How To Reduce Support Calls and Close More Tickets in Slack
If you’re a busy support agent or supervisor, what’s your highest priority? You want to reduce support calls and close more tickets, right?
You’re surrounded by analytics and a ticket backlog that demoralizes rather than motivates.
In an ideal world, you’d stop taking all these calls and message everyone in Slack.
Well, we have some good news for you.
In this post, we answer the following:
- How can you reduce customer support calls?
- How to reduce ticket backlog
- How to close more support tickets
- How do you ask a customer to close a ticket?
1 — How can you reduce customer support calls?
If you’ve identified call reduction as something to work on, it’s important to ensure you approach this strategically.
Simply not answering the phone isn’t going to help.
Call reduction strategies
Before we dive into how you can close more tickets in Slack, let’s look at how to reduce the number of incoming calls altogether.
That will help you keep your backlog in check and free up your agents to handle more complex queries.
Offer smooth customer onboarding
One of the best ways to avoid an influx in support calls and queries is to create an airtight onboarding plan for all new clients.
If you’re experiencing growth in your customer base, it’s easy for tickets and support calls to skyrocket as users try to navigate their way around your product.
Instead, invest in a clear onboarding strategy that will help customers get up and running quickly.
Rather than waiting for queries to come in, anticipate what these might be and embed the answers within your website or app as a guided tour for customers as they start using the product.
Check out Mio’s onboarding and help center below.
Depending on how complex your product is, customers might customize it to make it fit with their specific workflows and processes.
Ideally, you’d be able to offer them a tailor-made onboarding plan which will answer how they’d be using your product day in and day out. This will save you tons of time in handling tickets later on.
Offer call queue options
Many of the queries you get might be simple “how-to” questions which your agents can answer within seconds.
But, managing a high volume of calls can have a serious impact on your response times and your net promoter score (NPS).
A good practice here is to analyze the most common themes of your past incoming calls and incorporate them into your switchboard.
Your welcome message could play a prompt to redirect customers to your FAQ page, further reducing the number of calls your agents need to handle.
Likewise, give your customers an option to select the reason for their call and try to offer them guidance and direction right there and then, without needing to speak to an agent.
Invest in self-service support
Another great way to safeguard your business against too many support queries is to give your customers the tools to help themselves.
Self-service tools are not only a great time-saver, but customers expect you to have them.
In fact, 70% of consumers expect to find some form of self-service options on a supplier’s website.
A 24-hour response time is a thing of the past.
Customers expect their problems to be resolved within a much shorter time frame, and if they can do it themselves, that’s even better.
The most common forms of self-service are
- FAQs
- Knowledge bases
- Discussion forums
Slack has its own community forum for developers where members can discuss new or upcoming features.
You can make the most of these tools if you:
- Invest the time to understand the most common queries and pain points your customers have. Look at past ticket data and identify the key areas customers usually struggle with.
- Once you know what questions you need to answer, make your answers as detailed as possible. Rather than linking out to different pages, answer the questions as fully as possible on the landing page itself.
- Keep all your help sections up to date. Make sure that all screenshots or workflows are updated as you release new features or make changes in how your product works.
Leverage chatbots
Chatbots have evolved into sophisticated tools for timely and reliable customer support.
Unlike support reps who can handle one query at a time, chatbots can serve an infinite number of clients all at the same time.
Not only that, but chatbots work across time zones. They can be available any time your customer needs help and can help reduce the number of calls that get through to your agents.
Not to mention that they can reduce customer service costs by 30% and take only minutes to resolve simpler queries.
If you look in the bottom right of this blog post (unless you’re on a mobile), you’ll see our chatbot.
2 — How to reduce ticket backlog
While originally a tool for internal communication, Slack has evolved into a tool for both internal and external communication.
In June 2020, Slack introduced Slack Connect — an option for businesses to create channels for collaborating with external organizations without leaving their existing workspaces.
The feature has the power to reduce your backlog of support tickets by 64% and improve your resolution times by threefold.
Unlike shared channels which are limited to one organization per channel, Slack Connect allows up to 20 organizations to join a single channel, making it easier to navigate and keep track of conversations when dealing with multiple organizations.
Use Slack Connect with customers who don’t use Slack
While Slack Connect has gone a long way to open up collaboration with people from outside your organization, it still limits businesses to using Slack only.
But, the reality is that your clients might be using other tools like Microsoft Teams or Webex.
In fact, Microsoft Teams has about 145 million daily users and Webex boasts 60 million users.
This a big number of users who could also be your customers.
This is where Mio comes in.
Mio allows you to streamline all your communications across different tools in Slack.
With Mio, you can create a universal channel where you can invite Microsoft Teams or Webex users to join your Slack chat.
Rather than switching platforms, your agents can keep all client communication within Slack without asking customers to switch tools.
Providing your customers with an instant messaging space like Slack can do wonders not only for your ticket queues, but also for overall customer satisfaction.
Rather than having to deal with ticket numbers and search your inbox, customers can have an immediate communication line into your support team and reduce overall response times.
3 — How to close more support tickets
Now that we’ve looked at how to reduce the number of incoming queries, let’s look at how to close more tickets using Slack.
Once you’ve installed the Mio app in Slack, you’ve connected your client’s communication tool and can reduce your ticket backlog.
Enable synchronous communication
Did you know that the average customer ticket resolution time is three days and 10 hours?
Most of this time gets eaten up by ping-pong between your agents and you customers trying to get to the bottom of the issue.
Emails get lost in people’s inboxes and the communication can drag out for days instead of minutes or a few hours.
Slack can reduce the need for emails by 32% by providing both sides with a more immediate access to one another.
Instead of waiting for your customer to get to your email, by which time you might no longer be free to handle their query, you can message them and ask if they have a few minutes to spare to jump on a quick call.
This not only creates a more agile customer service, but it can reduce your backlog by resolving simple queries within minutes of them being logged.
And don’t forget, if they’re not using Slack themselves, you just need to invite them to join your universal channel from the platform of their choice.
4 — How do you ask a customer to close a ticket?
Regardless of what tool you use to track and triage tickets, it’s likely that you can create an integration with Slack in order to mimic a self-service desk within Slack.
Using Zapier, for instance, Slack can connect to over 3,000 applications so it’s likely you can find one that works best for your business.
Here, you can introduce a virtual assistant bot that can have scripts ready to respond to the most common queries — something similar to your website bot.
Or you can use Slack’s own automated Slackbots and commands to reach your customers with almost no effort on your part.
For instance, Slackbots can be triggered when a key phrase is being used like “how do I open a new workspace” and return an answer immediately.
You can also use bots to get permission to close a ticket when a customer responds with “that worked” or “it’s fixed”.
How do I reduce escalation calls?
You might have a support channel for resolving general questions and queries, but you don’t necessarily want customers to vent their frustrations in that same channel.
If you’d like to avoid escalations or simply get to the bottom of urgent issues faster, you can use direct messages to speed up communication.
With Mio installed, you can DM customers from Slack who use Microsoft Teams or Webex, making the support experience seamless for them.
Not only will this help you resolve tickets faster, but it will help you build trust with your customers, which can lead to better customer retention rates.
Conclusion
Reducing the number of support calls and tickets should never be done at the expense of stellar customer service.
It’s inevitable that good customer care will and should always involve some form of human interaction where agents can apply creativity to resolve more complex issues.
That said, leveraging automation and tools like Slack with Mio can improve your response times while giving your agents more time to handle more serious issues.
If you want to find out more about Mio and how it can help you streamline your support service in Slack, install it for free and start reducing support calls.
