Support teams often face overwhelming volumes of help desk requests. In fact, 60% of customer support teams report an increase in ticket volumes and they don’t see this growth stopping anytime soon. Therefore, the question these companies face is clear: how can we reduce customer tickets without stretching the support budget? The answer lies in leveraging the power of a well-optimized self-service system.
Balance out the increase in tickets by fully harnessing your content and investing in self-service offers for users. These channels help customers get easy access to content relevant to their issues so they can solve problems on their own rather than submitting support tickets.
This article will guide you through the steps to achieve this, explore the benefits for your business, and explain why Fluid Topics is your go-to solution for optimizing ticket reduction. Get ready to transform your support experience while keeping costs in check.
Why Reducing Customer Tickets is Crucial
Reducing customer tickets is crucial because it enhances efficiency, improves customer satisfaction, and minimizes the strain on support resources. This will continue to become more and more important as 57% of customer support leaders predict call volumes will increase by 20% in the next two years.
Preventing support ticket levels from getting out of control is essential for ensuring agents don’t become overwhelmed. In addition to maintaining team morale, high levels of tickets also threaten key support metrics.
A High Volume of Tickets Leads to Dissatisfaction
When users rely on the one-on-one attention of support agents, they must wait their turn. High ticket volume leads to longer wait times for customers before their issues are resolved, and when customer problems persist, dissatisfaction arises.
More Tickets Also Means More Support Costs
When there are more support tickets, it usually means higher costs for the company. This is because handling more tickets takes up more staff time, requires extra training, and adds to operational expenses for tools and systems. Plus, if the rise in tickets leads to ongoing issues, it can hurt customer satisfaction, leading to even more costs from losing customers and harming the company’s reputation.
How can an Organization
Reduce Support Tickets?
There are several steps companies can take to improve their self-service offerings and reduce support tickets. Fluid Topics’ AI-powered Content Delivery Platform (CDP) is there to help you take them from best practices to concrete and easy-to-implement actions.
Developing a Self-Service Customer Portal
To effectively reduce customer tickets, one of the most impactful things you can do is create a customer self-service portal. Self-service portals are digital centers where users can easily access any relevant information about your company from a single place, all on their own.
81% of users want more self-service options, yet companies often underestimate the demand for self-service portals. However, as the first level of protection against unnecessary tickets, they are a win-win for customers and businesses alike.
The Fluid Topics touch: Fluid Topics offers the foundation of a customer portal plus the advanced features needed to maximize its benefits. It provides unified content, personalized self-service options, consistent and accurate experiences across devices, and strong security measures.
In addition, Fluid Topics offers an AI-powered search engine that helps users find exactly what they’re looking for in milliseconds. By combining strengths of both keyword and semantic search, it provides more relevant results. Thanks to our state-of-the-art search technology, users get the answers they need and leave feeling satisfied.
Centralizing and Unifying All Your Knowledge
To reduce support tickets and ensure your portal offers the best self-service experience, you need to consolidate all company and product information into a centralized knowledge repository. The goal is to consolidate all your knowledge content in a single location that can then deliver the information to various self-service endpoints and tools: documentation portals, help centers, in-product help, AI chatbots, Salesforce community, etc.
The Fluid Topics touch: Our CDP collects and unifies knowledge – from user guides to API documents and help desk articles – into a single point of reference no matter the initial source and format. Fluid Topics then provides relevant, personalized content via any channel, device, or application. The content is always in context with each user’s needs and environment for seamless troubleshooting. With a robust base of knowledge, users easily find information they need, eliminating frustration and reducing the need for live support.
Organizing and Categorizing Your Content
Self-service tools are significantly enhanced by organizing and categorizing your content through effective metadata and taxonomy. By tagging your content with relevant details (metadata), you make it easy to search and find. Adding a clear structure (taxonomy) helps group related information together, making navigation smooth and intuitive. As users navigate from one document to another, metadata acts like a guide, helping them find their way through the content. This way, users can quickly and easily find what they’re looking for, enhancing their overall experience.
The Fluid Topics touch: Metadata is automatically generated by Fluid Topics based on the details an author sets in their authoring tool, such as product line or type. Sometimes, metadata is added after the content is published. Regardless of when it’s added, metadata can be applied to both the document and individual topics to help organize and find content more easily.
Furthermore, these metadata combined with user profile preferences are what contributes to the personalization of results. For example, a company could create custom business rules to prioritize certain document types for corresponding user types. In practice this means that when a field engineer looks up information on Product X, their search results would prioritize technical notes over data sheets.
Updating and Maintaining Content
Your self-service tools are only as strong as the content within them. Creating quality content is the first step, but then, you need to maintain that high quality. As products and services develop and your user base evolves, your content will need regular updates. Outdated content leads to unresolved issues and higher user frustration.
The Fluid Topics touch: Fluid Topics delivers content dynamically making content maintenance a breeze. Our Content Delivery Platform is connected to both original content sources and end points via APIs. What this means is that when your teams make updates to certain topics or add new documentation, our CDP automatically has access to these updates. When a user wants to read that documentation, our CDP pulls the latest content directly from the source, so information is updated on-the-fly without having to manually publish content updates.
Bringing Self-Service to your Help Desk
Not all users will think to take advantage of your self-service tools. Some will head straight to your help desk to submit a support ticket. Therefore, you should similarly deliver your content to your help desk. Here, you can boost ticket deflection through proactive content recommendations.
The Fluid Topics touch: With Fluid Topics, when a customer begins filling out a support ticket, our ticket deflection widget begins suggesting content. The recommendations are personalized to the user profile and relevant to the information in the ticket to help the user resolve their problem before submitting the request. The user can then review the suggested resources to find the answer to their issue.
Using Generative AI Applications and Chatbots
Bringing AI technology to your self-service offers will deepen user engagement with your product knowledge while providing increasingly personalized service to customers. With new Generative AI (GenAI) applications rapidly emerging, AI is now a must-have for companies to remain competitive.
AI-powered Search
Using AI technologies in your enterprise search allows your engine to understand the underlying intent and context of a search query. As a result, the algorithm suggests more accurate results.
The Fluid Topics touch: Fluid Topics’ AI-powered search engine leverages over 20 years of research and development in AI and Natural Language Processing to provide its semantic search capabilities based on embeddings. Our platform also uses Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance the responses of a Large Language Model (LLM). It does this by securely fetching trusted data from your own knowledge sources and combining that information with the language power of the LLM. Therefore, our AI-powered search engine can easily retrieve the necessary information to generate accurate responses within a protected and traceable system.
Automated Responses
GenAI can also be used to bring automated conversational responses to your self-service channels, so users get answers in natural language. This is a great way to engage customers and help them resolve simple queries while making them feel like they’re getting one-on-one support from an agent.
The Fluid Topics touch: Fluid Topics makes it easy for companies to configure and integrate ready-to-use GenAI applications. For RAG-enabled chatbots, we implement a conversational question-and-answer layer over your company’s data. This allows users to submit questions in full sentences to a chatbot or search interface and automatically receive responses in natural language. On top of that, with Fluid Topics, users receive document sources linked to the AI-generated answers for further research. In short, we turn your company’s search bar into your very own ChatGPT support bot with specialized knowledge of your products.
In parallel, our platform creates engaging content reading experiences that facilitate faster problem solving. Design experiences that will best help your users: generate content summaries, step-by-step instructions, explanations of complex code, or even lists of tools for field engineers. If you can dream it, you can do it.
With these AI applications in place, customers independently resolve issues on their own, preventing unnecessary support cases.
Benefits of Reducing Customer Tickets
There are many actions a company can take to reduce support tickets, and they are worth the time investment. As a result of implementing these new tools and processes, companies unlock several new benefits.
Improved Customer Satisfaction
Reducing the number of support tickets inherently means that users have less questions about the problems they’re facing. By providing easy-to-use self-service solutions, customers get the right answers faster and feel proud that they could find the information themselves. Empower your customers with user portals and AI applications to reap the rewards of a happy user base.
Higher Cost Savings for Support Teams
As less customer tickets are created, support teams use their time more productively, meaning less costs from support personnel. Additionally, as self-service options are available 24/7, users can find the help they need at any time without sending extra money to keep agents on call after hours.
Enhanced Support Management
Studies show that improving access to self-service options also helps new support agents become autonomous more quickly. Providing new hires with access to the self-service portal cuts training time by over 50% and reduces escalations by about 40%.
Measuring the Success of a
Good Self-Service Customer Support
Despite the effort to implement new support best practices, a meager 31% of customer experience leaders track the ROI of their customer experience efforts. Yet, without analytics, there’s no way to know how your actions are impacting your team and users. Thus, once you’ve optimized your self-service offerings, you need to track whether they are successful.
Important Analytics to Track
to Reduce Support Tickets
Are you really helping users reduce support ticket volumes? Are there other opportunities to enhance self-service? Here are a few metrics and data you need to follow to monitor your results.
Ticket deflection rate: Also known as case deflection, this metric refers to the rate at which you reduce the number of support requests by helping customers find answers on their own through self-service channels.
Portal visits: This metric measures the overall traffic going to your portal. Low portal visits and high tickets may tell you that your portal isn’t visible or well-integrated into various customer touchpoints.
Search with no results: Analyze the keywords and search queries users look for that don’t yield any results. This will tell your technical writers what content is needed to improve self-service troubleshooting.
Most and least read topics: These two metrics provide more insight into your portal’s performance than your self-service offers. However, they are important for determining how to optimize your efforts. Use this to prioritize your content updates.
Using Insights to Improve Ticket Deflection
In addition to quantitative analytics, customer feedback is crucial for optimizing your case deflection rate. Feedback can be in the form of document ratings, comments, scores, and more. This is the best, most direct source for helping your writers understand what does and doesn’t work in your self-service documentation.
Final Thoughts on Reducing Support Tickets
Implementing self-service options is a great way to reduce support tickets from piling up in your team’s backlog. 95% of businesses have noticed an increase in the requests for self-service options with 34% of users saying that faster response times are the number one benefit they expect from these tools.
From customer portals to case deflection widgets and AI applications, there are many ways for companies to cut down on ticket volume. Whichever strategy you choose, Fluid Topics’ AI-powered Content Delivery Platform is here to help you set up out-of-the-box tools quickly.
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