Dealing With Helpdesk Ticketing Complaints

How To Handle Customer Support Complaints Complaints are very different from questions. There are different reasons that a customer may submit a complaint through the help desk. Sometimes they are simply trying to encourage responsible business practices and are informing the company of the situation. They may or may not expect a resolution. Others will send in complaints because they absolutely want a resolution. Yet they only used the helpdesk ticketing software to submit a complaint without asking a question. In cases like these two tickets with totally different intentions on behalf of the user can have several different outcomes. Once a ticket is received should your support team interpret whether or not the customer is awaiting an outcome they can be happy with? All complaints without questions should be answered. This is a good time to apologize for any inconvenience and ask if they would prefer to have some assistance with the problem. If there is no resolution desired, the customer will either not respond at all or simply let your team know that no resolution is necessary. Many business experts recommend making an additional contact if no response is made to ensure that the customer really does not wish to engage in finding a resolution. In most cases, a complaint ticket is a question in disguise. The customer may be ranting or simply may not have the communication skills at the moment to phrase a question. Just because the ticket does not appear to ask for help or direction does not mean that the intention of seeking help or direction wasn’t there in the first place. This is a common mistake among support staff members. They read the ticket and find that there isn’t a question and thus they do not respond expressing a willingness to help. Any complaint that is treated as though it was a question or that there will be a follow up question is more likely to result in a positive outcome. Some consumers have emotional, and even inappropriate reactions to spending money only to discover that what they believed they were buying didn’t turn out to be the reality of the situation. Emotional tickets can be difficult to deal with but when handled in a professional and helpful manner the emotionality of the situation will pass and the support agent and the customer can get down to the business of solving a problem. For the most part help desk ticketing complaints are really just the expression of an unhappy customer that is not taking the time to formulate a question that can be helpful to him or her. Teaching your team how to be respectful, helpful, and polite in their response will help to soothe over many potential situations well before they become erroneous. Your team may already do this. Many support staff teams were simply never properly trained on how to go about responding to tickets that are accusational and emotional in nature. Teaching your team those skills will serve your business very well. Author Bio: Steve Davidson is President of Cynergy Corporation, a software development company formed in 1998 to develop and support customer support and CRM relationship software to improve help desks, customer relationship building, and general communication between business to business.  He is also President of U.S. Infotel Corporation.  U.S. Infotel provides and supports corporate telephone systems and call center applications geared towards improved productivity through technology.  Contact Cynergy Corporation for more information.