Ticket Triage: Process and Best Practices for Faster Resolution
Master the art of ticket triage! This in-depth guide breaks down steps, tools, and solutions to help your team be more productive.
Serving customers effectively and efficiently is the best way to retain their business. Salesforce found that 88% of customers are more likely to make repeat purchases if they receive good customer service. Of all participants in this survey, four-fifths (80%) stated that customer service is as important as a company’s products or services.
The driving force behind good customer service is effective ticket management, and at the core of that is ticket triage. Getting the right ticket to the right operator to ensure a speedy and satisfactory resolution is key to building trust with your clients. However, it takes planning to perfect the ideal triage process.
This article explores what ticket triage is and how the process should work. It also offers examples of best practices and solutions for utilizing pre-built workflows to automate the process. Moving tickets to the agent who is most qualified to handle them can be more streamlined. Let’s find out how.
What is ticket triage?
Ticket triage is the process of evaluating and prioritizing incoming support tickets to ensure that you assign them to the appropriate team member. This allows the agent to address the ticket efficiently and resolve it on time.
The triage process involves assessing customer support tickets’ urgency, impact, and complexity. With this in mind, you can correctly tag the ticket and assign it to the optimal agent or team in your ticketing system. This makes the workflow more efficient, improving response times and resolution rates.
This can take place in any type of ticketing system used by businesses. Whether you receive tickets by email, phone, or through a communication app like Slack, you need to have a triage process to assess the issue before assigning tickets.
Types of tickets and their triage requirements
Your support desk can manage a wide range of different types of tickets on a daily basis that will require a different level of prioritization. Each ticket has to be tagged accordingly and passed on to the relevant stakeholder to speed up the customer service process. This table gives an example of the decisions that the person or team involved in ticket triage might have to make to optimize the workflow.
The ticket triage process
- Log the ticket as it comes in from the stakeholder. Auto-tagging helps you automatically assign the type of issue that the customer has raised using keywords in the ticket. Your tags might be used to illustrate the type of user creating the ticket, the category of issue, the product or service to which it relates, and the status of the ticket. The tags you apply to your tickets depend on your workflows and the information that is most important for your internal ticket management process.
- Prioritize the ticket accordingly, depending on how urgent it is. This will help you work out in which order you need to address them and the time frame in which they need to be resolved.
- Based on these tags, categories, and priorities, route the queries through to the relevant team. It might be that the problem requires specialist knowledge from a dedicated team or should be handled by someone with a certain level of seniority for resolution.
- Apply automation to deal with common issues. Many of the tickets that customers create will apply to situations that arise on a regular basis. In these cases, you can use canned replies that offer the best advice, with the wording pre-approved by the relevant department. You can allow the message to be sent straight away or let customer support agents customize it for the specific situation and then send it. Another option is to send links to your knowledge base so that users can find in-depth answers. Be sure to review these resources every so often to ensure that they provide the most helpful information.
- Escalate tickets if they remain unresolved towards the end of the period outlined under the service level agreement (SLA). You should automate reminders to escalate these tickets to ensure they are resolved within the designated period. Monitoring tickets throughout the ticket triage process using the status tag allows you to manage them more effectively and efficiently, in-line with customer expectations.
- Close and review resolved tickets. Set the status to “resolved” and ensure that you archive them to help your review process. This enables you to understand how you can improve your workflow in the future.
Ticket triage example
1. Ticket submission
The customer contacts customer support through Slack. The query is about problems integrating a software solution with the customer’s existing business infrastructure. Your connected external ticketing platform, Wrangle, automatically prompts her for relevant details with a custom form within Slack. This way you gather crucial information that will help you resolve the case much faster.
2. Assign or deflect with automation
The Wrangle platform within Slack acts as an initial triage process. Based on your settings and pre-set workflows, it will auto-tag your ticket, assign the correct agent, or use AI to deflect the ticket. The system will provide a comprehensive answer if the relevant information is located in the company knowledge base. However, this issue requires additional help from your team.
3. Assessment and tagging
The company triage specialist assesses the ticket and adds more tags with relevant information. He categorizes the Slack message as an integration issue, with high priority, as it affects the user’s ability to complete an important task. It is also tagged with high urgency, reflecting the need to find a solution quickly so the user can access the software and start using it.
4. Assigning the ticket
The specialist seeks out the right team to deal with this kind of problem. In this case, it is a Tier 2 technician with expertise in integrating solutions. He finds a free agent with that status and assigns the case to them.
5. Ticket status
The customer can see the status of the ticket within the Slack conversation, so is aware that it has been assigned and the technician is dealing with it.
6. Communication with the customer
The Tier 2 agent contacts the customer through Wrangle. To the customer, this is still just a regular Slack chat. The agent asks for additional information before attempting the fix.
7. Troubleshooting
The agent analyzes the information about the problem and discusses it with his colleagues before formulating a resolution.
8. Resolution
The agent carries out the necessary fix for the client.
9. Ticket update and closure
The agent updates the ticket with the issue identified and the steps taken to resolve it. The software notifies the user that the problem is solved and the agent tags the status of the ticket as resolved.
Ticket triage best practices
- Make sure that your ticket categorization criteria are clear and that all internal stakeholders understand what process each tag instigates within the customer service workflow. This allows for a consistent approach to ticket triage across all customer support agents.
- A defined ticket priority matrix helps you to work out which tickets are most important and urgent. This informs the outcome of your service desk ticket triage, prioritizing the most impactful and urgent issues, and deprioritizing those that are less time-sensitive and will make minimal impact.
- Using automation tools and AI during the triage process helps to make the process of dealing with incoming tickets more efficient. This is especially helpful when customer support teams are overwhelmed with huge volumes of tickets and the inevitable backlogs. AI can automatically deflect tickets that are easy to answer by giving the user access to the knowledge base, for example. This element of ticket triage saves time for your team and ensures the customer gets their response as soon as possible.
- Analyze performance metrics to understand how effective your ticket management process is. Set key performance indicators (KPIs) and measure how well you perform against them. This will help you determine whether you need to adjust your approach to the triage process.
FAQ
What is the role of human judgment in triage decisions?
Human judgment is helpful in triage decisions to interpret the nuances and complexities that automated systems may not recognize. Having human oversight to accompany the work of the automation can help prioritize tickets accordingly.
How can we reduce ticket triage time?
You can reduce ticket triage time by using AI and automation tools, predefined categorization rules, and efficient workflows to quickly assess and route tickets.
How can you create triage guidelines for complex issues?
Experienced team members can help define criteria, workflows, and escalation procedures that address various complexities in your triage process.
How do I select the best tool for intelligent ticket triaging?
Select the best tool for intelligent ticket triaging by evaluating solutions that offer the AI capabilities that work for your particular workflow. It should integrate with your existing systems and provide customization options to allow you to adapt it for your specific purposes.
Can you triage a ticket over the phone?
You can triage a ticket over the phone by gathering necessary information from the caller, assessing the issue, and prioritizing and assigning it accordingly.
Conclusion
Ticket triage is an important element of ticket management, allowing you to find the agent who is best positioned to resolve an issue quickly and effectively. By setting the right criteria for your ticket tags and understanding the urgency and potential impact of the problem, you can resolve more tickets with less back and forth.
To streamline communication even more, try Wrangle’s Slack ticketing solution that allows you to triage your tickets directly within the most-used chat app. Here is how Wrangle helps:
- Efficient ticket triage. Manage tickets directly in Slack, keeping all your conversations in one place.
- AI-powered responses: Wrangle’s AI taps into your knowledge base to handle common questions, freeing up your team for more urgent issues.
- Customizable tagging: Easily tag and assign tickets to the right team members based on criteria you define.
- Seamless Slack integration: Keep workflows within Slack, allowing staff to stay in the tool they use every day.
Try Wrangle to streamline your support process within Slack. Request a demo or add it to your workspace today.
References and further reading
- How to design a ticketing system process
- External customer ticketing
- Study: The growing importance of customer-centric support services for improving customer experience
- Book: Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences
- Guide to internal ticketing systems
- Try Wrangle free for 14 days
- Turn messages into trackable tickets
- Build a scalable help desk
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