What is Conversational Ticketing

Conversational ticketing, to put it simply, was created to avoid the need to switch to other sites for support and to allow employees to be served from within the corporate chat platform.

Like the name suggests, employees can obtain assistance simply through chat without having to resort to complex procedures of filing tickets. In the same chat, agents can discuss and resolve the raised issues, making Conversational Ticketing an effective way to collect focused data to ease query redressal for the support team.

Conversational ticketing with its personalized format makes the process of reporting issues seamless for employees ensuring a hassle-free work environment where employees can utilize their time efficiently.

Why the need for Conversational Ticketing

As the world adopts remote working, an increasing number of employees find it difficult to cope with the dynamic changes involved in working online. While some shifts to online platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams have been largely successful, traditional ticketing systems, despite being powerful, have been unable to attract engagement.

This resistance for adopting an online ticketing system can be attributed to the following factors:

• Additional learning curve

Employees have been observed to be resistant to acclimating to multiple platforms for different tasks. Depending upon the job background of the employee, ticketing systems can further prove to be difficult to navigate for employees.

• Lack of humanized interaction

With a complete mechanized system to record logs of the user requests, employees have been seen to feel increasingly alienated from the process of reporting their queries with. Remote working also depersonalizes any form of interaction among the employees, causing them to feel alienated and out of the loop.

• No status tracking

Support teams usually receive upwards of hundreds of requests in a week. The turnaround time as a result can be quite high. Employees who have depended upon verbal communication might feel unheard and by extension unwilling to use ticketing systems owing to an unspecified waiting time duration.

At the support team level, agents encounter another set of hurdles which further decrease their work efficiency. Some frequently arising  issues include:

• Multiple avenues

In addition to working with the ticketing system,  the Support team has an added burden of compiling requests from other platforms like Slack, email, etc. by employees unresponsive to the switch to ticketing system.

• Repetitive queries

Much time is wasted in resolving repetitive issues and complaints that can be resolved with either self-assistance or following pre-documented solutions.

• Context switch

Much time is wasted in getting additional help onboard and while transferring cases among support agents due to incomplete or complete lack of familiarity with contextual information of the complaint.

With hundreds of issues being assigned to the support agents, it gets difficult to keep track of approaching deadlines and unresolved issues.

Solution

Conversational ticketing is the one approach that effectively attends to all the blind-spots of a traditional ticketing system. By making your support system accessible in Slack, here is how conversational ticketing can make your workflow more efficient in Slack:

• Removes any friction by allowing you to turn Slack messages into tickets directly
• Automates answering of repetitive questions in Slack
• Ensures your Jira remains updated in Slack always
• Makes informing stakeholders outside Jira easy
• Helps you efficiently track team performance in Slack
• Captures and stores feedbacks for efficient tracking of team productivity

Impact of conversational ticketing‍

Conversational ticketing irons out the various creases arising in the complex process of filing to resolving of a ticket. With the reduced friction in this process, your team experiences a dramatic increase in productivity. You can evaluate this enhancement in work productivity from the following measurable metrics:

• Decrease in response time

With options like one-click approval requests and easy tracking of tickets’ progress update, conversational ticketing helps support agents in quick redressal of complaints.

• Saving of resolution time

With conversational ticketing you can file and discuss Jira tickets in Slack saving time along with automating answers of repetitive questions.

• Saving employee hours

Support employees no longer waste time performing mundane tasks like copy-pasting information from Jira to Slack or tracking. The overall saved time and effort by employing conversational ticketing further results in more work being done by the employees.

• Reduced cost of operation

As more tasks get automated, it eliminates the amount of manpower needed to man the support desk, hence saving your company’s operational costs.

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How to Implement Conversational Ticketing

There are two distinct ways to integrate conversational ticketing in your workflow.

• Switch to stand-alone conversational ticketing system
• Add a plugin to your existing ticketing system

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Standalone

There are a number of independent ticketing platforms offering the service of conversational ticketing. Such platforms allow your support agents to convert conversations in any Slack channel to tickets. Customers can also report and track problem status directly in Slack.

Zendesk, Halp, Happyfox are some of the most trusted names if you are considering standalone conversational ticketing systems.

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Add-on

You can add conversational ticketing on top of your current ticketing system by using a facilitator app that integrates your existing ticketing system with Slack.

Troopr is one such purpose built app for your Slack that integrates with JSM, Jira and Confluence to give you a superior conversational ticketing experience.

What works best for you

If you are looking to build conversational ticketing from ground up, a stand-alone ticketing system with Slack Integration is a good way to go. Standalone ticketing systems are the best fit for you if your organization is small or are still in the initial stages of Helpdesk development.

If your company is already using an existing ticketing system, then switching to a completely new one would not only prove to be monetarily expensive but will also result in significant waste of time and effort. A third-party Slack-ticketing integration app can just be the perfect solution to bring you the best of both worlds.

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Conclusion

Creating tickets has never been easier. Ensure a seamless experience for both your employees and support team by adopting conversational ticketing. Bring support to where all the conversations are already happening. With conversational ticketing, unleash the full potential of your Helpdesk.

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