The efficiency of a support team is quite often measured by the average number of tickets being handled by the team per shift. Depending on the variety of problems that the team handles, the number of tickets can vary in various shifts. However, there are certain measures that a team can effectively follow to maintain their efficiency and also improve performance.

Through this article, I would like to emphasize on a few such measures that every team needs to focus on, for efficient working.

  Understand the problems quickly

“Easier said than done”, is what would have gone through your minds now. But, let me tell you a few things that are involved in understanding support tickets quickly.

If the ticket has only one or two follow-ups, it is relatively easy to go through it, and identify the problem. When the ticket has a few more follow-ups, the task of reading them all and identifying the right issue is not that easy. It requires the ability to read follow-ups quickly and understand problems and their solutions. Again, it adds to the difficulty, if different types of problems are addressed in the same support ticket.

A Support Team is the backbone of a Webhosting business. A knowledgeable, efficient and friendly support team gets you customers for life.

The smarter side is to have different support tickets for entirely different problems, and a good grasping power to identify the issue mentioned in ticket and it’s solution while reading the follow-ups itself.

  Frame the replies effectively

Handling a support ticket involves two things:

• Identifying the problem and the solution and
• Updating the customer.

To make the overall ticket handling effective, both these steps should be done quickly. So before you start typing in your replies, identify and confirm the details that needs to be communicated with the customers. Then, frame it in a simple manner. A guideline we can use here is to make sure that you mention the problem and its solution along with supporting proofs. The proof must be something that the customer can verify from their side.

  Use check points to measure the effectiveness of work

Working smart means finishing the work in time. The best check point one can use is to keep track of the hourly tickets that were opened in the queue and the tickets that got resolved in the same hour. One should be able maintain a balance between these figures with an average of at least 4-6 valid solved tickets every hour.

The key point to note here is that you may need to handle 2-4 tickets simultaneously. If the resolution in one ticket takes time, start the steps or respond to the ticket mentioning the reason, and go on with the other tickets in queue. This way, the waiting time on one ticket should be utilized in solving another ticket. Also, having a quick scan through the open tickets can help to identify the simple problems and clear them almost instantly.

  Identify direct and indirect problems

The problems can be classified into two types, direct and indirect. A direct problem is the one for which the solution is already known. Such tickets should be handled quickly. The indirect problem are the ones that needs a little research and hence may take time in arriving to the solution.

Working smart means finishing the work in time. The best check point one can use is to keep track of the hourly tickets that were opened in the queue.

The important aspect is that once the solution for the indirect problem is found, one should make every effort to convert it to a direct problem and update the team about it. It will help to handle similar problems quickly the next time.

Having an internal FAQ system or Knowledge Base will help to keep track of the direct problems and their solutions and thus be shared within the team.

A Support Team is the backbone of a Webhosting business. A knowledgeable, efficient and friendly support team gets you customers for life. Even if we will need to work hard for it, ultimately it’ll be worth its weight in gold.

About the Author:

Prasad P M works as a Sr. Software Engineer in Bobcares and specializes in cPanel and remotely managing Datacenters. He currently leads all shared teams at Bobcares and is also the founder and manager of Bob and Knowledge factory – a searchable archive to get help on specific technical issues related to Web Hosting.