A ticketing system solution can be extremely helpful for businesses large and small. For some businesses, they’re a necessity. Finding the right one for your company can be quite a headache because of the sheer number of available solutions. Each ticketing system comes with its own different degree of cost, functionality and quirks to consider before investing. Hopefully, this short article will help you narrow down your search for a well-rounded ticketing system solution that suits you.

Does the ticketing system have a customer portal?

Having a ticketing system that features a customer portal can decrease the amount of time your support personnel spend on the phone.  by allowing customers to enter their own tickets, as well as check the status of issues they’ve already reported. This results in your technicians having more time to actually work on resolving the problems your customers report.

Automation is a must.

Automation cuts down on administrative overhead, which in turn saves time, money, caffeine, and aspirin. A good ticketing system should at least be able to automatically assign tickets to an appropriate person or group of people based on problem category and support personnel availability. Additionally, it should be able to automatically escalate an incident to a higher-level technician or supervisor if the incident gets uncomfortably close to breaching your customer’s SLA.

Application Integration

When your system monitoring software can integrate with your ticketing system, the benefits of automation really become apparent. When it works well, your ticketing system can intercept your monitoring solution’s alerts. Then it will create tickets for them, and route them to available technicians. Modern ticketing systems typically have functions to create tickets by parsing emails. If your monitoring system can’t directly interface with your ticketing system, you might be concerned.  As long as your monitoring system is capable of sending emails, you can still take advantage of ticket system automation.

Ticketing Systems Workflows

Most ticketing systems are designed with technical support in mind. But a really good ticketing system should be more flexible than that. Workflow support in a ticketing system can allow you to standardize and break down any business process into discreet steps. These steps can be assigned as tickets to the people in your organization that perform those specific business functions.

Knowledge Base

Having an integrated knowledge base, especially one that recommends articles based on keywords entered into a ticket, can be a lifesaver. A knowledge base can save you time by recommending answers to common or recurring problems, so that you don’t have to troubleshoot them repeatedly. As an added bonus, knowledge bases make excellent training materials for new employees when they’re kept up to date.

Asset Management

Asset management is great for keeping track of inventory, but also allows you to tie support tickets to particular pieces of hardware. Simple reporting features that every ticketing system should have will allow you to see what problems a particular piece of equipment has experienced over its entire lifetime. This can save you money by telling you what particular model or brand to stay away from in the future.

Depending on the scale and scope of your business and the services it provides, you may or may not not require all of the functions outlined above. Hopefully this overview has helped you identify the “must-have” features and narrow down your “short list” of ticketing system solutions. Happy hunting!