Customer Service Ticketing

From Online Business Wiki

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Main Features 3 How does it work 4 Case Assignment Rules 5 CSR Availability 6 Email sent to CSRs when inquiries are received from customers 7 Email sent to customers when CSRs reply to a customer inquiry 8 Blacklisting Email Address 9 Important instruction for when you reply to customer inquiries 10 Customizing Emails 10.1 Tags to use in customer email 11 FAQs

Introduction

You can use the customer ticketing framework to streamline and better manage your communication with your customers. Traditionally customer service is done via email into one’s inbox. Although this approach works for a small number of inquiries, as customer email volumes increase, a ticketing framework will ensure that customer inquiries are handled in a timely fashion. Another major benefit of this framework is that it captures all communication between your customers and CSRs (customer service representatives) into the built-in customer database. This means over time you’ll build a valuable database of past inquiries.

Main Features

• Use your favorite email client such as Outlook for all correspondence
• Captures every inquiry into the database including file attachments and embedded images
• Case assignment rules, e.g. random, least load
• Manage CSR availability
• Blacklist email addresses
• Completely customize outbound emails to customer
• Report on service center and CSR performance
• And many more!

How does it work

Setting up a customer ticketing service for your organization is straightforward. First you have to nominate an email address that you want to use for this purpose. Most organizations use an email address such as:support@yourcompany.com.

Once you designate an email address, then you should no longer retrieve mail from it directly (i.e. via email clients, webmail, etc) and allow the system to manage that mailbox. This is how it will work once enabled :

• You designate the email address you want to enable customer ticketing for
• The system will retrieve email from this mailbox on regular intervals
• For each email retrieved, the system will:
  • Check to see if it’s an inquiry is from the customer or the CSR. It’s important to note that customers will send inquiries to this email address. Equally when CSRs reply to customers, they send their response to the same email address
  • If from a customer then:
  • If it’s a new inquiry, it will create a new case and send the new inquiry to a CSR based on the case assignment rules you set
  • Otherwise, if it’s a reply to an existing case, then the email is appended to that existing case and forwarded to the CSR that was dealing with the case originally
• If from a CSR then:
  • CSR response is appended to case, and response + case history is emailed to customer. It’s really important that when a CSR responds to a customer inquiry that they send the email from an email address that exists in the site. The system will recognize CSRs because they are users in the Admin, whilst customers are not users in the Admin.

Case Assignment Rules

Every time a new inquiry is received from a customer the system will decide how that case is routed based on the assignment rules that you select. The available assignment rules include:

When new inquiries are received from your customers:

• Do Not Assign - new cases are added to the system but no notification is email to CSRs
• Limit Cases - the next CSR who has less than 5 active cases is selected. If none are found then the system waits until a CSR's load is reduced to less than 5 active cases.An active case is a case with new, opened, re-opened or escalated status (i.e. not closed)
• Randomly - an available CSR is selected on a random basis from the 1st level support group
• Least Load - an available CSR that has the least number of non-closed cases is selected from the 1st level support group
• Launch Workflow - Case is not assigned but a workflow is launched. You can customize a workflow to notify one or more people within your organization whenever new cases are received

When a reply to an existing inquiry is received from your customers:

The system will check to see if the CSR is available, if so, it will append the inquiry to the existing case and email the details to the CSR. If the CSR is not available, the system will use your case assignment rules to find a new CSR and, if successful, it will assign the case to that CSR and notify them with the case details.

CSR Availability

When you setup your ticketing service you can choose a 1st level and a 2nd level or escalated role to deal with the inquiries. Choosing these is optional. For instance if you do not choose a 1st level role, then when new customer inquiries are received they cannot be assigned to anyone and therefore no one will be notified.

Setting a CSR’s availability has two important outcomes:

• When new customer inquiries are received, CSRs that are not available are ignored from the selection process to handle new cases
• When a customer inquiry is received for an existing case, if the CSR already assigned to that case is no longer available then the system will choose a new CSR based on your case assignment rules
• If no CSR is available and you are using a setting such as: Limit Cases, Randomly or Least Load, then the case is unassigned and the system will try periodically in order to assign the case to a CSR that becomes available

It’s important to note that CSR availability is on a per role basis. This means if you have set up more than one ticketing service and they share the same role, then when you make a CSR unavailable, this will apply for all the ticketing services that use that role.

Email sent to CSRs when inquiries are received from customers

Whenever a new customer inquiry is received, depending on your case assignment rules, it’ll generally be forwarded to a CSR to deal with. Below is a typical email which contains all the details the CSR needs to effectively reply to this customer.

Here is a quick description of the various sections in this email:

1. Name and email address of the customer
2. Blacklisting - By clicking either link you can instantly blacklist this customer’s email address. You can undo a blacklist via the Administration interface.
3. Subject of the inquiry
4. ID of the case. You can search for this case via the Administration area (Customers->Search). Please ensure you choose to search through Cases.
5. Date the case was first created
6. Total duration of the case from when it was created to the time this email was received.
7. If the customer CC’s others on their customer inquiry you will see their name here. The system will create these recipients in your customer database and will link them to this case internally.
8. The CSR the case is assigned to as well as the 1st level and 2nd level roles applicable to this customer ticketing service. Read below to learn more about re-assignment and escalation to a different role.
9. The list of CSRs in each role. Read below to learn more about re-assignment and escalation to a different CSR.
10. The current status of the case. You can configure cases to be closed each time you reply. A closed case is automatically set to reopened when a customer replies to it.
11. You can quickly change the status of a case by clicking on the applicable status
12. The list of files attached to this case. Each time an inquiry is received or a CSR replies to a customer inquiry, any attached files are captured and attached to the case.
13. The entire communication history between the customer and the CSR. This is a great way to quickly get an overview of the entire communication.
14. Click this link to view this case in the Administration area. You will be asked to login first.
15. It’s imperative that when replying to a customer that any new material is entered above this line. This is then appended to the case and an email is generated and sent to the customer.
16. The subject line carriers the ID of the case which allows the system to detect whether this is a new or existing case and to append subsequent threads to the same case.

Email sent to customers when CSRs reply to a customer inquiry

When a CSR replies to a customer query they will simply reply to the email they receive (shown above). Their response will go back to the same mailbox as where customers send emails to. This is why it’s imperative that when CSRs reply to customer inquiries that they use an email address that is a user in the Admin area. This is how the system knows that the reply has come from a CSR and is to be routed to a customer.

You can customize the appearance of this email and the information that is contained within it (refer below on how to customize this).

Re-Assignment and Escalation Procedures Case re-assignment and escalation are an important part of any ticketing system. Often customer inquiries need to be dealt by someone more experienced or someone who has specialized knowledge in that area. Re-assigning and escalations are essentially the same, however, when escalating from the 1st level CSR to a 2nd level CSR then you can optionally send an escalation message to the customer. Generally, this message will advise the customer that their inquiry has been escalated and that they should allow 1-2 days for a reply or something to that effect. There are 2 ways to re-assign or escalate cases:

• Escalate by clicking on a Role or CSR’s name in the email received. This will instantly re-assign the case to the applicable CSR
• Alternatively you can click on the (Email) link next to each role or CSR. This is a more popular option which allows the CSR to provide some private information for the reasons behind re-assignment or escalation for the next CSR.

When escalating to a role or a CSR by clicking on the email link, a new email window will open. Simply enter details for your re-assignment or escalation so the next CSR has adequate background information for dealing with this case. This information is considered private and will never be forward to the customer.

The information in the red dotted line is the extra information the last CSR entered just before re-assignment or escalation of this case to a new CSR.

Blacklisting Email Address

From time to time you may need to blacklist certain incoming inquiries because they are either abuse or unrelated to your organization. For example an incoming inquiry may be a holiday auto responder, spam or some sort of automation that’s creating new cases unnecessarily. The ticketing system uses sophisticated techniques to detect looping of emails, however it cannot in all instances detect between a real email vs. an automated one. In those cases you can manually blacklist an email address. You can also optionally blacklist an email address with a specific subject. In those cases an email is only rejected if the from address and the subject meet your criteria. If you don’t specify a subject then if the from address matches then the email is rejected. When an email is rejected it is deleted off of your mail server permanently.

Important instruction for when you reply to customer inquiries

Whenever we reply to customer inquires it’s normal to greet the customer, provide a reply to their query and then sign-off. With the ticketing feature, you no longer need to greet nor sign-off. This means when you receive a customer inquiry via email, you select reply and enter the answer there. When the system receives the reply, it will add the greeting to the beginning, e.g. “Hello John” and it will add a sign-off with your name and the signature that may be setup for the ticketing service. This approach will ensure CSRs reply to customer queries in a more efficient manner.

Normally you would enter this:

Now you would only enter your actual reply for the customer inquiry (displayed in red above). The system will append the greeting and the sign-off automatically when it forwards your reply to the customer.

Customizing Emails

When using this feature there are 3 different emails being sent back and forth between customers and CSRs. These are:

• Auto Responder email that is sent to customers whenever you receive a new inquiry from them. You can completely customize this email. This is done in Admin->Customer Service Ticketing. Choose a Customer Service Account and then select Auto Responder.

• The email your customers receive when a CSR replies to their inquiries. You can completely customize this email. This is done via Admin->System Emails->Customer Service Ticketing.

• The email sent to your CSRs when a new customer inquiry is received. This is a system email only ever sent to CSRs and cannot be customized. This email contains all the information a CSR needs to either reply to the customer or re-assign/escalate the case to a different CSR.

Tags to use in customer email

• {tag_filelist} - list of files attached to case and link to download any
• {tag_threadcount} - number of discussion in the case
• {tag_threadlist} - the entire discussion history or the thread
• {tag_threadlast} - last or most recent discussion in thread

FAQs

Q) Can I turn on ticketing for an email address not hosted by this service? A) Yes you can. It doesn’t matter where the mailbox resides. To use this service you simply need to provide the username and password for the mailbox so the system can retrieve the mail in that mailbox on regular intervals.

Q) What happens when an email is received from a customer on existing case but the CSR is no longer available? A) Normally existing cases are always routed to the same CSR. However if the CSR is made unavailable then the system will choose a new CSR based on the case assignment rules you set whenever an email is received for an existing case that is assigned to me.

Q) Can I publish customer inquires in a secure zone so customers can view all their past cases? A) Yes you can. Please visit: http://onlinebusinesswiki.com/index.php?title=Secure_Zones#Publishing_Case_History_for_Customers_in_Secure_Zones to learn more.