Support levels

Ticket statuses

Ticket organization and management play a crucial role in your support team’s efficiency. 

To ensure all tickets keep moving through the ticket lifecycle quickly, you need to define ticket statuses. Based on the help desk tool you use, there may be default ticket statuses or an option to modify and create custom statuses. Your help desk manual should list the ticket statuses you’ve defined and explain what each of them means.

Here are some examples:

• New: The default status of a ticket when it gets created.
• Open: The ticket is open, and someone is working on the request.
• Pending: An agent is waiting to get more information from the customer.
• Escalated: The ticket was escalated to a senior agent or another department.
• Resolved: The ticket reached its final stage in processing, and no more action is required.

Ticket priorities

In addition to ticket statuses, your help desk manual should define your ticket priority matrix so your agents understand how to prioritize tickets based on the available information. Below are some standard prioritization levels:

• Urgent: Tickets marked as urgent are critical issues that may prevent a user from working and cause devastating consequences. These tickets should be addressed first or escalated to a senior agent/manager.
• High: High priority issues may prevent users from using the product or service effectively and require an immediate response.
• Medium: Tickets marked with a medium priority are questions or issues that don’t prevent users from using the product, but they require a quick response regardless.
• Normal: Tickets marked as normal can be questions from people who aren’t active users or leads. “Normal” tickets can also contain general user feedback that doesn’t require an immediate response.

Processes

Next, your help desk manual should outline your entire workflow from when a user submits a ticket until it’s resolved. The outline should describe what your users/customers can expect to happen when they submit a support request. Provide a brief description of the following to ensure your agents have a clear understanding of the processes and actions they need to take to resolve a ticket:

• Response to tickets: Indicate whether your support agents need to send an email acknowledging the customer’s initial message. Explain what details should be included in the first response and whether you should inform the customer of the expected resolution date.
• User follow-up: Explain how the support agent should proceed and format a follow-up email if the customer does not respond within a specified period.
• Closing tickets: Explain how and when tickets are closed and when your agents should send out CSAT surveys. 
• User feedback: Describe the preferred steps your agents should take if customers are unsatisfied with their service and how they should report concerns. 

Ticket escalation 

While support agents can resolve most support requests during the first contact, some issues might demand the intervention of a senior rep or a manager who has more in-depth knowledge, technical expertise, or simply more authority than standard support agents. To ensure streamlined support and a quick ticket resolution process, you need to have a clearly outlined and documented ticket escalation procedure that your agents can follow whenever they encounter issues they cannot resolve immediately. 

The escalation process may differ depending on the size of your support team. Generally, a ticket escalation process should:

• Define which issues require escalation and to whom to escalate them.
• List your support tiers and outline the skill levels and responsibilities of each tier.
• Estimate the duration for resolving tickets (Service Level Agreements).
• Define who to notify when an issue needs to be escalated.
• State how often agents should provide updates to customers.
• Define who to contact when the issue is still unresolved after the first escalation.