Client requests are often both vital and potentially irksome. It doesn’t matter if you refer to them as issues, claims, inquiries or tickets. They’re time-sensitive and, unfortunately, they tend to be time-consuming. The more time you spend on them, the less profitable each client and project will be.
Whether you have a traditional help desk with defined SLAs or you’re fielding ad-hoc submissions from clients about their projects, it’s essential to stay on top of these needs and wants if you hope to achieve high client retention and optimal profitability.
Accelo users in a range of industries have found creative ways to adapt the Tickets product to ensure they respond to clients in a timely and attentive manner — without compromising team efficiency.
Let’s look at four objectives you can achieve with the help of automated ticketing software.
Customer support is one of the areas of business in which you have the least amount of control over time spent. Issue resolution takes as long as it takes, and being fully dedicated to making your clients happy is ultimately great for preventing client churn. The problem arises when your team members serve clients in silos and don’t track every billable minute they spend attending to requests.
Most of the time, people neglect time tracking because it feels complicated. The way to simplify and demystify this process is to adopt ticketing software with built-in time logs that can be categorized as billable and non-billable.
Once you start gathering data about how much time your team is collectively spending on resolving inquiries for each client account, you’ll be able to determine how much billable time you’ve overlooked thus far. These collective records can contribute to the bigger picture of how profitable each client is, which helps you make more sound decisions about whom you serve.
In action: Read how LeapIT used Accelo to recover five to six hours of billable work per month that they were unknowingly providing for free.
One of the worst things that can happen in client service is for a ticket to be forgotten about. If you have difficulty properly routing requests to the right person, you increase the chances of unintentionally ignoring them and risking your client relationships.
But putting tickets in the correct bucket and sending them down the right path is a mundane task that shouldn’t take up your team’s valuable time — time they could spend giving your clients the attention they crave in other ways. Automation is the answer.
Technology that supports the ticketing stage of client work should, at a minimum, have the functionality to label your incoming requests and route them properly.
In action: Spera Law Group significantly reduced administrative work and simplified employee training by combining the power of Accelo with the low-code utility of Zapier.
READ NEXT: 9 Efficiency Hacks for Client Service Professionals
What’s the most common type of client request that comes through? What’s your average resolution time for each? If you can’t answer these questions, you probably need ticketing software.
Especially if you’re in an industry in which you get a lot of repeat requests, it can be tough to prioritize them. Sometimes, it makes sense to take requests in the order in which they’re received, but in some cases, that may not be the most efficient approach. You might need to resolve a certain client’s issue more quickly due to a project timeline shift, or you could decide that one type of request is always more important than another, despite the time required.
It will be tough to adapt to one-off changes if your team isn’t in the habit of prioritizing already. Build good habits with the help of a platform that helps you automate ticket assignments and embed them into your workflows in whatever ways you need them to. Customizability is key for generating reports that tell a meaningful story about your client interactions.
In action: See how Comit Developers organizes its clients’ website update requests in Accelo’s Tickets product and sends custom monthly reports about work completed.
Good ticketing software does a lot more than simply keep track of who’s assigned to which tickets. It eliminates confusion and supports quick and efficient internal communication.
With useful native integrations or an open API, you can build processes around ticket intake that make it easy for your team to talk about incoming requests. Perhaps they need to consult one another about a complicated issue or brainstorm a solution. Or, someone’s unexpectedly out of office and the team needs to reassign their tickets and catch up on the history.
Accelo has built-in functionality that supports these scenarios and more, but that’s not where its power as an issue resolution partner ends. The availability of two APIs allows users to create ticketing workflows that align with team goals and capacity.
In action: MSP Ignition used Accelo’s robust API to build an app that displays key information about help desk tickets and gives team members the ability to interact with them in Slack.
Not convinced that attending to requests can support profitability? That’s because you haven’t tried out a ticketing software that’s seamlessly linked to your projects, billing and other essential elements of client work.
See for yourself how Accelo users are achieving results with its end-to-end functionality — start a free trial or schedule a demo.
