Ticketing systems have been around for decades. Ticket numbers, formal emails (“don’t reply below this line”), isolated data (“what is your order number?”), have been a part of our lives as customers and customer support professionals. It’s hard to believe a better world is possible. Kustomer, built by industry veterans, was created with a different vision in mind — a customer-centric platform that ties together all the conversations and business information about a customer into a single timeline, together with powerful workflows that enable customer-first companies to execute their customer experience vision.
What Is Ticketing In Customer Service?
Traditional help desk ticketing enables companies to resolve customer issues. A ticketing system generates a document that records the interactions for a service or support case. The ticket is shared between the agent and customer, logging the exchanges on a continuous thread.
While this seems to be an efficient enough solution to customer problems, it is not always the most feasible solution, especially for the customer. With ticketing, each conversation is siloed from the rest of a customer’s brand interactions and tends to be non-contextual and impersonal.
What Is the Process of Ticketing?
The process of ticketing usually begins with a ticket containing information initially filled out by the customer. This same ticket can be referred back to by the agent as well as the customer at any point in the conversation. The agent is able to be notified of any updates or new information from the customer, and the agent is able to close the ticket at any point when the problem is resolved.
The downside to the process of ticketing is that history is erased and agents won’t have that history at their fingertips in order to reference during a future conversation. For example, once the ticket is closed by the agent, the customer could come back the next day with a similar problem but get assigned to a different agent. The customer then has to explain their situation all over again, which could eventually lead to some form of frustration, and the agent won’t have background information about their situation or the conversation they had with previous agents.
In the past year, a number of customers have successfully migrated from ticket-based solutions to Kustomer. Here are a few items that CX agents and executives who made the switch have highlighted about making the move:
1) From Isolated Tickets to a Single Timeline View of the Customer
How many platforms does your team use to communicate with customers? Is your team in constant need to merge tickets? Because tickets from different channels are often disconnected, it’s easy to run into a customer who is chatting with another agent while you’re in the middle of replying to their email. Or worse, you might reply without knowing that they’re already being helped.
In Kustomer, you can see all the communications with your customer in one place. That means that real omnichannel communication is possible. You can go from emailing a customer to chatting with them, to calling them on the phone, and see all those records in one conversation. That’s because the customer is the atomic unit of our platform — everything revolves around them.
2) From Disconnected Solutions to Actionable Integrations
How many tabs does your team need to keep open at the same time? When your customer support platform is disconnected from the rest of your platforms, agents need to keep copying and pasting customers’ email addresses into your admin systems to get even basic information about the history of their interactions with your company—past orders, delivery status, etc. Kustomer pulls data from all your platforms and tools and arranges it in a way that makes sense for your business.
With Kustomer’s single timeline view, the customer is the focal point, not individual conversations. Not only does Kustomer merge every interaction into the same conversation automatically, but it also integrates with your other systems — like Shopify or JIRA, just to name a few. That means you can see when orders are dispatched and delivered, or previous items that customers have added to their carts or subscribed to on your site. All of this is displayed in that same timeline, so you have a deeper context whenever they reach out. Everything is completely customizable, so it’s easy to create a view that empowers your team to tackle your specific business challenges.
With this level of integration, tasks like returns or reimbursements can be completely automated (as we’ll discuss in the next section). No matter if your business is pizza, shoes, or software, Kustomer can be customized to show your agents everything they need to know in a single window. Orders, shipping info, product or version number, buyer and seller information, and social interactions can all appear beside each customer in bespoke “K Objects”. This makes it easy for agents to get the whole picture and take the next best action, or communicate with the right parties while staying on one platform.
3) From Repetitive Tasks to Intuitive Automation
Kustomer makes it easy to automate commonly-used workflows so that your agents can focus on connecting with customers rather than rote tasks. Don’t be limited by basic workflow functionality that won’t simplify your agents’ day-to-day work. Now you can define intelligent, branched workflows and reports encompassing all customer-related systems in your business.
Because Kustomer integrates with your other platforms, it’s way more powerful than just showing your customer history — it allows you to act on it. These branched, multi-step workflows make it easy to efficiently scale your team and automate simple tasks. Sending instant follow-up emails or processing a return is now only a click away and no longer has to take your agents’ attention away from the customer.
4) From Reactive Support to a Proactive Experience
Proactive service solves for what your customers need. That means it may be something they haven’t even asked for, like a faster delivery to avoid an incoming storm that might cause delays. It’s one of the best ways to build stronger relationships and deliver meaningful experiences. Ticketing customer service systems are inherently reactive, as agents only respond when customers have a problem or a question. Because Kustomer keeps all of your customer information in one place, you can create granular searches for customers around specific behaviors or qualities, all on the same platform. That means your service isn’t just efficient — it’s smart.
If you want to build customer loyalty, you can search for customers that may have bought a product that could give them an issue, then send them all a message proactively. Let’s say your new mascara is mislabeled as “Vegan” — you can look up all the customers who have preordered it, then send them an email letting them know the mistake and offering a free refund or exchange if they don’t want it — all before their orders have arrived. Or if there’s going to be a storm that affects customers in a certain geographic area, you can notify all the customers with orders going to that region with a list of options before their shipment is delayed. With all your customers’ information in one place, it’s easier to surprise and delight them than ever.
When you combine this robust search capability with automated workflows, intelligent and proactive outreach can become a reality.
By putting all the information about your customers in a single view and making it easier than ever to act on it, Kustomer is winning over companies across industries.
