Ticket Management Systems: Maximising Their Effectiveness Through Surveys And Metrics

When it comes to your business and managing the effectiveness and success of your service delivery, your ticket management system is central to everything you do. So, if you’re to optimise your operations and improve customer satisfaction, you need to ensure your ticket management system is performing as well as it can be.

Yet, how can you measure this performance?

Well, that requires ongoing feedback from your customers with surveys, which we will go on to look at later in this piece. However, before we do that, we need to provide a bit more detail about ticket management systems and why they’re important.

Why it’s important to measure the success of a ticket management system

Given its ability to influence the overall efficiency, productivity and customer satisfaction within an organisation, the ability to measure the success of a Ticket Management System (TMS) is vital for number of reasons including:

Evaluating efficiency

A well-functioning TMS should help streamline workflows, minimise response times and efficiently manage the resolution process. Therefore, the ability to measure this success can indicate how effectively a system is working and if it’s contributing to improved efficiency.

Helping to ensure customer satisfaction

The key aim of a TMS is to ensure customer issues are addressed as quickly and effectively as possible. You can gauge the system’s impact on customer experience by measuring customer satisfaction ratings and response times.

Pinpointing bottlenecks

Through the introduction and tracking of metrics such as ticket resolution times and backlogs, you can more easily identify any bottlenecks or issues in your TMS process.

For example, if you’re experiencing a consistently high-ticket backlog, it may indicate problems such as understaffing or issues with your ticket assignment process.

Enabling continuous improvement

If you’re regularly measuring the performance of your TMS, you’re more likely to achieve continuous improvement. This is because when you know what’s working and what isn’t, you’re more able to make adjustments to improve that system.

Guiding training and development

When you’re better able to assess your system’s performance, it’s easier to identify areas where your staff may need additional training. For instance, if tickets in a certain category are taking longer to resolve, that could indicate a need for more training in a specific area such as learning particular technical skills.

Justifying investment

Given that a TMS often requires significant investment, both in the system itself and the staff needed to manage it, if you can demonstrate your system’s success, it's easier to justify the investment in it to your stakeholders.

Without measuring the effectiveness of its ticket management system, a company might continue to use an ineffective TMS, which could potentially damage customer satisfaction and lead to the waste of valuable resources. By contrast ongoing evaluation of a TMS, helps to ensure an organisation can continue to meet its needs by closing the loop on customer feedback and contributing to its ongoing success.

Key metrics to help measure the success of the ticket management system

It’s possible to track the performance of your Ticket Management System (TMS) and the efficiency and effectiveness of that system with the following key performance indicators (KPIs):

Resolution time

This metric is concerned with the average time it takes for a ticket to be resolved after it’s been created.

The lower your resolution time, the quicker and more efficiently your team manages tickets and resolves customer issues, leading to higher customer satisfaction levels.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Following the resolution of a ticket, customers are typically asked to rate their satisfaction with the resolution process. This score can provide a valuable insight into how well your TMS is working from your customer’s point of view.

Ticket backlog

This metric is concerned with the number of unresolved tickets at any given time. Consequently, a consistently high-ticket backlog could indicate problems with your TMS, such as understaffing or inefficient processes.

First contact resolution rate

Here the focus is on the percentage of tickets resolved during the first interaction with a customer. A higher rate generally indicates that your team can quickly understand and resolve customer issues, reducing the need for follow-ups.

Agent performance metrics

This involves various metrics related to the individuals handling the tickets, such as the number of tickets resolved per agent, the average resolution time per agent, and the individual CSAT scores. These metrics can help identify high-performing agents and areas where additional training may be required.

Through regularly monitoring these sorts of metrics, organisations can get a better measure about the performance of their TMS and make data-driven decisions to improve its effectiveness.

Remember the wider goal is to keep a closer check on these numbers. It’s also about better understanding what they mean and how improving them can lead to better customer service and, ultimately, a more successful business.

Further tips to consider when measuring the success of a ticket management system

Some additional areas you need to think about when trying to evaluate the success of your ticket management system include:

Monitoring your Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance

You might want to check how often your team meets your stated SLAs, as high compliance rates show that your TMS is effective at delivering on your promises.

Tracking ticket reopen rates

To assess the performance of your TMS and your service teams, it’s useful to know what percentage of tickets need reopening after they’ve been resolved. A lower rate is generally better, as it suggests issues are being thoroughly resolved the first time around.

Assessing root causes of service issues

Analysing your types and categories of tickets, can help you to identify common issues or trends. This can provide useful insights into any larger issues that need to be addressed.

Checking escalation rates

Another useful measurement is to review how often tickets need to be escalated to higher support tiers or management. If you have low escalation rates, it can signify that your team is well-equipped to handle most issues, indicating an effective TMS.

Monitoring self-service usage

If your TMS includes a self-service portal area, consider tracking how often customers use it to resolve their own issues. If you discover a growing number of customers are self-serving in this way and returning to this portal whenever they have an issue, it’s likely that you have an effective knowledge base, which customers are using to locate the help they need without contacting your team.

By keeping an eye on these and earlier metrics, you can better understand your TMS’s effectiveness and continually make improvements to optimise your ticket resolution process.

How SmartSurvey survey software can help

Through our range of surveys, metrics, features and tools SmartSurvey survey software can play a key role in helping to maintain the performance of your ticket management system. Here’s how:

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

After resolving a ticket, you can use the SmartSurvey software to create and send a customer satisfaction survey to your customers.

Besides asking questions about their satisfaction with your products and services, or any support you’ve provided, you can also include questions that will provide you with insight into their experiences with your ticket management system.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Sometimes you just want to check in quickly to gauge overall levels of customer satisfaction with the service you’re providing.

This is where a question such as that used with the CSAT metric can provide you with a quick useful measure.

Based on the following CSAT question:

"How satisfied were you with your latest service experience?"

Respondents are asked to rate their satisfaction with what they’ve been asked using a scale of 1 – 5, where 1 represents being “very dissatisfied” and 5 “very satisfied”.

You can then calculate your CSAT score by adding up all the responses where you’ve been given a 4 or 5 rating and dividing these by your total number of responses. The resulting figure is then multiplied by 100 to give you a CSAT percentage, where scores closest to 100% indicate the highest levels of satisfaction, and those closer to zero the lowest satisfaction levels.

With SmartSurvey, you can also find a quicker and more convenient way of measuring your customer satisfaction levels with our handy CSAT calculator.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

You could also choose to track and measure your customer’s loyalty using the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) survey metric.

When implemented with your TMS, ongoing measurement of your NPS, can help you to check on how the quality of your service may be impacting your customers’ loyalty towards your business.

The NPS metric is based on asking your customers the following question:

"On a scale of 0-10, how likely is it that you would recommend our company/service to a friend, family member or colleague?" (on a scale where 0 represents not likely and 10 very likely)

Following this you would group your responses based on the following classifications:

• Promoters (Score: 9-10): your best customers, who are advocates for your brand, returning often to buy again and referring their friends and family to you.
• Passives (Score: 7-8): customers in this group are not particularly satisfied or unsatisfied. However, they’re unlikely to have much loyalty towards your brand. So, if they find a better deal somewhere else, they're likely to take it.
• Detractors (Score: 0-6): these customers are generally unhappy and may harm your brand by writing negative reviews about you.

To calculate your NPS score simply subtract your number of detractors from your number of promoters.

You’ll then be left with a positive or negative number, which you will need to divide by your total number of survey responses and then multiply by 100. This will leave you with a number between 100 and –100, where the higher your score the greater its desirability.

Once again, there is a simpler and more convenient way of working out this figure by using our NPS calculator.

Automation

Through the APIs, web hooks and other integration tools that are available with our Enterprise price plan, it’s possible to set up automated workflows that make your operations more efficient.

Consequently, when it comes to your ticket management system, you could use these tools to trigger feedback surveys after every ticket closure. That way you’re always maximising your opportunity to gain feedback following every service interaction you have with a customer.

Omni-channel feedback collection

From email, web and SMS to distribution via social media, offline mode and more. With SmartSurvey you have a wide range of distribution options available to you, to help you capture a wide range of customer opinions.

If you can also integrate your TMS with your SmartSurvey software, it will help you to collect, manage and analyse customer feedback more effectively, providing crucial data to measure and improve the performance of your ticket management system.

Concluding thoughts

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this blog. And if you’ve already got a ticket management system in place, it’s given you a few additional ideas about how to maximise its success.

Ultimately, the most important thing to remember, is that if you’re to improve your ticket management performance and levels of customer satisfaction, you need to be able to identify and measure how your customers are feeling. Without this, you won’t know what it is you need to improve.

The best way to achieve this is to collect ongoing customer feedback through surveys and metrics. If you can do this, you’ll be well on the way to achieving the levels of customer satisfaction that you would like to see.