Choosing a ticketing system
Something something choose wisely
After last week’s discussion of when it’s time to buy and set up a support ticketing system, I wanted to continue along the same lines this week. Now that you’ve decided that the time has come, what’s next? How do you decide on one?
What this post is not
- It’s not me telling you which system to use! Instead, I want to think through the process of making a decision, and figuring out what matters most to your team. What’s right for me won’t necessarily be right for you.
- It’s not an exhaustive comparison matrix between any support ticketing products. In fact, I’m not going to mention any names at all because that’s beside the point.
- It’s not about anything but making a choice—budgeting, procurement, deployment aren’t getting more than this passing mention today.
Think about what you need most, and go from there
If I had to boil down this entire discussion to one sentence: first decide what’s most important to you, then choose accordingly. While there are a few well-known products in this space, there are any number of newer and smaller tools out there that may also fit your needs very well. The best way to cut down a crowded field of contenders is to be very clear from the beginning what you really need out of a ticketing system and see who can provide it. There are as many requirements for a ticket management tool as there are support teams. In my opinion, though, there is one that is vital that you get clear on first: how do you want to interact with your customers?
What I consider the most important
Setting aside live troubleshooting and screen shares, which should figure heavily in your support process anyway, there are two different archetypes of support ticketing systems: email-first and chat-first. The one you choose will have a tremendous bearing on your support process going forward, so it’s important to understand the difference and make the correct decision now.
Email-first
This category encompasses literal email-based support as well as systems where a customer might open a ticket via a web form and subsequent communication is either via email or generates email notifications. The most important feature of this model is its asynchronous nature: emails are sent without generally expecting an immediate response. If your customers are communicating with you via email or an email-like system, you have breathing room to research and compose comprehensive responses. Though it’s overall a slower communications method, it lets both sides be more deliberate. Emails are also more permanent: your customer has an automatic record in their inbox and doesn’t have to request a transcript later. On the other hand, email is going to be slower: it can be frustrating for a customer who has what seems to be a simple request to have to wait hours or days for every update to their issue.
Chat-first
When you’re typing into a chat box, either on a website or in a shared Slack channel or any number of other live-chat systems, you’re expecting the support person on the other end to be actively engaged and to respond to you quickly. For a lot of support teams this makes sense—particularly in B2C (business to consumer) environments where you’re selling a relatively uncomplicated product to individuals. The questions are more likely to be around usage and product features, and your engineers can handle them easily. If they have technical problems, it’s probably with only one user, and they’re available immediately to troubleshoot. The immediacy of a chat-based support tool is great for this type of support process, and lends itself to quick resolution and improved customer satisfaction. Where it’s less effective is in more complex troubleshooting situations, or when dealing with long-running bugs or feature requests where you need to return to the same conversation over periods of days, weeks, or months.
Other considerations
Your team’s specific requirements are going to be unique to your team, and the things that are important in my decision-making process may not be important to you and your team’s support model. That said, here are a few considerations that are probably worth thinking about as you go through your selection process.
- Price: we’re not all lucky enough to have unlimited budget (there’s that word again!). Consider how much money you’re able to spend on your ticketing system before you get your heart set on something you just can’t afford. Relatedly, be aware of your chosen solution’s pricing model. Is it a flat fee? Cost per interaction? Cost per solution? Make sure you understand what your monthly spend is likely to be, today and in the future.
- Knowledge base: the first and easiest way of cutting down your inbound support issues is to make it as easy as possible for customers to answer their own questions. By integrating a knowledge base into your system, and making it prominently visible when the customer is about to open an issue, you can deflect a healthy percentage of issues before they even get to you.
- Customer portal: less important for B2C products, perhaps, but for larger customers, it is important to provide a centralized location where they can see all of their open issues, current status, and next steps for each. If this information isn’t available, you can expect to hear from those customers regularly just to get updates on all of their other tickets. Save yourself the time and trouble and let them have that information directly.
- Other features: there are any number of other things you may be looking for in a ticketing system. At the time of writing, the newest and hottest feature that everyone is scrambling to implement is AI assistance, where with the input of an LLM (large language model) your system is able to do things like draft responses, point to knowledge base articles, and summarize complicated ticket histories with little or no manual assistance. Tomorrow, who knows? Maybe everyone will want a built-in telepathy interface.
- Other contact modalities: even if you decide to choose an email-centric product, why not have the option for customers to chat with you as well? If it turns out to be a complex issue, you can switch to email. (Ditto for chat-based support.) Giving the customer the option of how to reach out to you will make them more likely to do so when they have problems, rather than suffering in silence.
- Available integrations: maybe your company is highly reliant on a specific internal issue tracker, or an on-call paging system. Whatever the existing tooling that your support team may be expected to use, it’s worth considering if you want to integrate it with your support ticketing system. The larger and more established tools tend to be well stocked with third-party integrations, but you may have less luck with newer competitors. That said, third-party workflow builders can often fill the gaps if you’re willing to put in some extra work.
Go buy something and don’t wait too long
My final piece of advice today is that once you’ve looked at your options, and chosen the one that fits the most of your requirements and nice-to-haves, don’t wait too long before buying it and getting started using it. If you don’t yet have a ticketing system, two things are probably true: first, you’re probably small enough that the initial purchase cost won’t be large. Second, the longer you wait, the longer you and your team will struggle with handling support issues without a centralized repository. Don’t let evaluation periods go too long, push forward budget and procurement processes as quickly as you can (I guess I lied about not mentioning those again), and get something in place. You and your team need it!
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