Stop closing tickets. Start solving cases.

The goal of building a Customer Support division is not to have a team to support your customers when they need help. It’s about building a scalable machine that is designed to swim upstream and get to the cause of the challenges that customers experience - not just closing tickets. 

It’s easy to close tickets. Password reset? Easy - closed. Change email address? Easy - closed. [Insert the vast majority of the questions your Support organization gets.] Easy - closed. 

But that’s symptomatic treatment. It’s treating the symptoms you see (which feels good), but never actually gets to the cause. And with this approach, you’ll never win. Another password reset ticket. And another. Yes, you can close them and high-five your team on reducing ticket resolution time, or first-touch closes. I hate to say it, but you’re not really helping anyone. 

The password reset tickets will still come. Your Support team will grow tiresome of answering the same ticket again and again, and will soon check out. 

Let’s say the ‘password’ issue is actually user error. The email triggers are performing as normal. So can you help it if your customers just can’t seem to use the password reset properly? Yes, and that’s exactly the point. 

Within your Customer Support team, you can’t just look at tickets in and tickets out - you must thread the tickets together and look at them as though they are pieces of evidence in a case.

Once you have the case you’re trying to solve for (reduction in user dependency on Customer Support for a simple task) and you have your evidence (tickets), you’re on the investigative path. You question your victims (users) about their experience and begin to recognize patterns in the evidence and anecdotes. 

Only after following this path and actually connecting with the end users - you realize that the ‘forgot password’ copy on the login page was slightly below the fold, and customers were missing it. A relatively easy solve for what has been stealing time from your Customer Support organization. 

Next time you’re meeting with your Support team, start looking at things a bit differently. Tickets are pieces of evidence in a case that has yet to be solved.