Customer Service Management

Learn about elevating from case management to customer service management and the impact service management can have on your team and business

Enterprise Service Management

Read our blog posts, case studies, and more focused on centralizing internal service operations and the efficiency that comes with ESM.

Ticket Deflection: How to Reduce Support Tickets

As businesses grow, providing on-demand customer service responses can begin to feel a bit overwhelming. When an increased volume of general inquiries is compounded by specific requests that require time-consuming replies, the backlog of customer service tickets can lead to frustrated buyers and a stressed-out service team.

Such conditions offer team leaders a strong incentive to find preemptive measures for helping clients before they ever need to submit a ticket—a strategy also known as ticket deflection. This proactive method can reduce a team’s overall time to response and enable service team members to provide higher-quality, in-depth replies to clients who do submit tickets.

But how can companies prevent tickets, even in instances where customers have a knowledge gap, a genuinely defective product, or an earnest question? Some of the ticket deflection strategies we recommend include:

Providing a knowledge base for basic information and common questions.
Creating comprehensive educational material for first-time customers.
Providing self-service portals that automatically direct customers to specific information.

Let’s discuss each approach in greater detail, then cover next steps for implementing them.

Provide a Knowledge Base

Establishing online knowledge bases and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages provides brands with a broad range of service coverage. Clients can access these resources for common issues and questions that might otherwise fill a business’s ticketing system.

A FAQ page specifically covers questions that customers commonly ask, or those that a business expects them to ask. Proactively adding questions is the best way to keep an FAQ page optimized, as it ensures such simple questions get answered before they’re ever submitted as tickets or end up on the page.

A knowledge base is a more comprehensive database that includes FAQs, but often includes some basic quick-start guides, maintenance tips, and other helpful information. Some are filled by customers who add their own answers to common questions and assist future buyers with their own product experiences.

Create Comprehensive First-Time Buyer Educational Material

Within these knowledge bases, businesses should include instructions for first-time buyers on how to use a product or service. It’s the perfect place to include comprehensive, company-authored guides for every user level.

Such support materials are particularly valuable in the B2B space, where many industries create long-form videos to ensure their clients have out-of-the-box employee training material. This information can reduce the “telephone” effect of client education, wherein any information gaps during the buyer’s onboarding process become amplified as they train their own employees on a given product.

By offering such extensive educational resources, vendors can ensure their clients and employees have all the necessary information to set them up for success. It also allows buyers to rewatch or reread instructions if they forget some details, or face an issue covered in the initial training material.

Provide Self-Service Portals

The richest of resources can only help if they are easily accessible to the clients that need them. The best way to offer such easy access is via user-friendly self-service portals that automatically route clients to FAQs, quick-start guides, or training materials that address a specific issue or question.

The key is to create an avenue to detailed information that’s just as fast—or faster—than calling for assistance. Self-service portals are more than contact forms or drop-down menus on a FAQ page. They are comprehensive online sites that allow customers to search for specific information, or even submit their own answers to questions asked by others.

Master Ticket Deflection With Vivantio

Most businesses usually don’t know how to deploy all three of these strategies quickly.

While each can provide companies with tremendous benefits, none will help if managers choose a platform that lacks the necessary features. Vivantio’s cutting-edge customer service software platform offers everything listed and more, including:

Endless integrations for easy implementation
Automatic ticket routing so every ticket goes to the proper agent
Workflow designer tool so managers can customize the framework of their CS operations without any technical knowledge
White-label service portals so businesses can ensure cohesive branding throughout the service process
A holistic view of each client to ensure no agent is left without vital information

For businesses striving to bring their customer experience approach into the modern age, Vivantio is a premium option.

For more than two decades, Vivantio has helped clients optimize their service organizations with a uniﬁed service management platform. To learn how Vivantio can help you implement ticket deflection strategies, contact our team today, or register for a free demo.