Help for Handling a Sharp Customer Service Upsurge

Every now and again, customer support teams will experience a sharp rise in tickets. Whether they were expected or have happened unknowingly, this large amount of tickets can put customer service agents under huge amounts of pressure.

If a team isn’t functioning properly and is operating with below-standard software, this additional workload can soon start to swamp them. However, if agents have been given the right structure and tools, they’ll be able to deal with all of these tickets quickly and efficiently, providing customers with the most suitable solution.

When your business experiences a rise in customer support tickets, here are some top tips as to what you can do:

Adopt a Proactive Approach

In some cases, a number of customers will have sent in questions that are for similar queries. Therefore, if your business is experiencing a higher level of support requests for similar problems, assign parent and child tickets to help you get through this large volume. This system places similar tickets into one group – one of these becomes the “parent” while all of the others are “children.” Once you can solve the parent issue, this ticket is marked as solved, which subsequently closes all of the child tickets automatically.

Furthermore, customer support teams should have a thorough look at the profiles of their customers to see who is having the same type of problem. For example, are customers who are using the same piece of software experiencing very similar issues? Or, are the customers you’re hearing from in the same industry?

By doing this, your team can proactively reduce the number of tickets your receiving, by getting in touch with impacted clients before they contact you.

Make Sure Your Team is Organized

Because of the multiple channels involved in today’s business world, you may find support tickets come from a whole host of different avenues, including online chat, social media, email, and phone. Therefore, trying to stay on top of all these channels can be a bit of a nightmare, especially if your team isn’t connected.

To consolidate all of these incoming requests, an omnichannel helpdesk solution is best. This brings all of the different requests together and consolidates them to create tickets that are based on the type of query the customer has.

This type of software gets rid of data entry because agents don’t have to create these tickets by using a manual process. Instead, their time is more effectively spent dealing with the issues that these tickets are addressing.

Ensure You’ve Created Efficient Processes

It probably goes without saying that to handle an increase in workload, you need to make sure your processes are efficient as possible.

This means making sure customers are properly assisted and you’re supporting them in every way you can to resolve their issues. You shouldn’t just use common practice methods.

For example, if you allow your agents to work with each other, this will provide your customers with faster solutions. If one agent isn’t sure how to resolve an issue, they can turn to another rep who may be able to help. By transferring the customer through to this other agent, it makes sure the customer isn’t kept waiting for an answer to their problem.

Equally, if you can choose a software system that has your business’s guidelines and articles stored within it, you can make sure each of your team members has access to this information. This means, when they’re presented with a question they don’t know the answer to, they can find the best possible solution in real-time. They can also add their own comments to the information to help future agents with similar issues.

Always Be Supportive

Supporting customers doesn’t have to mean having direct contact with a member of the customer service team. Instead, they may benefit from self-service options, such as answers to frequently asked questions and resources that help them to resolve the issue on their own.

Sometimes businesses don’t favor this approach as they feel as though their customers get the impression they don’t want to interact with them, but this isn’t the case. Today’s customers are keen to get the answers they need without having to speak to someone because this allows them to resolve their issue in their own time.

You may also find it beneficial to send customers to these additional resources when they first get in touch with you. Customer support software can help to suggest these self-service guides as it analyzes the customers’ incoming questions based on product information and keywords.

A sudden influx in support tickets can have an impact on your customer service. If your agents aren’t able to deal with these questions in a timely manner, they could soon become overwhelmed by them. Instead, the right steps should be put in place to minimize the pressure put on the agents so they can continue to provide effective customer service.

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