer support, and always-available customer support. Here’s a closer look at the benefits of conversational ticketing.
Faster response times
Conversational ticketing improves problem resolution times by providing users with real-time support, either via self-service prompts or delay-free live support. Agents can respond to queries very quickly as compared to traditional ticketing systems by leveraging technology that flags high-priority urgent tickets and identifies frequently asked questions or submitted requests that can be automated to streamline the ticket resolution process. Speedy resolutions benefit everyone, but this benefit is especially important when urgent matters arise.
Unique, personalized experiences
Collaboration platforms offer a distinctly conversational form of communication that traditional ticketing lacks. Teams and Slack both humanize the support process, improving user satisfaction.
Most large organizations now offer multiple communication channels, which younger customers may expect and appreciate. Chat and voice formats currently have the highest satisfaction rating of all customer service channels.
24/7 help
Conversational ticketing systems offer far more availability than older systems, allowing businesses to provide continual support by leveraging chat platforms.
The addition of automation and real-time support means these organizations handle support requests more efficiently, providing users with more timely assistance. This benefit results in 24/7 support for users, who get rapid issue resolution and quick escalation for nuanced problems.
Data to continuously improve support
The real-time AI-powered data analytics provided by conversational ticketing can be set up to continuously parse the nature and results of every support request interaction and, crawling for patterns and abnormalities, glean insights. They not only reveal these insights to users but make logic-based recommendations based on them, as well.
An IT team that receives several Slack alerts within a span of a few minutes reporting a sudden rise in system access issues, for example, can swiftly take care of the problem before possible outages occur.
Managers can receive regular, automated messages in Slack or Microsoft Teams on just about any key performance indicator (KPI) they choose. They will want to track several such KPIs on a short-term (daily or weekly) basis. Most, however, will measure data over longer periods (monthly, biannually, yearly).
Urgent and short-term metrics include customer satisfaction rate, first response time, top agents, and repeat incidents. For more long-term metrics, consider average resolution rate, churn rate, cost per ticket, and ticket by type.
When businesses are made aware of trending or recurring problems, they can strategize to solve complicated underlying issues, decrease those types of requests for better solve rates and happier customers, and make the most of their newfound recognition of emerging market trends.
Challenges in implementing conversational ticketing
Conversational ticketing tools are a relatively new addition to the business tech stack lexicon. Users may face implementation challenges of both a cultural and technical nature.
Integration complexity
Popular platforms like Teams and Slack lack some features that effectively manage support requests, which may pose implementation challenges with some conversational ticketing platforms.
Overcoming this barrier involves choosing a ticketing solution specifically designed for your collaboration platform. It’s also a good idea to look for robust automation capabilities in addition to ticket management for quick communication across business lines and faster resolutions.
What’s more, it’s important to ensure that all members of your support team can access the conversational ticketing solution you choose, regardless of their device or location.
Adoption rate
Users are generally reluctant to adopt any new software tool, but this aversion can be particularly strong for implementing a conversational ticketing platform. The unusually low adoption rate of these solutions is primarily due to the different skill sets they require compared to skills of traditional email ticketing.
For example, conversational ticketing requires agents to handle multiple conversations simultaneously, while still effectively managing the chat platform. This may require a level of multi-tasking and rapid gear-shifting that many employees are not accustomed to. Positive encouragement, comprehensive onboarding, and thorough, ongoing training are essential for preparing and motivating agents to use these new tools.
Data integrity and AI accuracy
The results an AI-powered tool yields are only as good as their sources. If your conversational ticketing platform’s information source contains data that is incomplete, unintelligible, or just plain wrong, the answers your organization’s help desk agents and customers get will be, as well.
The implications of data inaccuracy go beyond individual cases, however. Business line campaigns, strategic plans, and organizational decisions based on incomplete or incorrect data analytics findings can range from minor to catastrophic. Data quality is essential for the success of any AI-based operation.
Conversational ticketing implementation best practices
Conversational ticketing can be a valuable tool for providing real-time support to both employees and customers. However, getting the full benefits of this powerful technology requires some preparation and maintenance on the part of leadership and IT.
Those best practices are as follows:
Connect ticketing systems with existing processes management platform for seamless workflows
Teams that already use ticketing systems typically engage with multiple platforms, especially in enterprise-grade organizations. Conversational ticketing adds value when it’s integrated into existing platforms, eliminating the laborious, time-consuming task of training employees to use a new suite of software.
For customer support agents already using Zendesk, for example, the ability to generate tickets and provide links to those tickets within Zendesk creates a bridge to conversational ticketing within an existing process management platform.
The circumstances are similar for software developers who use GitHub — integrating a conversational ticketing solution into this tracking product minimizes the disruption to the developers’ workflow.
Increase tool adoption with employee training and onboarding
Conversational ticketing is a new technology, so team members often require significant training to use it effectively. The onboarding process should include general information about the usefulness of the new capabilities, as well as specific instructions on using the solution and sandbox practice time.
Furthermore, training should include responses to support requests and the escalation of an issue to the next support level. It’s important to keep in mind that users require periodic training to cover updates to the ticketing platform.
Improve support experiences by customizing automated responses
Organizations that use conversational ticketing can take self-service to the next level by leveraging AI and machine learning (ML) to automatically respond to customers in real-time.
These automation features can also convert messages into tickets. Take, for example, a request for which the AI technology has no response. (If you’ve used AI chatbots in the past couple of years, this has most likely happened to you.) A conversational ticketing system can then use the query to generate a ticket and route it to the appropriate agent.
Streamline workflows and tech stacks
As their tech stack steadily increases, employees’ need to resolve their issues quickly and accurately rises, as well. This is particularly true of IT departments, where team members are often the most qualified to resolve software problems.
A conversational ticketing system gives these individuals an opportunity to customize their conversations and workflows so that they can easily interact with coworkers and outside business lines in layman’s terms.
Choose the right conversational support ticketing software
Today’s customers strongly favor communication channels to get the rapid help they need without creating obstacles or affecting efficiency. The transition to conversational ticketing is growing, but these systems must be fully integrated with existing platforms to successfully bridge the gap between end users and support teams.
This integration provides real-time support within a platform that support teams already use, removing much of the inconvenience of a traditional support system.
Pipefy AI automates and optimizes management processes like ticketing systems, streamlining the help desk process for efficiency and convenience. Paired with Pipefy’s process automation platform, streamlining workflows and automating repetitive ticketing intake tasks creates a more efficient ticketing system free of delays, errors, and poor support.
