Introduction

It is probably impossible to run a successful business if there is no strategy for handling a lot of support tickets. It is not normal if the company is overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tickets all the time. If you are innovating, you will be having problems and without innovation companies cannot foster growth.

There are various different strategies one can apply to reduce IT Support Tickets. You can reduce the number of IT support tickets you get. The methods are evolving over time and it will continue to evolve as we roll into data world to reduce IT support tickets and technology debt.

What are the main reasons to reduce support tickets?

There are many reasons for reducing the volume of support tickets, including:

• Business Growth. 

It helps streamline a lot of problems by building a community and reducing the support debt long term has great benefits for business growth, if you have 10 similar issues and they can be solved by a chatbot or online community that significantly helps fuel business growth.

• Increased ROI

The cost to handle a support ticket on an average is $1.60/minute and can cost as much as $96 per hour. Overhead is reduced and profit margins are increased by decreasing the volume of support tickets. Just eliminating 10 hours of support ticket each day processing equates to $50,000 in annual saving. An AI project that I worked on had an ROI of 3 years of support staff, which we reduced from 2 to 1. Reference: https://www.ghdsi.com/blog/evaluate-reduce-it-service-desk-cost-per-ticket

• Reduced Stress

The more tickets a team has, the more stress and pressure they feel. Unfortunately, these tickets tend to get backed up, creating an endless log of issues you have to face. This kind of stress can lead to burnout and cause turnover and cultural instability within the organisation.

• Improve customer satisfaction.

Most importantly, without a customer there is no organisation. A support ticket indicates an issue that a customer is experiencing. Reducing the volume of support tickets means reducing the number of issues they have. Naturally, this means better customer satisfaction and better end-user satisfaction.

It may seem like a small thing, but reducing the volume of support tickets can fundamentally change the dynamics of your business – both financially and practically.

What are 5 Strategies to Reduce IT Support Tickets?

Here are five of our favourite strategies that you can deploy to reduce IT Support Tickets.

BONUS: Use Machine learning to streamline and reduce IT Support Tickets

Get all the text into one place (create word clouds in BI dashboard) and also use that information to figure out common themes using K-Means clustering — cluster issues of customers and bucketing them to solve those support tickets. You can also use call trackers and get speech to text.

If you are using Twilio, you can use the text to speech and figure out what the customers are talking about and based on that you can use that to understand common themes. Expedia figured out cost savings of 1.5 million dollars a year by understanding itinerary was the most common issue by using this methodology. 

 I used calltracker.to in the past but you can easily link it with Twilio directly to a cloud technology like GCP or AWS, they have many tutorials to link Twilio. 

This will allow you to better understand customer issues in more detail and understand which issues are happening more that need more support and which creates more support tickets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv2M2sXxp-0 

Use power of data to reduce IT support tickets

It is important to understand what are some of the most common issues that customers are facing and understanding what are common themes. Firstly creating self serving BI tool using Tableau/PowerBI can be very effective in identifying some of most common sources of issues. Knowing which type of customer (Demographics, Device Types, Geographical location) are having most issues. Identifying that alone can save a lot of time and can put in perspective of what are most common places of issues. You can look at how BI self serve is becoming useful using this article to understand what triggers those IT support tickets:

https://www.datatabloid.com/redefining-the-role-of-it-in-a-modern-bi-world/

One can also use call trackers and get speech to text, if you are using Twilio, you can use the logs and figure out what the customers were talking about.

Get all the text into one place (create word clouds in BI dashboard) and also use that information to figure out common themes using K-Means clustering – cluster issues of customers and bucketing them to solve those support tickets.

This will allow you to better understand customer issues in more detail and understand which issues are happening more that need more support and which creates more support tickets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv2M2sXxp-0

Improve your onboarding process as a strategy for IT support

Improve your process and you can do yourself a lot of good. If you want your product to work, you need to educate your customers on what they need to do to use it. 

If you want to know how to use the product, put a QR code on the packaging. Software assistants and intelligent prompts can be included for virtual products to reduce IT support ticket

Either way, the goal is to get the customer familiar with the product so they don’t have to ask obvious questions that slow down the support staff.

Create self-service support options to reduce IT support tickets

As good as you can provide. There are many different forms of these, including guides, videos, FAQ and automated Chatbots which guide them to the right solution.

An IVR solution from a vendor like Twilio can also be a cost effective solution which is very easy to build and can have major savings and help in reduction in IT support tickets.

The more support you can provide via self-service routes, the less pressure your team will have to manually support customers. Customers like to solve their own problems. Being able to do that makes them happy and makes them feel competent.

Automation to reduce IT support tickets

Using DevOps principles can help with IT support tickets and following certain process can fast track it. IT Help Desk can be used to automate and streamline a lot of support processes. You can easily route support tickets to the right people and collect data for continuous process improvement to reduce those IT support tickets.

A comprehensive platform that makes it easy for your team to collaborate in real time is what you will look for when shopping for IT Help Desk solutions. A single portal that can handle all your IT support tickets is what you want.

The quicker your team can act, the less you have to think. It’s better for everyone.

Develop an online community

There are many reasons to create online communities, such as Facebook groups and message boards, but there are so so many hidden benefits. 

These communities not only create great brand loyalty but also help foster camaraderie. It acts as a IT support ticket solver and serves as portals for peer support and help. The online community allows customers to help each other. A prime example of this is Parallel desktop who use their forums very efficiently and effectively, they are SEO optimised and pick up common themes and issue searched in Google for their products.

It reduces number of IT support tickets and people can search via google to figure out most people have already responded there. 

Customers ask questions and other customers provide answers. Some of the pressure on the team to provide all support may be lessened by this (and reduce the volume of support tickets).

Summary

Customer service, employee engagement, and profitability are all related to support tickets, which seem like a small part of your business.

Optimising business performance to reduce the volume of IT support tickets can produce positive results in each of these areas and will have a very positive outcome on net ROI of the business.