During the holiday season, the demand for exceptional customer support becomes even more essential for businesses. This period often brings an influx of customer queries and concerns, making high customer satisfaction and loyalty important.
However, the seasonal surge can lead to inefficient ticket routing and assignment, resulting in prolonged customer wait times and an overwhelming workload for support agents.
To combat these challenges, businesses are adopting innovative solutions that leverage rule-based engines and intelligent algorithms to automate ticket routing. This automation is particularly beneficial during the busy holiday season. It ensures efficient handling of customer queries, reducing wait times and evenly distributing the workload among support agents. This saves valuable time for the agents and significantly enhances customer satisfaction.
Importance of AI and automation in holiday customer support
The key to managing the holiday rush is efficiency. Automated systems speed up the process of handling customer queries and free up support agents to focus on more complex issues that require a human touch. This is particularly beneficial during the holidays when time is of the essence, and customer patience can be short.
Moreover, the streamlined ticket routing made possible by these automated systems plays a crucial role in making the support process hassle-free. With AI-driven ticket routing, each customer query is intelligently directed to the most appropriate support agent, ensuring that the best-suited personnel resolves issues.
This accelerates the resolution process and significantly enhances the quality of customer support. Agents are better matched with queries that align with their expertise, leading to more effective and satisfying customer interactions.
In the next section of our blog, we'll explore ticket routing and how it minimizes wait times, improves agent efficiency, and ensures that customers receive the right kind of support promptly.
What is ticket routing?
Ticket routing assigns customer support tickets to the right agent or team. It analyzes details like topic, language, and channel, using predefined rules for efficient handling. By directing tickets to the most qualified agents, it enhances customer service efficiency and satisfaction.
In the past, the ticket routing process has been manual: agents gather incoming tickets from various channels, categorize them based on multiple criteria (such as subject, channel, language, customer importance, sentiment, severity, etc.) and forward them to the relevant individual or team. The objective is to guarantee swift and accurate resolution of each ticket, but with slow manual ticket routing, this often leads to angry customers.
The introduction of an automated ticket routing system simplifies this process and ensures your customer’s requests are on the smoothest path to resolution.
The challenge: Inefficient ticket routing and assignment
The absence of an efficient ticket routing system for customer inquiries, especially during the busy holiday season, creates significant challenges for both customers and customer service teams.
Long wait times and misdirected conversations can negatively impact the customer experience and place undue strain on support agents during this critical period.
To tackle this issue, DevRev Support introduces a streamlined workflow that efficiently routes and assigns tickets, significantly enhancing customer satisfaction and the effectiveness of the support team.
This is especially valuable during the holidays when handling a high volume of inquiries efficiently is crucial. It ensures that your support team receives requests that they are well-equipped to handle quickly and effectively, every time. This approach not only streamlines the support process but also contributes to a more pleasant holiday experience for both customers and staff.
Defining the solution: Rule-based engine and intelligent assignment
The essence of effective customer support software is centered around two elements: a rule-based engine for ticket routing and a sophisticated algorithm for intelligent assignment. These components are fundamental to the solution.
- Manual creation of routing policies: Support managers will have the power to create custom routing policies tailored to their team's needs. They can define various criteria, including ticket characteristics, team member skills, and customer preferences. This customization empowers support teams to create workflows that suit their unique requirements and resolve tickets faster.
- Intelligent assignment algorithm: The algorithm automates the process of assigning the right agent to a new ticket or conversation. It takes into account factors such as agent availability, workload, skill set, and historical performance. By intelligently matching support agents to tasks, this algorithm aims to expedite ticket resolution and enhance customer relationship.
- Automatic creation of routing rules: The solution uses clustering and classification techniques to automatically create routing policies. This automated system, groups similar tickets based on common characteristics and predicts routing policies for new tickets based on historical data. This automation not only saves time but also ensures consistent and effective routing decisions.
Driving success: The power of customization
DevRev Support's ticket routing feature optimizes customer service by intelligently directing inquiries to the appropriate teams. It includes time-based routing for efficient handling across time zones, content-specific routing to leverage team expertise, and customizable attribute-based routing for a tailored approach.
- Custom routing policies: Support managers will be able to create custom routing policies, enabling tailored and efficient workflows. This customization is expected to lead to improved routing accuracy and faster resolution times.
- Automated routing policies: As the solution evolves, the ability to automatically generate routing policies will streamline onboarding processes and give the support department the ability to solve customer issues faster.
- Intelligent agent assignment: The algorithm's ability to intelligently assign appropriate agents to tasks is anticipated to reduce workload imbalances and result in quicker resolution times.
User stories: Empowering support teams
DevRev Support adapts to the unique demands of the holiday season, offering solutions that enable both support managers and team members to seamlessly integrate new functionalities into their high-pressure workflows:
- For support managers: During the holiday rush, support managers can effortlessly create and manage custom routing policies. This capability is crucial for optimizing team performance amidst customer inquiries. Smart ticket assignments ensure the right agent handles each query, enhancing efficiency and customer satisfaction.
- For support team members: Support team members gain a crucial advantage with a clear view of their assigned tickets. This visibility is essential when managing a high volume of customer interactions during the busy holiday season. Additionally, they can reroute conversations to the most suitable colleague, ensuring the right expert addresses each customer query.
- Prompt and accurate responses: Assigning tickets only to online team members is a game-changer during the holidays. This feature guarantees that the available and appropriate agent promptly handles tasks. It prevents delays in response times, a critical factor in maintaining customer satisfaction during the holiday rush.
Other enhancements to help you during the holiday season:
Route tickets based on availability
Don’t leave your customers hanging when they reach out. Availability-based assignment ensures your customer inquiries are routed to team members who can respond quickly.
Give your customer a seat at the table
We made it possible for your customers to escalate tickets themselves from the customer portal. Take the guesswork out of work prioritization and deliver features and fixes your customers care deeply about.
Effortlessly escalate complex tickets
It's now even easier for your support team to escalate tickets. With this change, your L1 teams can effortlessly escalate tickets to the right team by updating the “Group” field. Users can easily configure the notifications and actions that should be taken on an escalated ticket.
It's now even easier for your support team to escalate tickets. With this change, your L1 teams can effortlessly escalate tickets to the right team by updating the “Group” field. Users can easily configure the notifications and actions that should be taken on an escalated ticket.
If you’re hungry for more, automated ticket routing is just one of the features we updated recently. Our engineering team merges an average of 850+ pull requests per week. That includes new features, fixes, design improvements, and more. You can check out the full changelog here: https://docs.devrev.ai/changelog
Future enhancements and beyond
This accurate ticket routing solution lays the foundation for enhancing the support experience in multiple dimensions. Features such as gamification, intuitive user experiences for routing policy creation, and performance tracking offer exciting opportunities for growth. Additionally, the integration of features like leaderboards, performance tracking, and rewards could further motivate support agents for nurturing customer relationships.
Conclusion
DevRev’s auto-routing feature, driven by customer requests and comprehensive product requirements defined by our team, aims to revolutionize the way customer support teams manage their workload during the holiday rush. By implementing a rule-based engine for ticket routing, an algorithm for intelligent agent assignment, and features like automatic policy creation, the solution aims to improve support efficiency, shorten resolution times, and boost customer satisfaction.
The power of customization enables support teams to create workflows that align with their specific needs, ensuring a more tailored and efficient support experience. As the solution evolves, enhancements like gamification and performance tracking promise to further enhance the support ecosystem. With the implementation of this innovative approach, companies can confidently provide top-notch customer support that meets the demands of modern business during the holiday season.
