Why You Should Start Using Conversational Ticketing

Do you find your team spending more time on managing a ticket process than collaborating? If so, it’s time to adopt conversational ticketing on Slack. It’s a modern way to organize team communication and tackle support tickets more effectively. Let’s take a look at why conversational ticketing is the new way forward for teams, what benefits it brings, and how you can implement it. 

How Does Conversational Ticketing Work?

Conversational ticketing works similarly to how you would have a normal conversation and at the same time manage any tasks as a part of that conversation. Just as you might compose an email to send to a colleague while they’re on vacation, you can also create a ticket on Slack. The difference is that, rather than creating a ticket in a separate ticketing app, you can create and manage it right in Slack. 

When you post a new ticket on Slack, you can add details to the message. This includes ticket type, ticket subject, and any relevant information, such as the customer’s name and email address, the date and time the ticket was created, and the customer’s location. You can also attach files and links (URLs) and set due dates. 

The ticket is created as a part of your conversation and messages in the Slack channel, where you and your team have their overview of all tickets, where they can comment on tickets and edit tickets - natively right in Slack.

What Are the Benefits of Conversational Ticketing?

Conversational ticketing offers several tangible benefits, including keeping users where they already are, faster ticket resolution, improved ticket management, and better collaboration among your teams.

A much more efficient ticket process is achieved by tickets being submitted in real-time between those users who request help, and those who are providing the help. Information flows easily in chat channels on Slack without any delays via email. 

Users do not need to leave Slack. It is their natural habitat of communicating within the organization and where all of the people at the company already are talking with each other. 

Ticket resolution times are lowered as all information flows in real-time between the user who requested the ticket and the responding users. Any additional questions and comments can be answered right away, removing the delays and making the ticketing process a lot more human. 

Teams who utilize conversational ticketing can see the benefit of working together, across teams. Tickets are a part of a natural chat dialogue which makes the co-operation a lot better compared to other ticketing processes. 

Why You Would Want To Implement Conversational Ticketing 

Support teams today are handling hundreds of tickets every month, spending hours and hours on managing these tickets to satisfy customers. A very large part of this is time spent to find answers within the team or, which is very common, by collaborating with other teams. 

The average time among technology companies to reply to a ticket is 2,4 hours according to the Zendesk benchmark. The lifecycle of a single ticket matters, both in terms of how fast you act on the ticket as well as when you return a solution back and can close the ticket. The primary way to reduce the average response and resolution time on tickets is to make sure the turnaround on internal communication among your teams is fast and without friction. 

The part that impacts the resolution time of tickets the most is when you don’t have the answer in front of you and need to go find it. Talking with your team members and colleagues from other teams to identify the problem and provide a solution. A large part that impacts the resolution is communication, or actually the lack of it. When someone from another team does not reply to your question for hours, what do you do? 

This is where conversational ticketing comes in. The ticketing process is applied to the place where people from the team or different teams are already communicating and discussing. Where questions are asked, where emojis are used to show appreciation and where solutions are shared. 

Why you should implement conversational ticketing is because it is natural and a part of an already working collaboration and communication. You do not force your users and teams to login to a 3rd party system and leave a comment. You do not force them to use this 3rd party system to check if they have any new notifications. 

Conversational ticketing becomes a part of the user's natural habitat where they already are. This is also helping them adapt to ticketing and respond to it, as it's just as simple as a conversation with another person which they do on a daily basis.  

Best Practices On Implementing Conversational Ticketing

Conversional ticketing has huge benefits when implemented and aligned properly within your organization. Before you start using it, have a read below where we have collected the common challenges and best practices on implementing conversational ticketing within your teams and organization. 

Being A Part Of The Daily Conversations

Slack is one of the most commonly used communication and collaboration platforms. This is where conversational ticketing should get applied as it’s where the users' daily conversations are happening. 

The ticketing process should be a part of the conversations and should not force users away from the channel. Many ticketing systems can operate on Slack or have integrations with Slack but this is not conversational ticketing. The ticketing process should be a part of the natural conversations, within the messages and message threads. 

Apply Structure That Fits Your Use Cases 

Slack utilizes channels for users coming together when communicating on topics that are typically defined by the channel itself. Conversational ticketing needs to be applied in a similar manner where the channel decides what kind of tickets that are relevant to be discussed and submitted. 

For example you could have a ticket for any internal IT questions, creating your own IT service desk channel. Another channel could support Product and Engineering questions related to your product and a third channel could help you deal with People Operations and HR tasks. 

Every channel should allow different forms to be filled in with different kinds of fields, making sure the correct data is submitted depending on what form that is used. By having forms and fields completely customizable, you can apply conversational ticketing to any kind of organization and team. 

Overviewing And Easily Managing Tickets 

Having a Slack ticket system to enable conversational ticketing requires supporting users in the way that ticketing is efficient and saves the users time on a daily basis. Features within conversational ticketing needs to offer the user supportive functionalities to make the ticketing management complete. 

Users need to be able to easily overview and filter tickets, ideally without ever leaving Slack. This allows them to quickly find what they are looking for and stay focused on the tickets that require their attention. 

Utilize Integration To Enable More Teams

Ticket systems are very likely to be a part of teams that are engaged with many other systems within your organization's product ecosystem. Conversational ticketing can bring a value to be integrated with your other products to bring further value and save time. 

Integration cases could for example be that your customer support have received a support case in Zendesk and need further help from other teams. By enabling users in Zendesk to create and link tickets directly from Zendesk, the bridge to conversational ticketing is built. 

Same is for your engineering teams were popular issue tracking products like GitHub and Gitlab are used and can be integrated with your conversational ticketing.  

How to Adopt Conversational Ticketing in Slack

Conversational ticketing requires the right product purpose built for conversational ticketing. Suptask is one of the leaders in providing a conversational ticketing experience in Slack, bringing all your teams together throughout an easy setup process. 

With Suptask your can easily customize how your conversational ticketing experience should work for your users by customizing ticket forms to the need of your teams use cases. With the powerful Suptask App running on Slack that allows for managing all tickets with focused filtering for each individual user. 

For teams that are engaged with other systems that are related to the ticketing process, Suptask have several natively built integrations available to empower different teams throughout the process. Engineering teams can make use of integrations with for example Gitlab and Github, while Customer Support teams can enjoy the Zendesk integration. 

All of this is the primary focus for Suptask, making the conversational ticketing experience as smooth as possible to really enable all kinds of organizations to adopt and implement it without friction.

Read more about how Suptask works and watch demo videos. Or get started directly for free to try out Suptask. 

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