Must-have features for a free online ticketing system

When a customer reaches out to your organization with a question, their experience with your service team begins well before their first agent interaction. Does the customer receive personalized communication as soon as they reach out? Do they feel confident that their request for help has been heard? That it’s being handled well? That their satisfaction matters to your business?

The quality of your customer’s experience at the earliest stages of this process can leave a deep impression that influences their confidence in the help they’re going to receive later on, their level of stress — either positively or negatively — and their overall trust in your business. And it all starts with your online ticketing software. Ultimately, it’s important to choose a ticketing system that will be able to scale up with your organization as your team’s needs become more sophisticated. But the right free ticketing system can help simplify your customer service processes quickly — increasing productivity and providing a great experience for your customers.

Here’s what to look for when choosing the best free ticketing software for your business.

A free ticketing system should be easy to set up and measure

When deciding between free online ticketing systems, prioritize solutions that are easy to set up, deploy, and maintain. Look for tools that provide omnichannel support (so your customers can reach out to you using their favorite messaging and social media apps), and let you add new channels in minutes rather than days. The tool should make it easy to create workflows without reaching out to the system’s vendor for help each time. Your team needs to be flexible, and able to react swiftly to new insights about customer behaviors, preferences, and needs.

Free help desk software shouldn’t have limited reporting capabilities just because it’s free, and the tool you choose should offer AI-driven analytics — providing real-time actionable insights that can help your agents spot trends and early warnings. CSAT prediction can further remove the guesswork for agents and managers. And AI-powered speech and text analytics, which analyze customer conversations in the moment, are another key feature of any good free ticketing system.

Automation and skills-based routing are critical to providing a great, personalized customer experience

For businesses that take in lots of inbound messages and calls from across multiple channels, efficient routing is critical to your customer experience. A manual approach to routing and assignment is not scalable or sustainable — and it can result in both a frustrating experience for customers and a waste of contact center resources for your team.

Each transfer will extend the amount of time your customer spends resolving their issue, and increases the likelihood that they will give up on the conversation entirely. There is also a risk that the next agent following each transfer won’t know all the context of the customer’s previous support conversations, or even some of their important personal details. Every time a customer is forced to repeat their issue and basic information, they lose faith in your team’s ability to help them — and your agents will become discouraged too.

The best free help desk ticketing software provides automated ticket queues, responses, and case routing for greater efficiency, within a unified agent desktop that offers a 360° customer view with full context, and easy channel switching. Traditional routing mechanisms pair customers with agents through skills-based or queue-based logic. They don’t consider the customer profile, behavioral traits of the agent, or past conversation history. The resulting pairing is often not the most efficient or productive one. But AI can identify those subtle, valuable patterns by parsing billions of historical customer service interactions to intelligently pair customers and agents.

Sprinklr Service’s AI-powered ticketing system eliminates the manual steps that can delay ticket creation, cause friction, and slow resolution. With Sprinklr AI at its foundation, Sprinklr Service proactively identifies each customer’s sentiment and intent, automatically creates a ticket for them, and routes that ticket with the right information to the right agent at the right time.

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