Support ticket volumes have skyrocketed, with a 35% increase noted since the pandemic began. Whether it’s hardware failure, software bugs, or simple user errors, the flood of incoming tickets can cripple an unprepared IT support team.
Yet, with the right strategies in place, this surge in tickets can be managed effectively, leading to increased customer satisfaction and internal team efficiency.
Much of this comes down to leveraging technology like ticketing systems, improving workflow processes, and empowering your agents with the tools they need to excel.
Understanding how to handle support tickets can mean the difference between endless backlogs and a smoothly functioning IT support operation, whether you have in-house IT support or are a managed IT services provider.
Improve Your System for Handling and Tracking Support Tickets
The backbone of handling IT support tickets lies in a robust ticketing system. If your team is juggling customer queries through email, social media, phone, and chat, then problems are already slipping through the cracks.
A centralized, omnichannel system is the bedrock that aligns all these channels, allowing every incoming support ticket to be categorized, tracked, and addressed in one unified hub.
Jira, Zendesk, and Freshdesk stand as popular options when it comes to managing tickets because they allow for seamless integration across multiple channels. Consider Dollar Shave Club, which used Answer Bot within their ticketing system to answer between 12–16% of their queries automatically.
Simple questions didn’t need an agent, and customers received quick, accurate answers through automation. As a result, their dedicated agents could stay focused on more critical customer issues rather than wasting time on some of the most common trouble tickets IT support receives.
Ticketing systems not only improve efficiency but also significantly boost productivity. In fact, 86% of service teams report that implementing a help desk system has improved their productivity.
Your ticketing solution should allow your support staff to quickly view a ticket’s status—the life cycle of a query must be crystal clear to avoid unnecessary delays. Whether a ticket is new, in progress, pending further information, or resolved, ticket status management is critical for keeping teams accountable.
How to Track Support Tickets: Organize Better
Sorting tickets is crucial both for your team’s sanity and your customers’ satisfaction. An incoming ticket that is tagged and categorized properly makes routing, resolving, and closing it much simpler. Most importantly, it ensures that high-priority items—such as a total system failure for a VIP client—get immediate attention.
Prioritizing tickets correctly can reduce backlog and improve resolution times. Does it affect ten users or thousands? Is the customer locked out of the system entirely, or do they just need access to a report? Answering these questions early in the lifecycle of a support request allows faster problem-solving. VIP clients should always take precedence over lower-impact or general inquiries.
Effectively categorizing support tickets also involves noting recurring themes. Are you getting many tickets for password resets, bug fixes, or routine inquiries?
By reviewing tagged tickets, you can determine whether any proactive measures—such as a self-service knowledge base or automated responses—might lessen the ticket volume. Automated password resets, for instance, can single-handedly reduce a massive volume of requests that would otherwise require live agent involvement.
By properly tagging and reviewing tickets, you can identify and implement the necessary self-service features to prevent recurring issues from becoming tickets in the first place.
Automate Repetitive Tasks to Save Time and Reduce Support Tickets
Automation ensures swift and organized ticket management. There’s no reason for support agents to manually route or categorize incoming requests in a high-volume environment. Smart systems can evaluate tickets based on keywords or customer profiles and route them to the relevant departments without human intervention.
Consider enabling automated alerts for overdue tickets or implementing Service Level Agreement (SLA) violation notifications. Teams with well-implemented automation often see a significant drop in resolution times.
Routing is just one area where automation helps, however. Tasks such as sending follow-up reminders or escalating tickets where the issue has persisted for too long are textbook scenarios for automation success.
For example, during ticket surges, critical tickets tend to be buried in a pile unless flagged appropriately by automatic workflows. A system-triggered alert for high-priority cases guards against missed deadlines or SLA breaches. The average cost of handling a self-help ticket is $2.37, compared to $37.52 for walk-up support, illustrating the cost-efficiency of automated solutions.
Automation also allows for more personalization without increasing the workload. 79% of customers believe that getting personalized help and support is more important than receiving personalized marketing messages.
By automating routine processes, agents can focus on complex, high-value tickets that require a human touch, ensuring both efficiency and customer satisfaction. The less manual oversight needed in routine ticket routing, the more time your agents have to deal with complex queries.
No More One-Size-Fits-All Support
A multi-tiered support structure helps your team focus its energy where it’s needed most. Rather than treating every ticket equally, smart IT teams layer support into multiple levels, or “tiers,” where each successive tier deals with progressively more complex issues.
Tier 1 handles basic password resets or troubleshooting, while Tier 2 addresses more advanced technical problems. Tier 3 and Tier 4 may involve specialized experts or engineers devoted to top clients.
Why bother categorizing support this way? To start, it allocates resources more effectively. Tier 1 agents resolve the maximum number of tickets as quickly as possible, freeing up higher-tier specialists to concentrate on complex or time-sensitive issues.
Additionally, this layered structure helps ensure that the right personnel are handling the right tasks—leading to faster resolution times and happier customers. High-performing support teams are 3.4x more likely to report that their agents feel empowered, which is critical for smooth tier-based operations where decision-making and autonomy at each level can streamline workflows.
This approach reduces backlog as lower-tier issues are tackled without clogging the pipeline for more advanced queries. Building out a clear escalation plan ensures smooth transitions between tiers, reducing both redundancy and frustration.
Make Self-Service a Priority
Self-service functionality isn’t just a nice-to-have anymore—it’s expected. 88% of customers reportedly want a company’s website to have a self-service portal. From a support organization perspective, investing in self-service resources pays off through reduced support tickets over time.
By constructing a high-quality knowledge base, organizing FAQs, and developing AI-powered chatbots, you can provide customers with a “help yourself” option. This reduces repetitive requests such as password resets, general troubleshooting, or request-for-information issues.
In fact, 67% of consumers prefer self-service over speaking to a live IT support agent, highlighting the growing demand for independent solutions. A well-maintained self-service suite can deflect hundreds of tickets monthly.
Finalcad’s experience shows how effective this can be: With self-service measures in place and a team of just 35 agents, they were able to handle a monthly volume of 2,500 tickets while maintaining 100% SLA compliance. Additionally, 40% of people who call IT support first look for answers via self-service options, further validating the need to prioritize robust self-help tools.
This strategy also ties back to customer expectations for speed, convenience, and personalization. Customer satisfaction peaks at 84.7% when response times are between 5 to 10 seconds, making AI-powered chatbots and immediate access to FAQs critical to positive experiences.
Customers increasingly prefer finding their own solution over waiting for an agent. By promoting a solid self-service environment, not only will your team’s workload ease, but you’ll also build more satisfied and empowered customers.
Use Agent Training to Drive Excellence
Training is not a one-and-done event. Efficient support ticket handling requires continuous upskilling for both new hires and existing team members. A key part of this training isn’t tied to technical skills alone—familiarity with the company’s chosen ticketing system is equally important.
The more familiar agents are with the tools at their disposal, the quicker they’ll be able to answer support tickets. Training also encompasses soft skills—the ability to handle customer frustration, maintain a calm demeanor, and emphasize a sense of empathy in difficult situations.
84% of customers say that being treated like a person, not a ticket, is essential to winning their business, underscoring the importance of soft skills training for agents.
Collaboration tools enriched with ticket comment logs or shared dashboards create opportunities for teams to work better together. Agents can seamlessly collaborate, with cross-department interaction becoming more fluid.
Even with complex tickets that require multiple team inputs, an agent should never be left wondering what the current status of an issue is or waiting for help from another department.
Additionally, 80% of consumers report that companies often lack context about their previous interactions, further highlighting the need for proper training in utilizing collaborative tools and maintaining a shared knowledge base.
Continuous training ensures agents are not only equipped with the necessary technical knowledge but also empowered to provide empathetic, efficient, and context-aware support.
Benchmark Results and Improve Continuously
Good support ticketing management doesn’t end with closing out tickets. Teams need to look back and identify the areas where things broke down or succeeded. Benchmarking and measuring KPIs, such as the average ticket resolution time, first contact resolution rate, or customer satisfaction scores, serve as a metric for continuous improvement. Most support teams measure their performance through customer satisfaction survey results (48%) and the number of tickets resolved (39%), highlighting the importance of tracking meaningful KPIs to evaluate success.
Look for early signs of bottlenecks or backlogs forming: Are certain types of tickets taking longer than they should? Do specific clients seem to be submitting repeated requests for similar problems? These are areas for continuous refinement.
For instance, downtime can cost industries up to $9,000 per minute, making it critical to identify and address inefficiencies promptly. Even small businesses face downtime costs ranging from $137 to $427 per minute, underscoring the importance of proactive improvements in reducing such risks.
The more organized your ticket handling process is, the better you will perform over time. Historic data informs your approach, demonstrating where improvements are possible. It’s key to not only train your agents to be effective but also to give them the power to make decisions without unnecessary bureaucracy.
Ultimately, the goal is to blend data-driven insights with agent empowerment to deliver seamless, efficient support that meets evolving customer expectations.
Reduce Support Ticket Volume with Proactive Solutions
Proactively addressing problems before they can become a ticket is a powerful strategy for reducing ticket volume. Investing in product stability through regular maintenance, patch updates, or hardware improvements directly impacts customer satisfaction. It’s always better to fix the issue before the customer even notices.
Taking this one step further, hosting webinars and publishing thorough product guides can educate users and reduce the volume of technical queries.
63% of customers start with online resources like knowledge bases or FAQs before reaching out for help, underscoring the value of educational materials in deflecting potential tickets. Here, education-as-prevention serves not just as a support tool but as a way to improve customer relationships and reduce your team’s ticket stress.
In cases where common technical issues persist, further automation of responses can clear significant backlogs. For instance, automating password resets, which are a common source of tickets, dramatically reduces the need for live agent intervention.
By addressing common pain points through automation and education, your team can shift resources to more complex or value-added tasks, reducing ticket volume and enhancing customer satisfaction simultaneously.
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