In 2020, Freshdesk (ticketing system) observed an average of 1st response time to internal tickets of more than 24 hours.
In a world of immediacy, this result is far too long to meet the satisfaction and quality expectations of your business staff.
If agility and efficiency are imperatives for business, the processing speed of user tickets is becoming a major challenge.
A resolution time of more than a day for a user ticket can have harmful consequences on productivity, employee satisfaction and the company’s overall performance.
So why do some organisations struggle to solve tickets in a reasonable amount of time?
1. Inefficient priority management
One of the main reasons why tickets take longer than a day to be solved is ineffective priority management.
In many companies, tickets are processed in the order that they are received, without considering their criticality or the impact they may have on business processes. This lack of prioritisation prevents support teams from concentrating on the most urgent incidents, leading to delays in solving critical tickets.
Low-priority tickets, which do not require an immediate attention, can therefore be handled at the same time as blocking issues, slowing down the whole workflow. This lack of prioritisation of requests is often the result of an outdated or poorly configured ticket management system, which does not differentiate between minor incidents and emergencies.
This path is especially important to watch out because, in the eyes of the user, every problem is “URGENT”. Support may therefore have to waste time reading and re-prioritising each ticket.
2. A lack of automation in ticket resolution
The lack of automation is another factor that slows down the processing of ticket resolution. In many companies, support teams manually manage every stage of the resolution process: analysing the problem, identifying the solution, contacting the user and resolving. This manual process is not only time-consuming, but it also increases the risk of errors or delays.
The lack of automation also means that recurring tickets or simple issues, which could be resolved quickly, take as long as complex incidents to process. Without automation, it becomes difficult to handle a large volume of tickets, and the slightest anomaly can clog up the support team for several days.
3. An overloaded support team
Support teams are often overwhelmed by the high volume of tickets to be processed, which inevitably leads to longer response and resolution times. When support teams are understaffed or under-equipped, they struggle to keep up the pace and respond efficiently to all requests. This overload is generally exacerbated by the absence of clear processes for managing the flow of tickets, or by the absence of delegation of repetitive tasks to automated systems.
Furthermore, without a powerful tool to manage and prioritise tickets, support teams can spend more time sorting requests than resolving them. This lack of efficiency slows down the ticket processing and creates a backlog of tasks, making it impossible to resolve problems quickly.
4. Incorrect routing of tickets
Another reason why support teams are overloaded by a lack of automation is that your ticketing system may not be able to route requests to the right person.
Often, by the absence of a features allowing, for example, the selection of a category linked to the request when a ticket is created, and therefore to diversify the reception addresses on the support side.
Indeed, generic support mailboxes do not allow this initial sorting.
This results in a delay in the response time required to transfer the ticket to the right department. But it also forces users to repeat themselves to each person they speak to, which is not very satisfactory.
5. Insufficient ticket qualification
The penultimate reason for a lengthy delay in the resolution of a ticket: the lack of qualification of the tickets received. There are several reasons for this.
First of all, your users don’t necessarily know what information your support needs to answer their questions: URL of the screen they are on, their role in the company, data entered when carrying out the process, etc.
As a result, you generally receive the message “it doesn’t work”, without knowing what should work, where, or in which context. This leads to a lot of back-and-forth qualification work that could have been avoided, lengthening the delay.
Some users don’t want to write a request. Because they’re afraid to contact the IT team, or because they’d prefer to be able to call someone directly to explain their problem and resolve it in a minute.
6. Missing knowledge base
Finally, the last reason explaining a lengthy resolution delay, is the absence of a knowledge base in your business application.
Have you listed the answers to the already asked questions? If so, in a PDF manual (or worst, on paper)? Is it easy for users to find their way through? Are the screenshots updated? Are the instructions adapted to the context and profile of each employee?
In fact, a knowledge base containing contextual help and answers to already known problems by the support, enables users to self-help without even needing to create a ticket!
Some market solutions even offer to capitalise on the responses made by support to users, by automating their creation and distribution to the right places in the tool.
To conclude:
A ticket resolution time of more than 24 hours is often the result of a combination of factors: an insufficient qualification of requests, a lack of automation and ineffective priority management.
These problems can slow down a company’s reactivity and affect its overall productivity.
Of course, these 6 reasons do not necessarily apply to you, but they are ideas that can give you food for thought about your practices and your support strategy.
👉 To go further into this, discover our 14 secrets to solve a ticket in less than 1 hour
Do you recognise yourself in these practices? Don’t panic! We have developed a solution to deal with these issues.
The Smart Ticketing solution:
To solve these problems, it is essential to rethink ticket management by adopting modern solutions such as Smart Ticketing.
This ticket management system enables to:
- Simplify the support contact process by guiding users in reporting problems,
- Prioritise requests effectively by automatically redirecting requests to the right place according to the category selected.
- Accelerate problem resolution by guaranteeing the qualification of tickets received by the support (screenshot and contextual information collected by our algorithm, for example)
- Improve user experience and satisfaction by providing a human response in the shape of a real-time discussion
- Reduce operational bottlenecks by encouraging users to self-help thanks to a self-service knowledge base, which provides users with automatic suggested solutions.
- Industrialise and simplify ticket management via an integrated and intuitive back office
By delegating simple requests to an intelligent solution, your teams can concentrate on complex tickets, reducing overload and improving resolution speed.
If you want to discover how Smart Ticketing can help you improve your ticket resolution times, contact us right now for a demo.
