Triaging Tickets: How To Create a Triage Workflow

Your customer support agents are bombarded with multiple tickets every day. While the huge volume of tickets is a sign of growth, it is also a cause of poor customer service. In times when 64% of customers and 80% of businesses expect companies to respond in real-time, you cannot mismanage support requests and deliver poor customer service.

This is where triaging tickets come to your rescue. 

Ticket triaging helps you manage the huge volume of tickets that keep coming and provide the best solutions for your customers. In this article, we’ll talk about what ticket triaging is and show you how you can start using ticket triaging in your business.

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What is Ticket Triaging?

Ticket triaging is deciding the order of treatment of the support tickets received from different channels. This involves tagging, assigning, and routing support tickets.

The main objective of triaging tickets is to make sure the right specialist is dealing with the ticket assigned to them. This removes redundancy and improves the productivity of your agents. 

For example, if you receive a support request. The customer is asking about a specific feature of your product. This support ticket should be routed to the product specialists or your customer agents. In the absence of ticket triaging, this ticket may end up with your team engineers. They will, of course, be of no help and would have to reroute it to the product specialists.

See how the absence of ticket triaging led to redundancy and wastage of time? 

Your team can triage tickets manually or use AI tools for triaging. AI tools are not 100% efficient, and your team may still need to interfere in the triaging process. The ideal triaging system would include both human and AI triaging.

Now let us see why triaging tickets is essential.

Why is Triaging Tickets Important?

Ticket triaging helps you provide excellent customer support. In times when 93% of customers are more likely to return to your brand when delivered good customer support—ignoring triaging could cost you a bad customer experience. 

Your customers get quick and effective solutions when you use triage systems. When tickets are triaged properly, it reaches the right agent. The agent being the perfect fit, is able to provide the best solutions and that too quickly. 84% of customers get irritated when an agent is uninformed–you need an agent that’s the perfect fit. 

Your customer support agents also benefit from ticket triaging. It reduces their workload and boosts their efficiency. Your agents will only be working on relevant issues, leading to better solutions for your customers. With a lower workload, your agents will also not be burnt out quickly. Ultimately it will also help in reducing the agent turnover rate. 

Your agents will only be working on relevant issues, leading to better solutions for your customers.

Since triaging tickets also helps you manage tickets better, you are able to track all tickets and identify any recurring issues. With such identification, you’re also able to batch-solve similar problems. You can also identify any potential issues that may happen in the future and prevent them from happening.

In a nutshell, triaging tickets is important to:

• Reduce the cost of customer support.
• Reduce agent workload and boost productivity.
• Manage, track and analyze the rising number of tickets.
• Deliver good customer service, which brings customer retention and brand loyalty.

How to Create a Ticket Triage Workflow?

Ticket triaging won’t work if there is no workflow for it. With a ticket triaging workflow, your team knows what steps to follow—leading to more productivity and less confusion. Here is how you can create your own ticket triage workflow:

Step 1: Decide your Ticket Prioritizing Structure

Based on your organization and its objectives, your ticket prioritizing structure will be formed. This structure will help you quickly categorize a ticket as soon as it arrives.

Making this structure could be as simple as labeling tickets as urgent and non-urgent. For bigger organizations with various segments of customers, this approach may not work.

In that case, several factors need to be taken into consideration. These factors are:

• Urgency
• Customer’s spending 
• Service Level Agreements
• Type of Channel
• Type of Product

Step 2: Decide What is a Severe Issue for You

It is understood that severe issues will always be put on priority. But what is a severe issue for your brand? Is it a software failure? Is it a refund issue? This needs to be decided next.

Depending on the type of industry, customers, and your product, your severe issues will be different. These issues could be within each category (as defined above) or above all categories.

You need to evaluate which issues are categorized as “severe” issues for your brand. A good way to identify your severe issues is by looking at the impact different issues will have. For example, A website crash will have a higher impact than an unbroken link. 

For a SaaS brand, a high-priority issue would be app downtime because their app is their product. While refunds may be a high-priority issue for eCommerce brands. 

Step 3: Automate Wherever Possible

Not every support request needs to be handled by your agents. Instead, use automation features like chatbots to automate responses for repetitive and simpler questions. This will reduce the number of tickets that reach your agents, reducing the triaging your agents will have to do manually. 

Step 4: Create Self-Service Options

The next step is to create self-service options like community forums, FAQs, guides, and tutorials. Your customers will feel empowered, and the burden on your agents will reduce when there are self-service options in place. An FAQ section would be great for more straightforward questions like what your product is or what it does. 

Step 5: Integrate Human and AI

Using a good mix of AI and human agents will help triage better. While your help desk system could do the basic ticket filtering, your agents could do the complex triaging like routing tickets to the specialist or rerouting tickets to a different channel.

Step 6: Allocate Tasks and Define Roles

Now that all is done, the last step is to allocate different tasks to different agents and define their roles. The best way to assign tasks is to allocate agents to problems they are best suited for. A few of your agents may deal with product setup, while others will deal with software issues.

Once this procedure has been established, your agents will be able to triage tickets appropriately each time one comes in by referring to your triage workflow.

Ticket Triage Best Practices

Ready to start implementing ticket triaging? Here are some best ticket triaging practices you should look at!

Mix human agents and AI.

Your helpdesk system or any such AI tool can help your human agents in the ticket triage process. For efficient ticket triaging, using AI to help your human agents is helpful. 

With such a system in place, your AI software could do the initial triage, and then your agents could triage tickets further. For example, as soon as a ticket arrives, the software will tag it based on the ticket type. The agent could now hop on the issue and either resolve it or assign it to a specialist.

Use the right tags for triage.

Based on your ticket prioritization structure, you can create custom tags that agents can use for triaging. 

For example, you could have different tags like product setup, incomplete information, or software glitch. Agents would use these tags to identify which ticket belongs to the appropriate agent.

For a ticket tagged as “software glitch,” the engineering team would quickly hop on it. Similarly, for a ticket tagged as “product set up,” a product specialist could start working on resolving this ticket.

With the right tags, the people are able to work on the issue—leading to efficient triaging.

Set up triggers.

Setting up triggers is beneficial when you use automated triaging. Based on the intent and language attributes, your triage system can take action.

For example, you might wish to develop a trigger that routes newly created tickets with certain intent to the team most qualified to deal with it. Or, based on the language, the ticket might go to your language specialist. 

Although, since it is AI, it may not always be accurate. Make sure your agents also keep a check on it.

Use and implement a triage workflow.

A triage workflow eliminates the scope of delays and inefficiency in providing solutions. With a set workflow, your agents know the next steps and will be ready to follow them immediately. 

Once you have set up a triage workflow, you must convey it to your customer support team as well. Implementing the workflow for the best results will be challenging if your agents are not clear about how a triage workflow will benefit them.

Follow the 80/20 rule.

The 80/20 golden rule says that 80% of tickets should be handled by AI-powered-solutions. The rest 20% is what your agents should happen. This rule is based on the fact that a large portion of support requests are generic, repetitive questions that can quickly be answered by chatbots or other such tools. Using this triaging rule, you can ensure that your agents are able to spend time resolving more complex queries and are more productive.

Track and improve your triage process.

Your job will not end with setting up a triage process. You should constantly track the progress and find a scope for improvement. Understand the reasons why there might be leakages or bottlenecks in the process. A good way to track progress is to establish reasonable benchmarks. You can also conduct meetings with your customer support teams to understand what they’ve felt about the process and what improvements can be made. 

Final Words

Your customers and your agents will love you for using ticket triaging. Your customers get excellent customer support, and your agents have a lesser workload. It is a win-win for you! However, a triage workflow is essential for effective ticket triaging. Without a workflow, ticket triaging will just be another task for your agents. 

At Keeping, you can create the perfect mix of AI and human ticket triaging. With our collaborative features, such as assignments, tags, and labels in your shared inbox, you’ll be able to deliver excellent customer support—all while being on Gmail. Check out our demo video to learn more.