Is it time for a ticketing system yet?
No? How about ... now?
Let’s imagine you’re running, maybe by yourself, support for an early startup. Up until now your organization has been able to get by with a cobbled-together edifice of email, shared Slack channels, and lots of manual copying of data from internal issue trackers to customer communications. But as you’re digging through Github tickets for the fourth time today looking for the crucial update you know is in there somewhere, you think to yourself there’s got to be a better way to handle all of this. Is it time to finally bite the bullet and implement a support ticketing system?
The motivations for bringing in a support tool, whether it’s Zendesk, Salesforce, Intercom, or any of dozens of other alternatives, are clear and compelling:
Saving time: as dramatized by the thought experiment above, functioning without a ticketing system is possible, but arduous. You need to look in half a dozen different places for information, manually copy data from one place to another regularly, and spend a lot of time making sure that the various interested parties—support, customer success, sales, engineering, and of course the customer—are up to speed with the latest updates and changes to every support issue you’re tracking. Setting aside the difficulty in keeping all of this straight, consider how much time you’re spending just gathering and conveying information over and over again.
Single source of truth: instead of having to look at emails, and Slack conversations, and Jira or Github tickets, a well-configured support ticketing system can consolidate all of this information in one place. Changes made in other systems will seamlessly sync into your open support tickets, and the progress of support issues can in turn be shared with other tools.
Unlocks internal self-serve: that last point is important because support issues are of interest to more than just the support team. Customer Success wants to know how onboarding is going for their newest customer and whether the bug they reported during the pilot phase is being investigated. Sales is concerned that their big deal scheduled to close next week may have hidden landmines in the form of neglected feature requests. The Education team is regularly wondering whether there’s any feedback abut their latest documentation, or whether customers are even reading it at all. In all of those cases, if they can’t find the information on their own, they’re going to be asking you or your team. By making this information easy to find via your ticketing system, you’re saving yourself and your team hours of time.
External self-serve, too: most full-featured support ticketing systems have the concept of a customer portal, where customers can go to see the status of all of their support issues at a glance, and maybe even access additional resources like a knowledge base or customer forum. The more your customers are able to help themselves, the fewer times they’ll have to reach out to you for assistance.
Room to grow: a good ticketing system will not just save you time today but will keep being useful as your team expands in the future. Ticket categorization will help you understand where resources should be spent in improving the product and the documentation, a growing library of solved issues can be invaluable for onboarding new engineers to the team, and the metrics generated by your system will provide critical team data not available anywhere else. More interestingly, a full-featured ticketing tool will let you experiment with adding new services to your support process: maybe you’ll want to add a chat window to your website, or investigate new AI tools to streamline drafting or editing support responses, or build a knowledge base accessible via your support portal. As your team’s size and capabilities grow, a good ticketing system will grow with them.
So how do you know it’s time?
A good question, and the answer will vary from team to team. But here are a few signs that it’s time to start planning to research, select, and deploy a ticketing tool.
More tickets: when you’re fielding one or two issues a day, it’s reasonable that you can keep all of the details straight in your head, most of the time. Many more than that, and you’re going to have to refresh your own memory on what’s come before whenever you have a ticket update to share. Having all that information in one place is going to save time and effort in bringing the ticket history and context to mind.
Increasing overhead: as your customer base grows, and your company grows, you’ll find yourself having to look in more places and consult with more people internally for every support issue that comes in. Once you’re spending more time digging up information, keeping everyone in the loop, and updating disparate systems than you are actually solving the customer’s problem, it’s a sign that you need a better system.
The team is growing: as long as you’re the only support person, you can usually get by without a ticketing system because you don’t have to coordinate with a team. That changes the minute there’s more than one support engineer in the mix. Are you going to give them access to your email? Of course not. Get a ticketing system. By the time your new hire is onboard, you should already have the system in place, so plan accordingly.
It’s hard to dispute that a functional support team should have a ticketing system, but it can be surprisingly difficult to know when it’s time to actually implement it. Especially when you’re in the thick of it, fielding support requests and pitching in across functions in a growing startup, it can be hard to take a step back and recognize that you need to improve your tooling. Keep these considerations in mind, and remember: by the time you’re consciously aware that you need a better system, you should probably have had one six months ago. Plan for the future now!
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