How Can MSPs Decrease Ticket Volume?

How to decrease ticket volume, is a common concern for most MSPs. Often there appears to be an unending stream of requests, and you need to attend to all of them with finite resources.

Managing an MSP IT help desk support outsourcing can be an extremely tough job for your service delivery team. For a small process, it is possible to keep checks on all the tickets that land. But as you expand, this method becomes unusable.

So, instead of keeping an eye on each request, you must manage your MSP team more productively. This article includes 6 proven ideas for MSPs to reduce ticket volume. So, let’s explore the ideas.

Timely Resolving of support tickets not only saves costs but also satisfies customers through prompt service. Here are some proven strategies to impressively bring down your ticket volume.

• Train Your Support Team
• Decrease Workload With Automation
• Categorize The Support Tickets
• Keep An Escalation Team
• Prioritize Tickets Based On Their Urgency
• Facilitate Skill-based Ticket Routing

A well-trained support team can resolve support tickets faster than anybody else. So regular training for your employees will not only enhance their skills but also help you develop a productive team.

Let’s explore how customer service training programs for your team can benefit your business, agents, and customers.

• Improved Engagement – Any organization investing in training expresses its willingness for continuous skill development of its employees. From customer service training, your agents can learn new strategies and interact with peers and mentors.
• Enhanced Skills – With regular training, employees can enhance or develop new skills. The focus of the training should be on improving listening skills, technical or problem-solving skills, and communication.
• Better Customer Satisfaction – A well-trained executive can better understand a customer’s concern and offer a fast and appropriate solution.

Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that there are no apparent skill or knowledge gaps in your team.

An automated support process can have an unquestionable impact on your success rate. Automation ensures the correct flow of tickets assigned to the right people. Besides, you can record customer feedback through automated surveys.

Let’s explore how automation can benefit your business, agents, and customers.

• Prompt Response – Your agents can use pre-defined saved replies for quicker ticket resolution. They do not need to type the same responses again and again.
• Automated Notifications – Executives and customers will receive automated email notifications. It will keep them updated about a ticket’s progress.
• Automated Survey Emails – From an automated MSP help desk, customers will get automatic survey emails once their issue gets resolved. It enables them to rate your service quality and share their overall experience.

Customer issues come in various forms and types. So you need to categorize the tickets accordingly for faster troubleshooting. By categorizing the tickets, you can ensure that the agents get more information about the issue.

Further, you can add labels to separate different or unique tickets. For example, you can label all tickets related to system outages outage.

Likewise, you can categorize the support request by updating the status of the resolution process. For example, the status of a new ticket is always open.

MSP help desk team manages a variety of issues every day. It is not possible to resolve all those cases in the first contact. Some may demand intervention from a senior representative, a manager, or someone with advanced expertise.

• The first-level agents can address basic customer requests.
• They need to escalate complicated issues to the right experts. For instance, shipping or logistics specialists can better handle delivery or return-related issues.
• Agents may not have the right to handle certain requests.
• Sometimes customers demand validation from a manager for a solution offered by an agent.
• Sometimes, customers themselves demand escalation.
• A well-prepared escalation program ensures every complex issue is resolved at the earliest.

Tickets generally stack up when your agents are not able to decide which ones they should resolve first. This further creates havoc when customers raise new tickets to know the status of their critical issue.

To skip this undesirable situation, train your agents to pick the top-priority cases and the issues that need urgent attention. An automated help desk can easily prioritize the issues as High, Low, or Normal, based on the nature of the event.

Assess the below factors to prioritize tickets:

• Who will get affected by this crisis
• Whether the issue may cause a security threat to anyone or not
• The probable impact of the issue on the business or its brand image

You can separate high-priority tickets from low-priority tickets by focusing on all the above factors.

MSPs use skill-based routing methods to match customer issues to the most appropriate support agents. In simple words, skill-based routing enables assigning tickets to people with a specific skill instead of fetching availability.

By engaging the help desk tool, you can either assign tickets manually to relevant agents or decide to automate the method.

• Skill-based routing is a verified approach to decreasing ticket backlog.
• It maximizes agent productivity and decreases ticket resolution time.
• Your agents can deliver the best in them and focus on tickets so they can respond the best.
• Complex technical issues can be effectively managed by agents having relevant technical expertise.
• Your customers will get better resolution because skilled agents will never beat around the bush.

Managing an MSP help desk is challenging, especially handling high ticket volume. High backlogs of support requests have a direct impact on your brand image and revenue. Timely Resolving of support tickets not only saves costs but also satisfies customers through prompt service. So MSPs must follow effective result-oriented methods to reduce support ticket volume.