9 Essential Features of a Good Ticketing System

A good ticketing system forms the backbone of your team's IT support. Not only does it help your support team be more organized, but it also enables them to help your customers faster with a better success rate. At the end of the day, a happy customer is all that matters. But how do you find the ideal ticketing system that works best for your organization? 

Today there is a plethora of tools and software out there that help you manage your tickets effectively. However, there are some common essential features that you should definitely look for when doubling down on a ticketing system for your organization. So in this post, I'll walk you through some of the most essential features of a good ticketing system. 

Quick Ticket Creation

There's no perfect product or software. In fact, the closer you are to a perfect product, the more likely you are to encounter tons of support issues every day. You most certainly need to be able to create a ticket as quickly as you can. 

You could be handling a ridiculously high volume of tickets every day. Hence a good ticketing system should allow you to easily and quickly create a ticket within a matter of seconds. It should only ask you for the essential details, which could be four or five fields at maximum, in the ticket creation form. Then once you're done, it should rapidly create a new ticket so you can focus on the remaining workflow. 

The quicker you're able to create a support ticket, the faster you'll be able to help resolve it as well. 

Integration With Other IT Team Tools

So you can create tickets in the brisk wind. Nice! But what if the ticket creation process requires you to open the ticketing portal software, log in, and trigger creation from that site? It's definitely a hassle. This is why we have readily available integrations! A good ticketing system must integrate well and easily with your favorite IT tools. 

If you're using Slack for communication, you should be able to instantly create a ticket from Slack itself. This not only saves time because now you don't have to hop on and off to another platform but also doesn't block your workflow. In the middle of an important Slack huddle, or directly chatting with a customer and helping them out with something? You can continue doing your work while creating and managing your tickets simultaneously without leaving Slack at all. 

Ticket Categories and Tags

The best way to be more organized with your ticketing system is to know exactly what a ticket represents. You may not always have the time to go through the details in each ticket. Hence another essential feature of a good ticketing system is the ability to let you categorize your tickets based on their statuses and types. 

You should be able to instantly look through your tickets to see which are the ones that have been resolved today. Or you should be able to see the pending tickets and sort them by their priority. Ticket categories will help you skim through your ticket data quickly. This can speed up the time it takes for you to convey something valuable to your team, customer, or stakeholders. 

However, even beyond categories, it's really helpful to be able to assign a custom category or type to a ticket. Most ticketing systems implement this using tags. Tags help you define custom categories for your tickets that are more relevant to the way you operate or the way tickets are generally resolved in your organization. Using custom tags will expedite the process of resolving the tickets by your developers since now they have more information and metadata around the underlying issue for a ticket. 

Workflow Automation

No ticketing system is tailored to fit a specific organization. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't care about making it a tailored fit for you. Your organization could have a number of different workflows that you usually follow based on the details around a ticket. For instance, you may want to automatically update customers in Slack when you update the status of a ticket. Or, you may want to automatically assign tickets to a team or an individual based on its type or category. 

You can easily automate these workflows if your ticketing system lets you. Workflow automation is yet another essential feature of a good ticketing system because it helps you save time for repetitive tasks that can be otherwise automated. It helps you save time and be more efficient. 

Reporting Tools

Automated reporting gives you valuable insight into what your customer wants and how they react to a certain ticket, and it helps you understand your customer better. For instance, your ticketing system could tell you which are the most frequently affected customers, and then you can use that information to mark their future tickets as a priority. Or it can also tell you which area of your software or product is most reported by your customers. This can further help your product team focus more on improving that area of your software. 

Templates

Any external software you use can feel foreign to your users and customers. When your customer reports an issue on a ticketing system that doesn't have any type of brand association with your organization, it can throw them off. They may feel reluctant to use it, or it may not establish trust in your organization. 

Your ticketing system should give you the ability to customize your ticket creation and manage templates. It should basically let you have custom ticket pages that have your brand's logo, your color theme, or maybe even some quick hyperlinks, so they feel just like your product. 

Individual Ticket Queues

Having so many tickets being generated and being worked on can often lead to chaos and a messy situation for your support teams. Ticket queues introduce a more organized structure for multiple people to work on different tickets simultaneously without causing chaos and confusion.

For instance, you could be working on a certain ticket that someone else had already started looking into but had to leave midway due to a more urgent priority. This can lead to redundant work. Having individual ticket queues will help you and your colleagues know who's working on which ticket and what their progress is, and you can use that information to manage and move tickets without causing confusion. 

Ticket Linking

It's not a rare scenario to have two or more tickets that are similar. In fact, you're likely to have multiple tickets that are correlated. They may have a similar category, status, and tags. Or they may be linked in terms of priority or the exact issue around the ticket. Your ticketing system should have a feature where you can link one ticket to another. 

For instance, you can have a ticket as a sub-ticket to another parent ticket. The exact link or relationship between two tickets can be many. However, when you are able to link two or more tickets together, you can analyze the ticket data quickly. You can easily interpret the ticket requests, inform customers about them, and even help your developers understand and resolve the tickets faster. 

Priority Views

Looking at your tickets and arriving at conclusions shouldn't be any harder than it needs to be. A good ticketing system should allow you to filter and sort your tickets quickly based on priority. This could be simply displaying the tickets that you have marked as important in a single glance. Or you should be able to view tickets that have been overdue for a specified period of time. This can help you resolve the tickets faster since you know exactly which tickets need more priority. It can also give you a real sense of how holistically you're approaching solving these tickets. 

Wrangle Is a Better Solution Than the Rest

We've seen the most common features a ticketing system should have. Some of the most popular ticketing systems that satisfy most of the essential features are Jira, Freshdesk, Zendesk, and Zoho Desk. However, Wrangle integrates right into your Slack and allows you to create tickets within seconds. You can directly create a ticket in any Slack message. You can also update the progress of your tickets, set custom tags and categories, and view them based on priority on your Wrangle dashboard. 

You can transform your Slack into an advanced IT help desk and ticketing platform, allowing you to:

• Turn any Slack message into a ticket
• Instantly allow users to see the status of a ticket
• Gather all the issue context with an intake form
• Automatically assign tickets to the right agent
• Automate reminders to keep agents moving
• Provide reporting to uncover bottlenecks

Further, Wrangle also lets you automate custom workflows in your ticketing system. Check it out today. You can also book a personalized tour with a member of our team.  

‍This post was written by Siddhant Varma. Siddhant is a full-stack JavaScript developer with expertise in front-end engineering. He’s worked with scaling multiple startups in India and has experience building products in the Ed-Tech and healthcare industries. Siddhant has a passion for teaching and a knack for writing. He's also taught programming to many graduates, helping them become better future developers.