How To Speed Up Troubleshooting and Standardize Ticket Escalation

In an ideal world, you should aim at solving customer issues on the first contact.

However, to stay real, a 100% first-contact resolution rate is almost impossible to achieve.

No matter how well you hire or train your customer service agents, cases will crop up when the agents at the frontline can’t resolve customer issues without expert intervention. And this is where a ticket escalation process comes into play.

As your business grows, the volume of tickets you receive also increases. So, the earlier you automate your ticket escalation process, the better.

Let’s discover the seven crucial ways to manage your ticket escalation process efficiently.

7 Ways to Standardize Ticket Escalation

1. Determine which issues need escalation

Preferably, your customer service team should resolve most of the customer tickets your business receives. This means your agents would escalate only a few tickets up the ladder for resolution.

And to ensure that your support team escalates only those tickets that require expert attention, you need to determine which issues might need escalation.

Your ticket escalation process will be much more efficient when your team has a set of guidelines to follow.

2. Document your ticket escalation process

Expectations define the customer experience. That’s why it’s essential to document these expectations, establish your ticket escalation policy, and integrate it into your Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Your SLA creates standards that your customers can expect you to meet while setting benchmarks for your agents.

Some of the details you need to include in your ticket escalation policy should include:

• The estimated time for resolving tickets.
• Who should customer support reps notify when an issue needs escalation?
• Who’s the contact person when the problem is still unresolved after the first escalation?
• Who and how often will you update your customers?

3. Automate repetitive tasks

To speed up your troubleshooting and ticket escalation processes, you’ll need to automate the repetitive tasks.

For example, individually assigning tickets to agents may work for a startup with up to three team members. But when your team and the number of tickets you receive grow, you need to automate this process.

In addition, you should also automate the process of marking the tickets your team has already addressed as resolved.

4. Encourage agents to replicate issues

Sometimes, when your agents can’t seem to resolve customer issues, replicating the problem could do the trick.

This means that your customer service agent should do exactly what the customer is trying to do. For example, if a customer gets an error logging into your online platform, your agent can try logging in to see if they experience the same problem.

By replicating the customer issues, your customer service agents can:

• Understand your customer problems faster
• Determine whether the issue is unique to the customer or is global
• Identify the issue faster

5. Adopt multi-channel escalation

One of the best ways to keep your customer experience positive is to provide them with the option to escalate tickets from any channel they choose.

Your customer service channels can include:

• Live chat
• Email
• Phone calls
• Social media
• SMS

No matter which channels you use, make sure that you address the issues immediately.

6. Keep your customers updated

Ticket escalation means that resolving customer issues might take longer than expected.

And to provide the best customer service experience, it’s recommended to keep your customers in the loop. Communicate with the customer proactively to reassure them that an agent is trying to resolve their issues.

When your customers are familiar with the ticket status, they can readjust their expectations. You can also explain how escalation often leads to the best solution and comfort them that they’re in safe hands to evoke positive vibes. This way, they won’t get mad if the resolution process takes longer than they’ve initially expected.

Your customer service agent should also reach out to the customer as soon as they mark the ticket resolved to share the good news.

7. Collect customer feedback

For most customers, ticket escalation is not a pleasant feeling. However, you can always keep improving by collecting, analyzing, and reflecting on your customer feedback.

Once your customer support team has resolved the issue and the escalation process is over, you can share a customer feedback survey. The survey should provide you with the information of your customer’s experience with your customer service team and the process.

A Few Last Words

Since ticket escalation usually takes time, it’s not the most pleasant thing for anyone involved.

But the good news is, you can optimize and speed it up. And here’s where you start:

Incorporate your ticket escalation policy into your SLA, using it to streamline your customer support tasks, now and moving forward. And if you need some expert guidance? Contact us!