Last Updated on June 29, 2024 by Rovamedia
According to the CDC, Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a new virus. The disease causes respiratory illness (like the flu) with symptoms such as a cough, fever, and in more severe cases, difficulty breathing. It has gone far, by disrupting numerous businesses across the globe.
As you must know, numerous businesses are relying heavily on the infrastructure of the internet. However, with increasing demand in bandwidth and faster response demanded by customers from their various services providers ranging from eCommerce, eLearning, Fintech, and even more, this period is surely a time of pilling requests from customers to help fix their worries.
To be best prepared to handle this, your business must have a customer support ticketing system to best utilize the efficiency of what I am detailing in this article. That being said, let’s dive in.
Customer Support Ticketing System
A ticketing system is a management tool that processes and catalogs customer service requests. Tickets, also known as cases or issues, need to be properly stored alongside relevant user information. The ticketing system is also one that is designed to be user-friendly for customer service representatives, managers, and administrators.
In a previous Rova Media Digital article, there was an explanation of what we learned from the customer service week. A lot was emphasized on making sure the customer was given prime customer support at all times. As a business entity or even an SME, it’s important to constantly identify ways to improve service and products that will best benefit the customer. These ways must be innovative. You can use surveys and other data collection tools to access the mindset of the customers.
This will help your business to prioritize its mindset in providing more value that will best sustain the customers ‘ core needs. Businesses that do not identify ways to improve their products or services for their customers have a downside in ROI. Customers want and need to know that your business values them from all angles and this includes decision-making that affects them. This could be in the form of reducing pricing, adding more purpose value to your services, complaint response, and more.
So how can a business handle the ticket support overload in this time of Coronavirus global pandemic?
Steps to Handle Ticket Support Overload
The steps any business would take to handle ticket support overload during this period include:
- More Virtual Customer Support Team: Faster response time and efficiency will lead to customer retention as you know. If you don’t train your people well, though, they’ll create bad habits and unintentionally sabotage your customer retention program. When you create a little team of customer support to handle queries, it will backfire. As remote is now the new oil, hire a virtual customer support team across the globe or you’re local to tackle the overload.
- Have a System in Place: Many businesses have no idea about what a customer service ticketing system looks or even works like. If your business does not have any developed systems in place, you’ll be more than stress-lagged. Your business will suffer, why? Because you’ll receive dozens of emails that you’ll lose track of when, how, and who to actually respond to. Replying to emails on the queue will send you back to the critical moment of you setting up your business. If you don’t have a system for tracking customer service ticketing, you can send us a query by contacting us.
- Understand Your Customers’ Problems: Even if you have the most wonderful product in the world, you probably won’t sell many if you don’t know what problems it solves. More importantly, you need to know which consumers have serious problems that’ll need ticketing. Not all problems really require a ticket. However, if your customers have problems with your product or service, make sure your support team understands completely the customer’s problem. This means they must understand fully your business product and services. This is why you must hire the right professional team with an advanced mindset.
- Activate the Superusers. Enlist some great business users of your project and bring them in during this period to handle and tackle customer-related issues. This works for the folks at Rova Media Digital of which I am part. Even though I founded Rova Media Digital and was a one time CEO, I am still part of the superuser community. What we do is basically respond to users that have issues with our services, using our experience too. Think of it as Stack-overflow or Reddit but in this case, it’s your business community of soldiers ready to battle for you. Oh, did I forget to mention that superusers are paid too, to handle queries?
- Scale and Improvise: To best manage the influx of users waiting to get their query answered by your team (especially little or big teams), help yourself and your business for the benefit of your mental health. You can prior to this moment of query overload put out knowledge-base articles and FAQs on your company business website. That way, users who are query fall into this section can be easily referred to those sections of your website. This way, more critical aspect of queries by customers are sent to the team who handle them. Thus, saving your business resources and time.
Conclusion
These are desperate and critical times. I do believe the world will pull out of this pandemic. While we obey the instructions given out by the WHO, CDC, NCDC, and others, using the above is certain to boost your productivity in this harsh time.
