Let's talk conversational ticketing: Not just for IT

Professional using ticket management on her company's messaging app to answer employee questions on her mobile device.

Did you know that ticketing isn’t just for IT help desks, but can be deployed by other departments too?

When used by IT, a conversational IT support ticketing system allows your IT team to seamlessly engage with users and resolve their issues over the channels employees typically collaborate through anyway, such as Microsoft Teams. But your organization’s facilities management, HR, and finance teams, for example, could also efficiently manage and resolve their service requests, incoming questions, and tasks by leveraging a conversational ticket management system.

Conversational ticketing: Way beyond IT

An employee might want to know, “how much remaining paid time off do I have this year?” or inquire about a discrepancy in her paycheck. The HR team can use conversational ticket management to facilitate getting these non-IT issues resolved.

How would it work? Questions and issues are transformed into tickets that are routed to the right departmental team/specialist to resolve in an organized, structured way.

“The same way an employee might message someone in facilities and say, ‘the office bathroom has a broken faucet or my badge isn’t working, or the heat is too high,” says Katie Steward, Product Marketing Manager at GoTo, "you can use conversational ticketing to resolve those same issues. The tool reduces a lot of headaches on both sides around organizing and streamlining interactions and resolving issues.”

Don’t let chaos and confusion disrupt productivity

The alternative of using a shared email inbox without ticketing is simply awful. Having to manually go in and check inboxes cluttered with random requests they’ll need to separate, organize, and resolve from among all their other emails is a big headache for teams. That’s a great recipe for chaos.

If your organization uses a collaboration tool like Microsoft Teams, conversational ticketing means you can get more value out of the platform you’re already using, streamlining the process and making it faster and easier for employees to get help. Now requesters don't have to ask questions twice (i.e. an initial message and then again when submitting the ticket).

Everything automatically happens through MS Teams. “Let's say someone doesn’t have a badge that’s working. That person can simply use Teams to create a ticket and interact easily with the facilities team to resolve the issue,” says Steward.

The person requesting help and the helper (AKA agent) can have their entire back and forth within the conversational ticket management system. And the agent’s manager has instant visibility into all the tickets and how they’re being resolved. Everything gets updated and made visible in real-time in the agent console. “With emails going into a department’s general shared inboxes asking for help,” says Steward, “there’d often be duplicate efforts to resolve an issue, which wastes resources and frustrates everyone.”

If you don't have conversational ticketing, and maybe you use a public Teams channel instead to manage questions, you can have the whole company chiming in with multiple and likely contradictory answers. That's the opposite of help.

With conversational ticketing, you're not adding yet another tool that you need to jump over to in order to resolve issues. Instead, you’re making your messaging platform a one-stop spot for solving problems. And it’s not the only interface you can use. If Mary in facilities would rather work in the helpdesk console at the office and Marty would rather work on Microsoft Teams in another location, that's fine because all the issues and interactions get organized in the same ticket management system, offering a single source of truth to everyone, everywhere.

Watch a demo of the agent experience using conversational ticketing in MS Teams.

 

Conversational ticketing is human, not a chatbot

While chatbots can be awesome, you're not getting a real person. You’re tapping into a digital knowledge base that’s searching through keywords and matching to FAQs, often using machine learning and AI.

“With conversational ticketing,” says Steward, “you’re getting answers from an actual human being. The best ‘human’ answers can then be fed into your chatbot interactions, into your website or Intranet, in order to reduce the workload on your help desk people.”

Conversational ticketing also enables you to designate the right person within the department to resolve specific issues. HR probably has a payroll expert who’s likely different from your benefits and your compliance expert(s). A conversational ticket management system enables you to set up different helpdesks or experts within the HR, facilities, or other departments to receive issues. “Users would click on HR-Payroll or HR-Benefits, for example, then the issues get automatically assigned to the right people,” says Steward.

Watch a demo of the employee experience using conversational ticketing in MS Teams.

 

Streamlining and organizing non-IT support

Conversational ticketing is a great way to streamline, organize, manage, track, and document support workflows across the organization, leveraging one convenient, accessible ticket management system.

Plus, it can make good sense from a budget standpoint. If your IT department is already using GoTo Resolve and its conversational ticketing to provide great support, why not implement this easy-to-use and powerful tool across your organization?

Learn more about GoTo Resolve’s conversational ticketing.

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