Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is a measure of the degree to which a product or service meets customer expectations. It’s one of the most important metrics for any business, as it reflects how happy customers are with their experience and how likely they are to stay loyal and recommend the brand to others.

But how do you improve customer satisfaction? Traditionally, many businesses have relied on ticketing platforms to handle customer inquiries and issues. While this approach may have sufficed in the past, it is becoming increasingly clear that traditional ticketing systems are outdated and inadequate in effectively addressing the needs and expectations of modern customers, leading to a worse customer experience and lower CSAT scores.

To achieve higher customer satisfaction levels, businesses must acknowledge the limitations of traditional ticketing platforms. These systems often lack the agility and responsiveness required to provide timely and personalized support to customers. With evolving customer demands and the advent of new technologies, customers now expect faster response times, seamless omnichannel experiences, and proactive issue resolution. Some of the most glaring issues with traditional ticketing systems are:

  • Ticketing platforms suffer from poor ticket visibility. Platforms often fail to provide adequate visibility into the status of customers’ issues, leaving them in the dark about where their concerns stand in the support process. This can be particularly frustrating if a customer is left waiting for extended periods to receive a response to their inquiries.
  • Ticketing platforms have clunky and disjointed processes. For instance, when a customer submits a web form and subsequently receives an email response, the overall experience can feel slow and cumbersome, even if the response time itself is relatively fast. This disjointed approach hampers efficient communication as well.
  • Ticketing platforms are reactive and siloed. Customers must initiate contact when they have a problem, and they often have to repeat themselves or provide additional information that the agents don’t have access to.
  • Ticketing platforms are rigid and inflexible. Customers must follow a predefined process of an isolated channel to get support. These channels often don’t work together and customers don’t have much control over the outcome or resolution of their issue.

But what options does an organization have outside of a traditional ticketing platform? The concept of tickets is still important for complex issues that require an extended amount of time or specialized expertise. Tickets also create a system of record for customers and internal process measurement. One solution is Intercom. By leveraging Intercom, businesses can eliminate the challenges associated with traditional ticketing systems and optimize their customer support experience.

Intercom has reinvented tickets as a way of handling customer requests asynchronously within the Messenger. Unlike traditional ticketing platforms that force customers to switch channels or submit a ticket and wait for customer service to reach out, Intercom’s Tickets feature allows customers to:

  • Stay in the same conversation with the same agent throughout the entire process, even when the ticket requires research or extended work on the service provider side.
  • Receive updates on the status of their request without having to follow up or check another platform. This can occur via push notifications, email, or SMS.
  • Choose how they want to be notified when their request is resolved (via email or push notification).
  • Rate their satisfaction with the resolution and provide feedback.

Intercom’s Tickets feature also benefits agents by enabling them to:

By using Intercom’s Tickets feature, businesses can handle complex customer requests asynchronously without compromising on speed, personalization, or convenience. This results in higher customer satisfaction and loyalty. In fact, according to Intercom’s own data, businesses that use Intercom see an average increase of 18% in CSAT scores compared to ticketing platforms.

Intercom is not just a support tool. It’s a way of building meaningful relationships with customers that drive growth and retention. If you want to learn more about how Intercom can help you improve your customer satisfaction and ditch your ticketing platform for good, schedule a meeting with our Intercom professional services team today.

Author

Andrew Ramadan

I’m a Business Development Manager at Vision Point Systems where I guide existing and potential accounts through the entire customer lifecycle, overseeing discovery to account management and ensuring they attain desired outcomes from VPS services and solutions. I also assist our executive team in developing our go-to-market strategy for our services team and solutions, developed in collaboration with our technology partners Appian, Twilio, Intercom, and AWS.

Before this role, I spent five years as a technical consultant, primarily leading software development teams building on the Appian platform.

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