Ticketing System Solution

Problem Statement

You are the Head of the Customer Support department for a B2B company providing research services. Your team acts as the primary point of contact for all the customer queries and is responsible for resolving them. Each customer query is treated as a ticket and the system to resolve re solve these tickets is being referred to as ticketing system. You are required to design this ticketing system. Key Pointers ● All queries are received at a common support id and customers are expected to send their

queries from their registered email ids only. ● Here are a few example queries for your reference: ▪

▪

▪

Please provide me the list of top 5 investors in E-Commerce Sector in India and list of top companies they have invested in. I am not able to download the report on Blockchain Sector from your platform. Could you please help me with that? My account status is showing as inactive even though we have processed the payment. Can you please help?

● Depending on query, it can either be resolved by the customer support department itself or

can be raised to any other relevant department. ● Org structure of the Customer Support team is as follows - There are Executives, who report to

Managers, who in turn report to an AVP.

There are many factors to consider while designing ticketing system. These factors include contact channels, hours of operation, language, customer base location, security and many other items. These are the core foundation decisions to make to build your policies and processes on. Many factors will influence the way in which a Service Desk function will be physically structured, such as the location, languages and cultures of end users, diversity in services and technology supported and the objectives governing the implementation of the Service Desk such as improved satisfaction or reduced operating costs.

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1. Please design the Blueprint (i.e. top-level block diagram) of this ticketing system.

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2. How can we distribute the tickets received among the Executives for resolution? What are the different options and what is your recommendation? Ideas for Managing the Customer Support Ticket Queue

Every customer support team will eventually hit a point where the volume of support tickets or emails grows large enough that a new process is needed. How to tackle those customer requests, and which to tackle first, can vary significantly. Most of my support experiences have employed radically different strategies to decide the order in which tickets are addressed. A lot of factors come into play, such as subject matter, technicality, free users vs. paying users, the SLAs (service level agreements) your team or company has, skill sets of your individual teammates, and much more. While all of these processes differ, they are equally beneficial for support-queue organization. Here are seven ideas to help you better manage your company’s support queue. 1. First-Come, First-Served vs. Picking and Choosing For smaller teams, it’s generally best to help on a first-come, first-served basis. That means tackling the oldest tickets first.

On the other hand, picking and choosing is a great way to give customers with tougher problems the attention they deserve and those with simpler problems a faster reply. While picking and choosing those “easy” tickets is an enjoyable and simple practice, those same tickets are also the ones you could stop from coming in altogether by creating knowledge base articles for common issues. If the documentation already exists, you can experiment with surfacing it in other areas of your project.

2. Using Roles When it comes to timing and SLAs, if you’re trying to get your response time down, you can try a few different options. The first is to split your team up and ask half to tackle the newest tickets while the other half tackles the oldest.

It is most beneficial to define a few rotating positions on support and assigning to one or two people during the day at different time periods—usually the times with the highest volume. Their

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This allowed for the team to offer a percentage of users a super quick response to absolutely “wow” them, and helped lower queue volume for the rest of the team working on older tickets. There is a mental aspect involved with queue volume, and in most situations, overall team morale and motivation picks up when working from a quickly shrinking queue. 3. Priority Support

As volume continues to grow, you might start putting some of the focus onto your paying users. Try to give tickets from users on our Business, Business Plus, and Infrastructure plans a look before working from the oldest tickets. This is based on the philosophy that if they are paying more, you should give them more attention. This isn’t to say you should incentivize upgrades to higher plans for priority support, as free users generally need the most help. That being said, companies like MailChimp are taking the opposite approach. MailChimp only provides email support to those on a paying plan. That i s because they do a fantastic job of creating and surfacing their documentation to users. Putting that requirement in place helps them focus on users who are paying to get more out of the product.

4. Working from an Unassigned Queue

Now what about assigning tickets? Most teams handle this in a similar fashion, automatically assigning the ticket to the person who first responded. This allows them to follow up with a reply in their personal queue or view, and they are primarily responsible for the entire interaction, along with finding a solution to the problem. Entire support team works from an unassigned queue. The support crew should do a job of leaving notes on next steps for the next person who lands on the ticket. Most of the time, there is plenty of detail included in the previous reply to the user. Anyone can land on a thread, know what’s going on within seconds, and then help the customer with next steps. This also helps give faster responses, as tickets don’t get stuck in anyone’s personal queue. If the customer replies, everyone can see it and anyone can reply. 5. To Triage or Not to Triage

Some teams purposely hire support members who are strong in one area. These teams also often triage tickets to their teammates. Sometimes the manager will assign tickets to those with relevant strengths and other times, triage will be a rotating role on the support team. Each week, one person could be responsible for keeping an eye on the queue and volume per teammate and assign tickets accordingly. This ensures a personalized experience and the highest quality

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set up a workflow to assign relevant conversations to teammates based on tagging particular types of issues. Another approach is to have your ticketing system auto-assign tickets to teammates so they are evenly distributed. This ensures that everyone has something to work on, even if it isn’t b ased on a particular skill set. 6. Setting Up Tiers

Triaging and assigning don’t always have to be based on subject matter; it could also be based on the technicality of the issue. Some support teams work in different ti ers. A three-tier support organization is typical of a larger support structure with responsibility for many systems, often distributed, and with many end-users. In this model, a primary help desk (super help desk) at tier one focuses on rapid response to many calls. Usually an automated help desk tool is used by the primary help desk. There may be expert system support to walk the help desk personnel through questions that they may ask to document the call. The emphasis is on information gathering and closure of the call so that the next call can be fielded. The desk does minimal fault management activity. Note that where the user community will accept its use, an automated call distribution/interactive voice response (ACD/IVR) system should be able to log and route many of the calls with minimum primary help desk staff intervention. Using the tool, each call is logged with supporting information. If the request is for general information, or can be resolved with the support information available, the call is categorized and closed. If the super help desk cannot respond, the call is closed, and a trouble ticket is opened and escalated for action to the appropriate next tier of support. The three tier support organization functions in the following manner: · Primary help desk procedures support rapid routing and categorization of problems so that each problem is most effectively forwarded. The procedures identify response service levels required for calls. · The second-level help desk responds to the trouble tickets forwarded from the primary help desk, and to alarms generated by automated tracking systems. They have prime responsibility for the resolution of the problem. · The third tier is comprised of experts that advise and may solve very difficult systems problems, but primarily the burden of response rests with the second-level help technical support.

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Customer queries are not all the same. You solve a vast variety of problems, questions, and issues every single day. Add tags and setup filters on your tickets in order to get a better grasp on various support topics. Or use tags to differentiate important customers. Even add tags to existing tickets in order to sort and filter through your tickets easily. Tags can be used in a hundred different ways. By examining and testing these different approaches, you can take a bit from each and create an efficient process to manage the queue. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, but there are benefits of each that you can implement to improve the way your team manages their support queue. At the very least, try working from an unassigned queue, from oldest to newest tickets. This ensures your entire team is getting equal exposure to the issues stemming from your project and also ensures customers are being helped in the order they emailed in. Next, start experimenting with filters and tagging to pick up on the issues that make up the majority of your support tickets. Once you figure out what’s generating the highest volume of reques ts, you can work with your team to add, improve, or resurface help documentation to answer your customers’ questions and reduce your support load. Now that you’ve cut your queue down to the most important tickets, you can further optimize. Define what makes a high priority ticket and begin to filter, tag, and then prioritize those. Once you know which tickets to tackle first, begin to assign roles and start triaging. Every team and product are different, so leave room for experimentation.

Each option will have upsides and downsides depending on your product and how your team operates. While there is no “right” way to tackle your support queue, testing several approaches will help your team f ind the right fit, resulting in maximum efficiency and delighted cus tomers. Make sure your agents always have their optimal load. Define how many tickets, chats and phone calls they can handle. Automatically rotate phone duty, set pause times and let them rest when they need it. Save the time of your support agents and fight against spam with automatic spam filtering in your help desk.

3. An Executive had received a query with incomplete information and had replied to the customer seeking the missing information. However, the customer is not replying on email or any other medium. What should the Executive do? What are the different options and what is your recommendation? Recommendation:

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Step 2: Look for past queries sent by the same customer to gaze any missing pointers, information or flow in the ticket at hand and resolve it accordingly Step 3: Keep your supervisor in loop and park the ticket to shield it i t against agreed SLA. Step 4: Keep following up with the customer on daily basis. Keep looking for alternate avenues to contact customer. Step 5: If customer does not reply by deadline close the ticket. 4. Please suggest top MIS reports that you would monitor to ensure that the designed ticketing system is working properly. Key ticketing system metrics and KPIs

1. Ticket volume trends: Total number of tickets handled by the helpdesk and their patterns within a given time frame 2. First call resolution rate: Percentage of incidents resolved by the first level of support (first call or contact with the help desk). 3. SLA compliance rate: Percentage of Queries resolved within the agreed SLA time. 4. Support Personnel bandwidth utilization: Working hours vs billed hours 5. Cost per ticket: The total monthly operating expense of IT support, divided by the monthly ticket volume.

6. Lost business hours: The number of hours the business is down because IT services are unavailable. infrastructure is characterized by maximum 7. Infrastructure stability:  A highly stable infrastructure availability, very few outages, and low service disruptions. disruptions.

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and proactive support, it must decrease over time.

Total resolved tickets

Must increase over time The number of tickets resolved The total number of tickets resolved in the time is a way to measure agent period selected. This number remains constant productivity. However, it irrespective of the time breakdown should always be read along (day/week/month/quarter/year) (day/week/month/qua rter/year) chosen. with the number of tickets received and the number of agents added to the helpdesk.

Total unresolved tickets

The total number of tickets that remained unresolved at the end of the time period selected. This number remains constant irrespective of the time breakdown (day/week/month/quarter/year) (day/week/month/qua rter/year) chosen.

Average received tickets

The average number of tickets received per day/week/month/quarter/year (depending on Must decrease over time the time breakdown selected).

Average resolved tickets

The average number of tickets resolved per day/week/month/quarter/year (depending on Must increase over time the time breakdown selected).

Average unresolved tickets

The average number of tickets that remain unresolved in a day/week/month/quarter/year Must decrease over time (depending on the time breakdown selected).

Sample MIS dashboard

Must decrease over time Unresolved tickets need to be constantly kept in check as it becomes more and more unmanageable with the growth of the company.

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6769141

Saturday, November 24, 2018

12-Dec-18

In Progress

7697167

Sunday, November 25, 2018

12-Dec-18

Parked

under review Waiting for missing information from customer

4581289

Monday, November 26, 2018

12-Dec-18

Open

To be assigned

9505850

12-Dec-18

Closed

completed

1517874

Tuesday, November 27, 2018 Wednesday, November 28, 2018

12-Dec-18

In Proress

2167597

Thursday, November 29, 2018

12-Dec-18

Parked

under review Waiting for missing information from customer

Sample MIS report

6. Design a MIS report to monitor if we are doing a good job at resolving tickets within ETAs communicated communicate d to the clients.

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*note: Similar reports can be generated on daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly basis. Sample MIS report

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Annexure:

The following are some of the main options chosen implementing a Service Desk function: 1. Local Service Desk

A local Service Desk structure is where the Service Desk is co-located within or physically close to the user community it serves. This may aid in communication communication and give the Service Desk a visible presence which some users may like. It may however be inefficient and expensive to have multiple Service Desks operating. Benefits of a Local Service Desk structure * Local and specific user knowledge * Ability to effectively communicate with multiple languages * Appropriate cultural knowledge * Visible (and physical) presence of the Service Desk Disadvantages of a Local Service Desk structure * Higher costs for replicated infrastructure and more staff involved * Less knowledge transfer, each Service Desk may spend time rediscovering knowledge * Inconsistency in service levels and reporting

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3. Virtual Service Desk

A Virtual Service Desk, through the use of technology, particularly the Internet and the use of corporate support tools, can give users the impression of a single, centralized Service Desk when in fact the personnel may be spread or located in any number of geographical or structural locations. Benefits of a virtual Service Desk structure * Support for global organizations * 24×7 support in multiple time zones * Reduced operational costs * Improved usage of available resources * Effective matching of appropriate staff for different types of calls Disadvantages of a virtual Service Desk structure * Initial cost of implementation, requiring diverse and effective voice technology * Lack in the consistency of service and reporting * Less effective for monitoring actions of staff * Staff may feel disconnected from other Service Desk staff. 4. Follow the Sun (Suitable (Suitable for this case) case)

Some global or international organizations will combine two or more of their geographically