Benefits of service-centric ticketing/service desk

Isolated, siloed trouble ticketing systems do not have all the information required for efficient support of subscription customers.

Key challenges for subscription services support include:

• Missing key issue information: service, account, product, service address, etc. — reducing support staff productivity as they need to gather information from other systems
• Lack of financial information (service revenue, account revenue, etc.) and additional customer information (rank, segmentation, contracts, etc.) to prioritize issues correctly
• Duplication and synchronization of data between ticketing and CRM (and other systems like billing) — inevitably leading to discrepancies and additional maintenance costs
• Tickets invisible to account managers — preventing them from providing top-notch customer care
• Cross-systems reporting challenges: which products are causing issues, in which geographical area are problems happening, what types of customers are most likely to report issues by market segment, etc.

Possible solutions

The following approaches can be taken:

• Keep things as they are and rely on textual information in problem description and switching between multiple systems while resolving issues
• Add fields (like account, service id, service address) to ticket object — this is better, allows for reporting, but there’s no single source of data/truth and will inevitably lead to discrepancies
• Systems integration: time consuming, costly in implementation and maintenance
• Putting everything on a single platform, e.g., buying a B/OSS with CRM and ticketing — sharing single master data for accuracy and no integration required

Putting service at the center

On top of the technical challenges outlined above, one of the biggest questions is what is a ticket opened against? A service (e.g., circuit or service id), a customer or a customer address?

We strongly believe that the service should be the main point of association. If a service is defined as:

Service = Subscription Product sold to a Customer [at a Location]

the optimal implementation should be able to link service to a ticket and pull most important data points directly onto it.

The benefits of service-centric ticketing include:

• Since service binds information about customer account, product, service address, etc. all this information can be brought onto a ticket easily. This allows for:
  • Efficiency — no data swivel-chairing
  • Accurate reporting (e.g., products that cause most tickets in the state of NY)
• It’s easy to bring secondary information (e.g., via formula fields) such as account revenue giving even more context to support teams enabling faster issue resolution
• It’s easy to build UI showing related information, e.g.: cases open for a customer (across all services), other services at this location (for customer that opened a ticket), all cases per product, etc. This helps customer support, but more importantly can keep staff not directly involved in issue resolution (product managers, account managers) informed

Nextian/Salesforce implementation

Salesforce provides a good foundation for service-centric ticketing implementation:

• It is a unified platform — single source of truth, no integrations needed
• Offers customizable cases/tickets that can be tailored to service providers’ needs (please refer to this post for ticketing implementation options for Salesforce).
• Has built-in reporting
• Provides means for creating object relations easily

What Salesforce is missing is subscription service management and inventory. This functionality is provided by the Nextian Salesforce package.

Nextian adds the following functionality to the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud cases:

• Cases are linked to services with additional product, location and account information
• It is possible to initiate case creation from a service, product, customer account or location
• Additional service information such as account, re-seller information, etc. is pulled to and displayed on the case layout
• Salesforce search and case creation actions enable creating case and starting navigation in various places:
  • Account → Service
  • Account → Location → Service
  • Location → Account → Product, etc.

  This is useful as customers often do not know their service designations.

Conclusions

Ticketing/case management is the cornerstone of successful customer support and constitutes a large chunk of post-sale product/service management.

A successful implementation must not only focus on technical aspects (e.g., which system to use) but also (more importantly) on the business process: how a ticket is open, what additional information should be pulled onto a ticket for quick resolution, how are resolution flows built and others.

Nextian is a vendor of Quote-to-Cash (QTC) software for cloud and communications helping providers accelerate growth and increase customer lifetime value.

Contact us today to find out how we can help you!