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5 must-haves in your problem management software
What is problem management?
In ITSM terms, an incident is a single unplanned interruption or reduction of the quality of an IT service. A problem, on the other hand, is a larger issue. ITIL™ defines a problem as “a cause or potential cause of one or more incidents.” Problem management entails the set of processes and activities responsible for managing the lifecycle of all problems that could happen in an IT service. The crux of problem management is to go beyond just finding a solution, but rather the underlying cause of the incident and finding the best way to eliminate this root cause.
Problem management can save your organization thousands of dollars and can play a big role in increasing both employee and customer satisfaction.
Did you know that reports suggest that downtime can cost organizations $300,000 per hour?
This cost can be even higher for web-based services. One of the primary goals of problem management is to reduce MTTR (mean-time-to-repair) by using a structured root cause analysis process and custom workflows. A good problem management process helps prevent future problems and disruptions and aims to minimize the overall impact on the business. If implemented correctly, problem management improves service design and delivery and increases productivity.
If you are considering implementing a problem management software to reduce/prevent downtime and enhance employee satisfaction, here are:
The top 5 capabilities to look for in a problem management software:
- Automation: Artificial intelligence (AI) is the future of problem management and aids all ITIL processes like incident management, change management, and asset management, thus, improving IT service management as a whole. Automation is involved in every step of the problem management process. Right from the problem detection phase to closure, automated alerts are sent to all the stakeholders. Moreover, once a problem is closed, automation makes it easy to ask for feedback and conduct reviews to help improve the process. The software aids in the follow-up process without manual effort.
- Known Error Database (KEDB): A KEDB is a rich repository of problems that have occurred in the past and their respective workarounds. Keeping a record is instrumental in ensuring a swifter resolution of problems. While workarounds are not permanent solutions, they help to minimize impact until a long-term solution can be reached. Overall, it helps prevent recurring problems and ensures that there is transparency throughout this process.
- Visibility: Your problem management software should have a dashboard that shows timelines, deadlines, and severity/urgency of problems. This dashboard goes a long way in providing clarity and keeping all steps of the problem management process systematic and transparent. It also makes it easier to conduct a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and stay organized. This consolidated view of incidents associated with a problem, issues, and causes, helps the problem management team reach solutions faster and more efficiently.
- Proactive: There are two types of problem management, proactive and reactive. Proactive problem management aims to identify future incidents and prevent them from re-occurring by identifying and eliminating the root cause before they can cause service-impacting incidents. Having problem management software makes the proactive approach easier to implement. This method of problem management empowers your IT team to thoroughly investigate, find the underlying causes. This is incredibly beneficial for creating an open environment for learning and communication, which, in turn, can increase agent productivity.
- Tracking Service Level Agreements (SLAs): A good problem management software will keep up with SLAs based on severity and urgency and helps improve the resolution times of problems. This helps your IT team to stay on top of your entire IT ecosystem and prioritize problems that affect more critical services.
Freshservice and problem management:
So, it is clear that problem management is a crucial part of delivering proactive service management. This, in turn, helps prevent disruptions to business and deflects a fairly large volume of low-priority, repetitive and redundant tickets. Freshservice has a number of embedded features that helps you implement a robust problem management process.
- Automation: It is easy to change status, close, and communicate about a problem’s associated incidents.
- Visibility: With Freshservice, you can seamlessly conduct root cause analyses, and record its impact, symptoms, and solutions or workarounds. The dashboard also helps you monitor its progress and view the timeline of events leading up to the problem.
- Transparency: The KEDB of Freshservice helps you link problems to existing incidents, changes, or releases. This way, you can plan ahead for downtime or service disruptions. Having this helps prevent redundancy in resolutions and gives agents much-needed context about the tickets.
- Prevent future incidents: Freshservice gives easy reference to solutions and workarounds all within a single window.
If you are interested in learning more about Freshservice’s problem management capabilities, click here. You can even get a free trial of Freshservice for 21-days. So, get a glimpse into advanced problem management features and more for no cost.
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Texting is one of the most used forms of communication. In the United States alone, 5.5 billion text messages are sent daily. So maybe it’s not so much of a surprise that your customers want to be able to text your business when they need support. Few things are more frustrating than when you’re trying to solve a problem and just end up sitting on hold. And texting offers an alternative for you and your customers. If your business doesn’t already offer texting support, then here are the nine reasons you should.. 1. Customers spend a lot of time on their phones People in the U.S. spend an average of 3 hours and 10 minutes on their cell phones each day. Mobile commerce, or purchases made on mobile devices, is expected to account for 45 percent of the total market in the U.S. by the end of 2020, according to Business Insider . Besides people using their phones for more than personal communication and shopping, they are also working from their phones. All of this points to the fact that your customers are already spending more time on mobile than anywhere else. And nothing is more accessible to a mobile user than texting. So it is high time that your business starts texting your existing support. Meet your customers where they are. 2. Your customers prefer texting Now that we know customers are already on their phones, but does that also mean they want to text businesses? Yes. Customers want to be able to text your support team simply because they prefer texting over long-winded support calls. Reportedly, 52 percent of customers prefer texting over other support communication channels. Another reason why texting should be preferred is that it has a 98 percent open rate . That means your customers will read your message nearly every time, which only makes it easier for you to resolve all of your customers’ support questions. If you meet your customers where they want to talk they’ll view your business more favorably too. Research shows that 65 percent of consumers feel positive toward businesses that they have the option to message. 3. Speed The average response time for texting is just 90 seconds. On top of that, 95 percent of texts are read within the first three minutes of being received. This is way quicker than your average email response time and thus will make your customer feel valued. Part of what can help to speed this process up is a good texting platform that your customer support team can work with. Such a platform can host all of the support messages, where they can see, respond to, or share messages. Some texting platforms like Textline can even integrate with your favorite customer support tools like Freshdesk and Slack. These integrations make responding and managing customer support requests easier. Another reason why texting is simply better when it comes to speed is that texts are inherently short. You’re limited to 160 characters and so are your customers. Realistically, there’s only so much one can squeeze into one text that naturally forces the sender to keep the message simple and clear. 4. Reduced active wait Customers don’t like waiting. Nearly 60 percent of customers said they would hang up if put on hold for more than a minute. Texting eliminates that hold time and gives your customers more of their day back. The beauty of texting is that it’s quick, convenient, and doesn’t interrupt your customer’s day. Texting also comes with built-in expectations around timing and the natural flow of conversations. While responses are expected, there’s an understanding that it may take a bit of time. This differs from live chat, which expects near-instant replies. With texting, even if you think there might be a wait for getting your customers some help, you can use a simple text to let your customers know that you are working on an answer but it might take a bit of time. This will help them to continue with their day without sitting by the phone waiting. Let’s look at the following example of one such situation.
It’s no secret that the significance of an effective customer service strategy lies not only in delighting existing customers but in drawing in new business as well. Customers have become increasingly impatient and expect companies to respond to them faster. They are also likely to switch to other businesses or companies if your response time is too high. There are many factors that might impact your average response time, including: the number of steps that agents have to take to find customer history and previous interactions the difficulty in communicating and collaborating with other teams absolute ticket volumes, as well as ticket volume to agent ratio the frequency of complex issues that routinely take longer to solve To help you tackle these challenges in an efficient manner, we’ve put together this article where we deep dive into the average response times across channels, and also look at effective ways to improve customer responsiveness. What is responsiveness in customer service? Simply put, customer responsiveness indicates how fast and efficiently a company responds to customers. From a customer support standpoint, it is the time taken by the support agents to respond to your customers. It’s important to note that customer responsiveness covers first response time, and also the frequency and consistency in communication until the final resolution. Customers would be delighted if they get connected to an agent immediately but it would all fade off if they don’t receive a speedy solution to their queries. Striking a balance between speed and quality is the biggest challenge faced by customer support agents. However, by clearly communicating the expected wait and query resolution time beforehand, you can help set the right expectations with customers. This will also enable customers to gain trust in your brand, and help you build customer loyalty. But the real question here is – how can you deliver timely and consistent customer support when you handle different communication channels? The answer to this question lies in understanding the expected response times for each channel as well as knowing how to deliver better customer experience. How crucial is the customer response time for each channel? The average response time or average wait time differs for each support channel. Here is a breakdown of the average response time for each customer service channel. Email According to SuperOffice, the average wait time for an email is 12 hours and 10 minutes. Here is a representation of the percentage of different age groups expecting an email reply within 1 hour.
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