Why you should stop tagging tickets in your support platform
Insights from feedback data such as support tickets can be incredibly powerful. Most companies are already sitting on thousands of conversations filled with actionable feedback that could help them prioritise issues and dramatically improve customer experience. However, making sense of these tickets on a larger scale is getting increasingly difficult, as the volume keeps growing with new channels like live chat.
So, how do you gain the valuable insights you need from your customer feedback data? Most support teams use tags to categorise and group the customer feedback in order to report insights to the rest of the business. There are currently two ways to analyse your support tickets.
- Tagging within support platforms
Tagging in support platforms doesn’t require any 3rd party tools as it consists of asking your support agents to assign tags to new tickets when they arrive. Although, this can lead to a few issues, including inconsistency, limited tag coverage and higher costs. If you’re curious to learn more about how to set up a strong manual tagging framework check out our comprehensive guide.
There is also a way to automate this process within your support platform by using tag rules in Intercom and Freshdesk or macros in Zendesk. These features allow you to create static rules based on keyword matching, so tickets are assigned a relevant tag when it matches a predefined rule in your support system.
2. Customer feedback analytics platforms
Customer feedback analytics platforms such as Prodsight, Chattermill and Wonderflow integrate with your support system in order to improve analysis and reporting. These platforms are often powered by some form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology and feature additional insights such as sentiment analysis and tag suggestions.
There are four key differences between tagging in support platforms and tagging in customer feedback analytics platforms. Read on to find out which approach you should be taking when it comes to tagging and analysing support tickets.
Retrospective tagging and flexibility
Reports based on tagged tickets are most effective when all of your tickets have been tagged, however accomplishing that is hard because you’re bound to discover new tags as you go along. This is why the ability to retrospectively tag tickets that have already arrived in your system is a crucial feature.
Support platforms
Tagging in support platforms only works for tickets that come in after you create the tag. Also, whenever you receive new or slightly different tickets, they remain untagged, hard to find and difficult to report on.
Let’s say you have a tag for all your “Pricing” related tickets. If you introduce a new pricing plan called “Enterprise”, none of the old tickets relating to the “Enterprise” plan will be included in the “Pricing” tag until you update it and manually tag all of the “Enterprise” plan tickets that have already entered the system. As a result, your reports will under-report any mentions related to this topic.
Customer feedback analytics platforms
Customer feedback analytics platforms index all of your tickets when they sync with your support platform, meaning you can create a tag and track all the relevant tickets, regardless of when they were submitted.
These tags can also be altered in the future to include new keywords, as they automatically update to include old tickets. This is extremely powerful as very few people will be able to accurately predict all of the tags they will need in the future.
Tag discovery and alerts
The time it takes from new issues to occur to your team fixing them, can be the difference between happy or unhappy customers. This is why it’s important to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to discovering new tags.
Support platforms
Currently, there is no way to automatically discover new tags that you should be tracking in support platforms. The best way to discover new tags is to schedule a regular brainstorming session every month with your support team and generate tags based on recently mentioned topics.
Customer feedback analytics platforms
Most feedback analytics platforms feature some form of tag discovery by scanning your conversations and surfacing the most important tags that you should be tracking. This means you don’t have to waste valuable time scrutinising tickets for new tags every month or worrying about completely missing important tags for several weeks.
Tag suggestions also include alerts, which notify you when new tags are discovered, ensuring that you’re kept up to date on what is happening in your tickets as close to real-time as possible.
Root cause analysis
In order to design effective solutions, product teams need deep insights to fully understand the root cause of the issue. Therefore it’s important to not only know what the high-level tags are but also be able to drill-down to find specific details.
Support platforms
Tagging tickets in your support platform won’t allow you to break down your tags to see which keywords are responsible for the overall tag volume. You’ll have to set up entirely new tags and retrospectively tag all the tickets to gain these additional insights, which can be impossible if you’re getting hundreds of tickets every month.
Customer feedback analytics platforms
Customer feedback analytics platforms allow you to dig deeper into your tags by breaking them down into sub-tags, allowing you to see additional insights such as how many tickets in the “Technical issues” tag came from tickets that mentioned, “Login” or “Sign-up”.
This is crucial, as it provides the team with actionable information on how to reduce the support volume for the overall tag.
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis is unique, as it allows you to understand how your users feel about certain tags or product features, rather than solely relying on conversation volumes to prioritise issues.
It also allows you to gauge overall customer satisfaction based on all of your support tickets. These datasets tend to be much larger than common surveys like NPS, where only customers that proactively provide a score would be counted.
Support platforms
As of now, none of the major support platforms allow you to perform automated sentiment analysis on your tickets. You either need to export your data to a standalone sentiment tool or use a third-party plugin for your support platform.
Customer feedback analytics platforms
Nearly all of the customer feedback analytics platforms offer powerful sentiment analysis, which allows you to see all of the tags that are driving positive or negative mentions.
Wrap up
While support platforms are a great place to start tagging your tickets and gain basic insights, feedback analytics platforms are purposefully built to analyse support data. Therefore, they are much more powerful, intuitive and flexible than support platforms.
These platforms allow you to seamlessly integrate with your support platforms to supercharge reporting, deep-dive into data and test your hunches in seconds. They can effectively empower anyone from product, customer success or even the C-Suite to get actionable insights from their existing data sources within a few hours.
Prodsight is one of these platforms, try it for yourself with a 7-day free trial, with full access to all our features.
