Conversational ticketing is the future of internal support

It humanizes support

The conversational nature of Slack and Teams humanizes the support process, leaving employees more satisfied. In fact, research tells us that the customer service channels with the highest satisfaction ratings are chat and voice.

It speeds up time to resolution

The easy back-and-forth and real-time nature of chat means faster ticket resolution—and the more complex the request, the more time you’re likely to save. After all, if you have to propose three solutions before you a find a fix, in a chat setup, the employee can try those solutions and get back to you in real time. With email, both the support agent and employee are often waiting for hours (or even days) in between responses. 

Slack itself cut its ticketing time by more than half with conversational ticketing powered by Jira Service Management chat. And social fitness network Strava blew even that number out of the water, improving ticket response times by 90%.

It merges the best of automation and human support

When we say conversational ticketing, we’re largely talking about one-to-one human support in real time on a chat platform. But the best conversational ticketing systems also integrate your knowledge base, using AI to answer common questions without bringing a support agent into the mix.

Because the truth is that not every support request requires an agent. 43% of employees actually prefer self-service support when it comes to IT tasks. And the more tickets employees can resolve themselves, the less workload on the shoulders of your IT team (and the faster your times to resolution).

It saves the business money

Live chat saves 50% compared to other support methods, according to one report. That number makes a lot of sense when you look at success stories like Slack and Strava. If you’re cutting resolution times by half or more, you’re probably also saving agent time. And time, as we all know, is money.

Keeping track of a fast-moving feed of requests

Chat moves fast. That’s part of the appeal—and a source of risk. Because what happens when you add hundreds of support requests into a quick-moving Slack or Teams feed? The answer is that it’s easy for some to get missed, to fall into what we not-so-affectionately call the black hole of chat. 

For conversational support to be effective, you’ll need a way to tag and track each individual support request—and fast.

Tracking key metrics

How do you know if your support team is meeting its goals? The answer is (obviously) that you track them. Which can be a challenge in Slack or Teams, which aren’t built to open and close tickets, track time to resolution, or archive threads for later reference. 

This means that providing conversational support with an out-of-the-box version of Slack or Teams either requires your support team to guess at its metrics or asks them to put in a lot of additional labor, hand-creating tickets in your ticketing system to mirror their chat interactions.

Keep it simple

Internal support teams are already worked to the bone, fielding an average of 500 support tickets per month, according to one study. Which means anything that feels like it’ll add work to their already-full plates is going to be an uphill battle.

If you want support teams to get on board with conversational ticketing, it needs to save them time and reduce complexity.  This means no asking them to provide chat support and manually create tickets for every tiny fix. It means no duplicate work. It means systems should be simple and intuitive from day one.

Which is why the best practice is to choose a tool that automates ticket creation directly in Slack or Teams and syncs that ticket with your existing ticketing system, automatically tracking replies, ticket closes, and re-opens.

The key here is that conversational ticketing should make life simpler for employees and support teams.

Keep it organized

The bigger your company, the easier it is to lose track of all the requests streaming through chat—which is why organization should be top-of-mind when choosing a tool and setting up your chat support. Every new request should automatically become a thread in your chat tool and every thread should sync with your ticketing system so that you never lose track of a request.

Archive data

If you’re like most support pros, you have KPIs to track and goals to hit. Number of tickets resolved. Time to resolution. Time to acknowledgement. Customer satisfaction. Whatever metrics your business hangs its hat on, you’ll want to choose a system that not only syncs with your ticketing tool, but also archives and tracks your success as you resolve tickets within the chat, giving you an accurate picture of your team’s metrics.

Ticket data should seamlessly flow in both directions

Having Slack and Teams sync with your ticketing system is the only way to keep things simple, organized, and trackable—and one-directional syncing isn’t enough. Actions taken by the support team inside your ticketing tool should also sync in the other direction, providing comments, screenshots, ticket closes, and/or customer satisfaction surveys in Slack or Teams when agents take those actions in a tool like Jira Service Management.

This makes everyone’s lives easier, giving you a full record of the request and resolution no matter which channel you’re in. Not to mention that high performing companies are twice as likely to take an omnichannel approach to support. And the more channels you’re supporting, the more important it is to make sure everything is in sync.

Offer self-service for common issues

Self-service often means faster resolution for the end user and more time freed up for support teams. Not to mention that nearly half of employees want to DIY their IT fixes. Which is why conversational ticketing shouldn’t ignore your knowledge base. Instead, choose a system that lets you tag common issues and automate responses, giving users the option of self-support before they loop in an agent.