Ever been in that situation where you send in a ticket and receive additional questions in the reply? Where a majority of the time is spent on the first iterations of emails flying back and forth to collect the necessary information? 

This is a very common scenario with traditional ticketing systems, where barriers exist between teams causing the communication to be unnatural and inefficient.  

Why do we insist on moving users away from their natural habitat of daily communication to a 3rd party system, just to share a reply?

Good news is that there is a solution to this problem. Say hello to the modern ticketing system, built natively on Slack where your daily communication happens.  


Why is a traditional ticketing system not a good fit when using Slack? 

Conversations have changed rapidly in the last year’s, from being email-first to moving into messaging platforms like Slack. Teams and colleagues are now messaging each other with instant replies, keeping the conversations focused with messages in different channels. 

There is a great value of having a single communication platform like this; instant communication, close collaboration with different teams and the ease to share information.

A platform like Slack is truly empowering cooperation within a company, as everyone knows what channels to keep discussions in and anyone can reach out to have a chat intra-team or cross-team instantly. 

This is a challenge for traditional ticketing systems as they are not built for a platform like Slack. Their primary ticketing functionality and supportive functions are far away from Slack in their standalone system, far away from where the daily communication happens.

Additional challenges with traditional ticketing systems for modern workplaces using Slack: 

  • You lose the context of the solution of a ticket as the majority of communication is happening on Slack while only the final reply is added to your ticketing system. 
  • Your users are forced to navigate away from their natural place of having conversation to a 3rd party system. 
  • There are barriers between teams as there are no natural communication channels for these teams in the traditional ticketing system.
  • Different tickets queues and complex workflows makes it harder to scale ticketing across teams.

Modern workplaces using Slack require a modern ticketing systems that are purpose built for Slack and aligned with the daily communication of your users, based on their conversations

The history behind the Slack ticketing system

As Slack gained popularity a few years back, the need to structure a growing number of requests across channels got significant across organizations. Teams would create their own standards on messages within Slack in order to provide structure to a process that people should comply with inside of channels. 

They were using message threads and different emojis to triage and respond to issues, helping support other teams and communicate the status of the submitted message. Ending up in overusing features like Mark as unread and Remind me later.

This was a challenge across organizations where the common pattern was to create custom solutions to avoid negative impact on productivity and accomplish scale. The company Teem had this challenge and explained their successful strategy of moving the complete IT helpdesk in to Slack.

They used what Slack had to offer to solve their current needs back then. Today this need could have been easily solved using a Slack ticket system adopted to their organization needs. 

How a Slack ticketing system will make your customers happier

96% of your customers will leave if they experience poor customer service, according to a study from Forbes. Providing a great customer experience is of the essence to minimize churn and keep your customers happy. 

Support cases submitted by your customers make up the major touchpoint your customers will have with your business. Every support ticket counts and sums up the final experience the customer has with your company. 

Every support ticket is also a number of internal touchpoints with one or different teams to provide the final solution for the customer. The time it takes to share a first reply on the ticket and finally resolve the ticket, is what can impact the final customer satisfaction, according to research from ZenDesk. By reducing the overall time to solve a ticket, you can impact the experience of your customers. 

By utilizing a Slack ticketing system across your teams internally, you can greatly optimize how your teams co-operates to solve tickets for your customer, resulting in a much improved customer experience. 

Teams that are adopted to conversational ticketing, such as Slack ticketing system, are empowered with with the following values that impacts the overall customer ticketing experience positively:

  1. Natural conversation around tickets where context is never lost and always connected to the ticket and the conversation directly in Slack.
  2. Users never have to leave Slack to submit and remediate tickets, resulting in faster turnaround times to resolve tickets. 
  3. Overview and filter all tickets inside of Slack, making it easy to track tickets that have not been updated within the defined response times and identify tickets that are missing replies.

If you are using a slack ticketing system like Suptask, it will further optimize the complete ticket lifecycle as it offers integrations with issue tracking systems such as Gitlab and Github. Suptask unifies the tickets and optimizes turnaround times on updates and coordinating relation between tickets and issues even further.

Why the customer experience impact your business and revenue

By working to improve the customer experience you will see the effect of an overall impact across your business as it is directly related with how you keep customers paying for your product & service. We have listed a number of areas where the impact is proven to work:

  1. Improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. Providing a great experience to customers can help improve their satisfaction and increase their loyalty to a company. This can lead to repeat business and positive word-of-mouth, which can drive more customers to the company.
  2. Increased revenue and profitability. Satisfied and loyal customers are more likely to spend more with a company and to recommend it to others. This can help increase a company's revenue and profitability.
  3. Competitive advantage. In today's competitive business environment, providing a great experience to customers can help a company differentiate itself from its competitors and gain a competitive advantage. This can help the company attract and retain customers, and ultimately, succeed in the market.
  4. Better reputation and brand image. Providing a great experience to customers can help a company build a positive reputation and enhance its brand image. This can lead to more trust and credibility, and can help the company attract talent and partners.

What teams could benefit from a Slack ticketing system? 

All teams that are utilizing Slack are a candidate to benefit from a Slack ticketing system. Below we are listing a set of popular use cases across teams which have been proven to benefit from submitting and remediating their tickets on Slack, using a Slack ticketing system. 

  • Product teams can receive tickets from other teams such as Customer Support, to help evaluate ideas, improvements or issues with the product directly in the conversations related to a ticket. 
  • Engineers using a Slack ticketing system benefit from less context-switching by never leaving Slack. By integrating with GitHub and GitLab, the ticketing system is deeply integrated into the existing workflow of most Engineering teams. 
  • IT Operations teams can receive escalations from Customer Support directly on Slack. Enabling conversations within message threads tied to tickets to impact the customer support tickets with faster resolution times.  
  • Sales or Sales Operations (SalesOps) can work closer together to handle internal ticketing tasks related to the sales process natively on Slack. 
  • Human Resources (HR) or People Operations (Ops) handles inquiries across an organization. By utilizing a Slack ticketing system with tickets allowed to be submitted through Direct Messages (DM), they can scale ticketing inline with any privacy concerns.

How to get started with a Slack ticketing system? 

The modern ticketing system is a product adapted to how your users are working, instead of forcing them to work according to the product. That is why Suptask is one of most popular conversational ticketing products built to work natively as a Slack ticketing system. 

Suptask enables team-to-team ticketing for any team within your organization on Slack. Teams can easily customize how the workflow for submitting and remediating should be routed by enabling it across different Slack channels. 

Ticket forms and custom fields allows Suptask to help users submit the data and information required to have as smooth ticketing process as possible for the responding agents that remediates the ticket. 

With integrations, teams can work efficiently with Suptask within their current product ecosystem. Among a few examples, the integrations are available for these products ZenDesk, JIRA, GitHub, GitLab etc.

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