How long does it take your techs to respond to support tickets? A few hours? A few days?
Today’s buyers desire fast response times — 80% expect a reply within 24 hours. And another 37% want responses within one hour. If you’re taking longer than a day, you could potentially weaken your relationship with customers. Around 56% of people leave a company due to poor customer service experiences.
But what can you do to accelerate ticket response times in your MSP?
ITSM software is one of the solutions companies are employing. Let’s take a look at what this is and how it can help your teams improve customer satisfaction.
What is ITSM Software?
ITSM software enables businesses to effectively plan and manage IT services and deliver excellent service to customers. ITSM software capabilities are a wide range, including handling tasks like problem and incident management, asset management, and license management. But for the sake of this article, we’ll focus on its use for customer support. For example, you can use it to build a system to track and resolve tickets submitted by your customers.
Let’s review how and why it’s an ideal solution for support management.
Stop Sending Customers to the Wrong Person
Have you ever been on a call with a technical support specialist only to be routed to a seemingly endless list of IT reps? This is caused by a poor customer routing system. When you don’t have an efficient way to learn a customer’s problems, then it becomes challenging to find the best person to route them to.
When this happens, it can hurt your customer experience. Roughly 72% of consumers say that explaining a problem to multiple people is poor customer service. And 30% say talking to a friendly and knowledgeable agent is critical for the customer service experience. So if you’re not routing customers to the right IT specialist the first time around, then it leads to dissatisfied customers. In turn, this can hurt your customer retention rate.
ITSM software resolves this by grouping clients based on their problems and immediately routes them to the best person for the job. Set up custom or inline forms that allow you to collect all the details you need from your clients, eliminating any extraneous back and forth communication.
Offer Real-Time Assistance
Some customer problems need real-time help. Let’s say a client of yours needs assistance overcoming a complex problem with your tool. Trying to explain a series of steps while answering questions along the way is difficult and time-consuming.
But it’s necessary if you want to retain customers. Fortunately, there’s a way around it:
A real-time chat solution.
When customers are unhappy or confused, the last thing they want is to wait on hold. They want an immediate response, which is why live chat appeals to 79% of consumers.
With ITSM software, you can create a chat designed to connect your IT and customer support teams with customers quickly, making your team available to answer questions and provide a top-notch customer experience that demonstrates expertise and dedicated attention to your clients.
Allow Customers to Help Themselves
Some customers are happy to find solutions on their own. In fact, 77% of consumers use self-help resources regularly. Creating a knowledge center not only empowers customers to resolve their own issues but also reduces pressure on your customer support team and saves techs time.
One recommendation is to have your MSP's customer support team collect FAQs from customers and turn these into articles or a searchable library within your ITSM software. Techs and customer support reps can direct customers here for questions. If customers can't find what they're looking for, they can always get in touch for more direction via live chat.
By adopting ITSM software, you can automate and centralize this entire process.
Prioritize VIP Customers
You want to do everything within your power to keep your best customers happy. But this can be challenging if their support tickets are left unresolved for days. One way around this is to speed route them to the top of the queue.
By using IT automation tools, you can identify and tag your top customers as VIPs, ensuring techs are alerted that each new ticket a VIP submits is a top priority in the queue.
Satisfied VIPs mean higher retention and more revenue. And it doesn’t have to be by much to see favorable results. Increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase profits by 25%.
Start Using IT Process Automation Today
Every MSP wants to make their teams more efficient, so they can save time, improve margins and maintain long-term customer relationships. But this requires having the right IT automation tools.
With countless ITSM and client portal options on the market, how can you tell which is right for your organization?
The key is finding a provider that offers all the solutions you need to make your IT processes streamlined.
With DeskDirector, you get access to a user-friendly, all-in-one customer success platform that empowers your support team and techs to manage customer communications efficiently. Our top priority is helping our partners to enhance customer satisfaction.
If you’d like to see it in action, sign up for a free 14-day trial today! 
