This interactive “Full loop” session will provide best practices on using demand status and type. When your agents use these features correctly, you optimize workflows and scale your support operation more easily. You will learn how to do it:
- Using demand status,
- Organize your workflows with the situation,
- Automatically manage pending requests,
Part 1: Understand when to use each state
There are five values for the demand state and in this article you can see a definition for each of them. It’s important to understand the purpose of each case as they help to strengthen both workflow and reporting across your account, but we wanted to point out a few specific things to keep in mind.
On and Pending: Open and pending states are fundamentally opposite. Open means that the request should be handled by a representative in your company, while pending means that more information is needed from the requester to resolve the issue.
It is imperative that your agents use the pending status correctly to avoid delays in resolution time. Let’s take a simple example to see why…
Most ticket views are prioritized for new and/or open tickets, as these tickets require a response from an agent. If a claim is transferred from one agent to another and is accidentally set to pending status, it will not appear in the new assignee’s views focused on the new or open claim. It may go unnoticed until the customer wonders what caused the delay.
Therefore, when an agent is responsible for the next step – always set the status to on;)
Pending is used to track requests that require input or resolution from a third party and should not be used as an alternative to open or pending.
Resolved and Closed: These two statuses are used to indicate slightly different stages at the end of the lifecycle of the request.
Agents can mark support records as resolved when they believe the issue has been resolved and are not waiting for the next question from the requester. If the end user responds, the request is reopened.
The off state is persistent and is only enforced by business rules or system automation. In this case, the request cannot be reopened or updated by anyone, and any response to the request constitutes a separate follow-up request .
Your Grispi account has a default automation that automatically closes the request 30 days after it is set to resolved. (All requests are automatically closed at this point).
Part 2: Leverage standby to automate your ticket workflow
It is best practice for agents to set a request to pending status while waiting for an end user to respond. This keeps their vision clear so they can focus on the support requests that are ready for their help.
Having agents review pending requests and send regular friendly reminders to these customers is a common next step – but this takes time that could be wasted on new queries.
Section 3: Use pending status to track third-party requests
The benefits of using pending status when partnering with third parties to resolve calls include
- Filtering of suspended requests while monitoring agent performance.
- Create filters to keep track of tickets that need third-party work.
- Automations to send emails to the third party requesting an update.
- Analyzing the time requests spend on hold to identify opportunities for improvement.
All this gives you better data about what is actually happening in your support organization and allows you to keep track of who is responsible for a ticket.
Section 4: How to use demand types
Utilizing claim types appropriately gives your agents the tools they need to efficiently manage the different scenarios they face on a daily basis. It also enables you to make faster decisions based on better data.
- Question: In most use cases, most requests are categorized as questions. As the name suggests, these are customer questions that can only be answered by your team.
- Task: This request type allows you to set a specific deadline that you can refer to in automations to send notifications or reminders.
- Problem: These are larger issues with your product or service that can affect multiple customers.
- Incident: Individual occurrences of a larger problem affecting more than one person
Section 5: Working with problem and incident requests
When problem and incident tickets are used together, they make life easier when large-scale problems arise. Understanding the full value of these related types of claims is easiest when considering an example:
Suppose your company makes games for mobile devices. You may get multiple reports from customers saying that the app closes when they try to upload a new avatar to their profile. Instead of managing these requests separately in a time-consuming and potentially confusing way, each one can be recorded as an event connected to the larger problem affecting those customers.
In doing so, you can easily see that this “Avatar Loading Problem” has been reported by X customers. Once your team has updates to share and the issue is resolved, all they need to do is update the ticket and their comments will cascade down to all relevant incidents and customers (saving your agents a lot of time).
When it comes time to analyze, it will be easy to compare your handling time and CSAT scores on the different problems your team manages. Also, if you are managing multiple issues that will take some time to resolve, your team can prioritize based on those with the highest number of incidents.
Another way to use problem/incident requests is a proactive way. Using the same company example, let’s assume you have scheduled maintenance for your application. You can create a problem ticket in advance for your agents to apply at that moment.
If you encounter a problem/incident scenario, use these simple steps:
1. Create your own request to solve the problem.
2. When you update or reply to the problematic ticket and mark the status as resolved, it will automatically flow to the related incident tickets (saving you a lot of time!)
Making it “full circle”
“A small push in the right direction can make a big difference,” said Sandip Karmakar.
We hope these small changes to your use of ticket status and type will make your agents fit for a truly scaling workflow.
