Whether you run a SAS company, an e-commerce platform, or a coffee shop, how customers experience your product is an important part of your business. It doesn’t count only for the classical services businesses (like in HoReCa) but in all domains.
Customers have become more knowledgeable and more astute in researching the right match for their needs. With all the options available out there, the difference doesn’t stand only in pricing or the key features, or quality of products, but very much in how your brand interacts with the customer. And no matter how much you try to do things the right way, there will be bugs, things that don’t go as expected, complaints, and requests.
The customer support team, thus, plays a crucial role in keeping customers happy. But when they deal with hundreds of messages, it becomes painstaking work to sort out the pain points to address. So, this is where ticket tagging saves the day.
What Is Ticket Tagging in customer service
First, let’s make it clear what a “ticket” is. Speaking of customer service, a ticket is a message, a piece of communication, between a client and a member of your customer support team. The communication starts, usually, with an observation/ question/ request on the client’s part, followed by the support agent’s answer. Sometimes, the tickets (regarded as an exchange of messages) contain various information about what the customer wants or what doesn’t work well.
Needless to say, the clients’ requests can’t be solved straight away. At least, a significant part. So, the tickets are “stored” by the ticketing system and forwarded to the technical team that can actually do something about those bugs, feature improvements, etc. Now imagine hundreds of such tickets in the course of a couple of days, flooding the support agents and the product team with ticket data. Adding tags to tickets is the way to manage all that customer data efficiently (or at all). Tags are nothing else than labels that help organize and categorize customer support tickets. Just like the labels on the grandma’s jars of jam, that helped you quickly find that favourite marmalade amongst the dozens of jars in the pantry.
Therefore, ticket tagging is the process of adding tags to tickets, so it becomes easier to find the messages on a certain topic, learn the contact reasons, prioritize the issues to address, get things fixed, and ultimately, improve your customer experience, so the gates of Heaven stay open to your business.
5 Benefits of ticket tagging
Adding tags to each customer ticket takes time and effort, in addition to the work of defining the right tags in the first place. Yes, it can be helpful for organizing and categorizing, but is it really worth all that investment of the company’s resources? Let’s see what the benefits are.
Reduce average response time
Having defined tags that help the customer support team organize tickets by subject, it is easier to go through all the customer insight about your product. Finding the common issues at a glance means less time spent on reading and analysing each message. As a consequence, your support agents can answer the client much faster, especially if the issue had been already addressed in a previous ticket with the same tag.
Improve customer experience
The ultimate objective of a ticketing system, in the first place, is to improve what customers experience when interacting not only with your software or website, but the brand, in general. So, how exactly can ticket tagging help achieve that? By grouping and pointing out relevant tickets such as tickets that have to do with important aspects of the customer journey, those which indicate which parts of your website or app users interact the most with, high-risk errors that can chase clients away. Needless to say, that the sooner your support system identifies the “hot” customer issues, the faster the product team can address them, with the most positive impact on the client.
Allocate resources more efficiently
Users can complain a lot. Of course, they don’t do it just for fun; when they open a support ticket, it is about something that matters to them. But to be realistic, you cannot spend the entire time of your support and product teams dealing with every single detail signalled by the users. Ticket tagging helps you organize the contact reasons, flag the smaller issues and highlight the urgent ones, so average handling time is reduced and the priorities are addressed. Dealing first with those aspects that contribute the most to client retention and monetization is one of the best advantages of adding tags to your tickets.
Get quality analytics and reporting
Adding tags to tickets, you already prepare the customer data for further analysis. An important insight for business decisions can be extracted even from a closed ticket, provided you have organized tickets by tags that make it easy to extract relevant information. What customers signal about their interaction with your app or website is important beyond solving bugs or explaining features. This kind of tickets based insight offers user behaviour intel that can drive further product and business development. Leverage feedback for marketing
Support tickets are not only about what doesn’t work. Even when they signal an issue, clients may also point out what they love about your product (it can’t be everything bad, right?). Why not take those positive remarks and use them to promote the advantages of your app or website? They will be much more believable, coming straight through the voice of customers. Also, the issues reported can make good subjects for content marketing – explaining s causes and solutions in blogs or media articles. All this can be leveraged if you tag tickets with names aligned with your marketing operations.
Why is Automated Ticket Tagging Important
We are clear now why ticket tagging is important for a startup or an already mature business – it is all about keeping the customers satisfied with your product, so they continue to use it. The great surprise, however, is that, despite the large ticket volume received every month, there are still many companies that choose to do the tagging manually. Leaving aside the average handling time required by each ticket, spending extra time to analyse and identify the specific tag for each ticket seems highly inefficient, to say the least. But businesses all over the world still choose to do it. So let’s take a look at why it is a good thing for the company to choose manually tag customer contact feedback.
First, here’s how automated ticket tagging works: the software scans the message’s text (whether it came from your support desk platform, via e-mail, or in-app) and searches for the keywords that were pre-defined by you, so it can organize tickets by tags associated with those keywords.
Let’s say you predefine as keywords “unsubscribe”, “cancel subscription”, “payment”, “refund”, or simply “subscription”. Tickets containing these words can be tagged with the “subscriptions” specific tag. Consequently, based on the rules and triggers that were pre-set, they will be automatically directed to the support agent that handles subscription issues, without the need to be analysed by other members of the support team, assigned with a tag, and, finally, forwarded to the agent who has the information and authority to answer. Whenever there is a subscription or payment issue, you wouldn’t want to keep the customer waiting, while your team sorts out the problem and who should answer.
Did we mention the time saved from manually tagging a huge ticket volume, that can be invested in answering users, solving pain points, and, ultimately, that improves customer experience?
In short, automated ticket tagging is important because it saves you time and money, not to mention it keeps customers happy so that your business keeps access to the gates of Heaven.
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Why manual ticket tagging is not the solution
Some of you may argue that nothing can beat the precision of human analysis when it comes to allocating the right tags to ticket messages. To some extent, this may be true. However, when a person is dealing with dozens of written messages or calls daily, the accuracy of their analysis is severely affected.
For good coverage of customer issues subjects, one should manually tag at least 50 labels, probably, together with rules and triggers. Now imagine a support agent attentively reading a message and browsing through all those labels to find the ones that best match the matters described by the customer. It may take a fair 10 minutes of effort. For one ticket. Multiply with, say, 30. That’s more than half of a work’s day program spent only on allocating tags to your tickets. Not to mention the nervous wear of such a repetitive job. Anyone would get annoyed after having to manually tag not even 10 tickets, especially if they happen daily. As consequence, tickets won’t be labelled appropriately, nor efficiently organized as route tickets or child tickets. So, they get forwarded to the wrong persons, leading to longer response time and frustration inside the customer support team.
On the other hand, if you reduce the number of tags, to make manual ticket tagging faster, you risk either losing a lot of important customer insight based on ticket or prioritizing non-urgent matters. Some issues may not fit with the existing tags and either your support agents will overlook them, or put them top of the list, even if they don’t belong. The result is, again, a long response time and frustration for both the customers and your team.
Top tools to use for ticket tagging
It is clear by now that automated ticket tagging is the way to go if you want to improve your customer relationship, especially if you run a tech business. There are plenty of ticket tagging tools to choose from. We’ve made a selection of what we think may suit most needs. There are help desk-focused tools with tagging automation as a feature and those that focus on customer feedback analysis with automated tagging as a feature integrated with other customer support channels (including help desk platforms). All these tools allow customization: deleting tags or finding the tags to improve and modify the tags.
Zendesk: is a help desk tool, mainly; their solution spreads across customer messaging and help center with automated ticket tagging as a feature. It is suited for mid and large-sized companies.
Freshdesk: they provide customer support across multiple channels. It can convert customer feedback into tickets, then automatically prioritize and assign the tickets to the right support teams.
Zohodesk: another omnichannel customer service software that employs AI to automate ticket tagging.
IrisAgent: this tool employs AI to automate customer support workflows, including ticket tagging. It works with some of the most used CRMs.
Monkeylearn: this tool falls into the “ticket management focus” category. It automatically tags tickets using machine learning models and issues visual tag reports.
ClientZen: it is the tool to use to automate tagging not only for help desk platforms but also for customer insight coming from emails or client reviews. It employs AI to allocate the appropriate types of tags for each message, without the need for an agent to analyse the text and browse through hundreds of labels.
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How to automate ticket tagging using ClientZen
Say you already use a help desk platform or a more complex CRM. But you get relevant feedback from various channels and tools, which all turn into support tickets. So, we’ll explain how you get the advantage of automated ticket tagging with ClientZen, by integrating your various customer support channels.
First, you connect all your communication channels with the ClientZen app. It has native integrations with Intercom, Zendesk, and Trustpilot. You can use Zapier to further integrate Freshdesk or Front. Basically, whether you get your customer knowledge base via chat, email, reviews, help desk tickets, or any sources you use for custom data, ClientZen automatically tags that feedback.
To get the most of automation for ticket tagging, create the topics to track. You can customize topics, organize them into groups, and tweak them with real-time preview.
Finally, the tickets, reviews, and conversations get automatically tagged under the topics and groups you have defined.
How does it benefit your business? Less time spent on analysing tickets, more focus on clients’ needs, more relevant customer insight and intel on product use, resulting in improvements in what customers experience and business growth.
Customer feedback made easy
Customer feedback tagged automatically
Real-time customer sentiment scores
Pain-points evolution over time
