3 Ways to Reduce Your Resolution Time on Support Tickets

As a customer, you want nothing more than attentive and helpful support. In best case scenarios, you’re looking for a quality resolution to your problem in a quick timeframe. It is common for support providers to offer one or the other but getting both good quality and quick responses is often a fantasy. Encouraging the proper outcomes isn’t always all on the provider. As a customer, you can help drive the engine to ensure Support delivers the results you want to see. Here are a few ways to improve the quality and push the pace to resolution on tickets you submit.

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Ensuring Resolution Quality

Let’s start with actions you can take to ensure a quality resolution and ways you can impact this when submitting a ticket. The two primary factors that affect the quality of a resolution are:

• The initial information you provide in the ticket.
• Proper testing when a solutions is proposed.

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As a submitter, you can ensure you provide as much information as possible. In cases for RightAngle, this can mean everything from screenshots to Windows Event Logs to recreation steps and many more artifacts. Gathering appropriate and detailed information allows the support provider to get started immediately and avoids repeat work you’ve already completed on the issue.

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Documenting the issue thoroughly will also serve you well when it comes to the back end of the interaction—testing the fix. Your ability to consistently recreate problems in the system will dramatically improve your resolution quality by allowing proper testing and sign-off when fixes are proposed. Robust testing can be the difference between repeat offenders and one-time issues. Documented test cases ensure proper validation and success of the resolutions your support provider is offering. There are, of course, notable situations where you cannot repeat the behavior, maybe when data fixes are in order, but where and when possible, having a well-documented scenario makes all the difference in getting the proper resolution quality you expect.

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Improving Resolution Time

The second piece of this equation is improving the pace of your fixes. The recommendation above of well-documented issues not only aids quality but improves resolution time. It offers the support team a glimpse of what investigation has occurred and narrows the potential culprits before they even begin debugging within the application. Properly triaging your issues is also important, as well as understanding and assigning ticket priority levels appropriately to elicit quick responses from your support provider. Driving the action is a great tool for pushing the pace of your issue resolution. You can do this by encouraging and offering your own time to hop on a call, demonstrating the issue, and even troubleshooting together—all of which can dramatically improve the flow of information and therefore time to resolution of the problem.

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Lowering the Urgency of the Ticket

The final piece of advice we can offer for both speed and quality is to encourage stepped fixes along the way. Understanding the best way to make an issue response feel fast and foolproof is to eliminate the immediate pain and lower the urgency of the situation. This can come in the form of a workaround to temporarily buy time, both for higher quality testing and resolutions, but also to give the user experiencing the issue (likely you) some immediate response and visible improvement to their situation. While partial fixes don’t check the box of high quality, the breathing room they can offer for proper long-term fixes to be developed is ultimately the catalyst to a high-quality resolution. There are going to be times where you simply cannot check both the quality and speed box at the same time, but buying some time can offer the right situation where a high-quality resolution can be crafted.

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Triarc Can Help

It is easy to feel anxious when engaging outside help. Once the ball moves to their court, you feel like there is nothing you can do to speed up the pace or get the results you want. Today we’ve covered a few options including well documented issues, regimented testing, effective triaging, and offering your time as ways to improve the quality and resolution time of the engagement. Ultimately having a strong relationship with your support provider and offering consistent communication is the key to driving healthy outcomes.

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If you’re in need of RightAngle support from a team of people who are both experts in their field and passionate about their work and the customers they serve, then give us a call. We can help to resolve your challenges and help you love RightAngle again!