Guest Post: How To Reduce Customer Support Tickets And Enhance CX?

This week we feature an article by Soumya Juttukonda, a content developer & digital media strategist at Knowmax, an AI enterprise knowledge base solution to enhance customer service. She shares how you can reduce customer support tickets and enhance customer experience.

The last thing you want in your business is to face an increased number of customer support tickets.  

As your team receives more customer service tickets, it will put a strain on the existing resources, leaving employees frustrated, that may end in a poor customer experience.  It is in the interest of any business to reduce customer support tickets and improve customer experience. According to a survey, around 52% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.  

As the average number of customer tickets is one of the parameters that businesses track to judge the level of performance of customer service, it is important to focus on reducing customer support tickets and improving customer experience. 

Here is how you can reduce customer support tickets and enhance CX: 

1 .Map the customer journey

It is important to map the customer journey and identify the possible customer touchpoints. This will help to match it with the core metrics of the business to figure out the opportunities and challenges for a business to provide a better customer experience.  

Customer journey mapping would help you to identify the processes, needs, and customer perceptions as they continue to engage at different stages of the journey. 

 2 . Create self-service solutions

One of the best ways you can reduce customer service tickets and improve CX is by creating customer self-service solutions. As an increasing number of customers would raise customer service tickets, it would result in a longer wait time for the customer.  The longer wait times would result in poor customer experience and will impact brand reputation as well.  

By creating self-service solutions like FAQs and other knowledge-based solutions, you can expect the customer to find solutions for commonly faced issues on their own, while the customer support team can focus on more serious queries that need human intervention. 

3 . Embrace omnichannel experience

You can no longer expect the customer to log into a desktop and get on your website to fill out the contact form to get in touch with the support team via email or wait for a long time to speak to a customer service agent.  

Customers expect brands to provide an omnichannel experience.  An omnichannel experience can be built by being available where the customer is spending time rather than expecting them to come to you. It can be on social media, public forums, mobile applications, or any other platform that the customer uses.  A brand needs to embrace an omnichannel presence and provide a consistent experience across all platforms. 

4 . Prioritize support tickets 

You can prioritize support tickets based on the urgency of the issue.  For instance, in the banking industry, cases on the lines of fraud and other similar instances should be dealt with on high priority, while other customer issues can be resolved by self-service or in-person channels depending on the nature of the issue. 

By opting to prioritize support tickets, you would be able to provide a better customer experience by resolving important queries first. 

 5 .  Merge support tickets

Another important way with which you can reduce customer support tickets is by merging support tickets. As customers feel impatient or frustrated because of the time being taken to resolve the issue they are facing, you can end up with more than just one ticket from the same customer.  

It is a good practice to merge the support tickets into one. This will help you to reduce the number of customer support tickets being raised and provide better data to your support team to resolve the issue at hand. 

6 . Develop decision trees

Another route that can help you to reduce customer support tickets is the creation of troubleshooting trees via a decision tree maker.  This information will help your customer support team to conclude a set procedure. These decision trees can also be useful in developing self-service solution tools.  As they can provide a guided roadmap to the resolution of customer queries, decision trees help improve customer experience with consistency and faster resolution to queries. 

7 . Follow a proactive approach

You need to have a proactive approach if you want to reduce customer support tickets. It is important to identify all the possible challenges that a customer may face while using the product or service and provide answers to the customer queries on self-service channels, social media, websites, and other platforms that are being used by the customer.  By following a proactive approach, you would not want the number of customer support tickets to blow out of proportion on a particular issue before answers are provided on relevant platforms. These answers would be available in the first instance as the customer faces any issue. 

8 . Opt for technological solutions

In the era of technology, you should opt for solutions that help you provide a better customer experience. These solutions can focus on knowledge base management system, visual guides, chatbot creation, or visual assistance. Depending on the issues that your business is facing, you can deploy solutions to help you provide service to the customer. With a solution that helps you provide better CX, you can expect the customer support tickets to go down. 

To sum up

These are some of the steps that can help you improve customer experience and reduce the number of customer service tickets that are being raised. One of the first few steps in this journey can be to opt for a knowledge management platform like Knowmax.  The AI-powered can help you in a variety of ways to reduce customer support tickets, including creating visual guides, decision trees, self-service solutions, and making chatbots smarter and more efficient. With Knowmax on your side, you can expect the customer support tickets to go down and CX scores to go up.