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This is the first in a series of blog posts that we will be releasing. It’s geared towards founders who are trying to set up a ticketing system for their business.
Finally. You’ve been dealing with an onslaught of customer requests coming in by email, text message, Slack, calls. But at last, you have a ticketing system. Now, they’re emailing support@yourcompany.com.
Good job, you've organized your chaos. Or have you?
One of the first things you’ll need to do is start classifying your tickets, so you can triage them more quickly.
For most startups, there are four primary types of customer problems: user education, bugs, feature requests, and manual tasks. You’re probably going to want different processes to handle each one.
📚 User education
User education (or knowledge-based) issues happen when your customers don’t understand something about your product. It can range from pricing to features you have to how those features work. They might ask things like:
- how much does your product cost?
- how do I sign up?
- how do I cancel my account?
- how do I add a teammate?
Priority
The hardest problem of early stage startups is when everything feels important. The good news is that not everything else. Prioritize actions that lie within a critical user path – things that prevent users from taking a core action in your app – or within the sales process.
Assignee
Any founding team member can typically handle these questions. The default first point of contact for these tickets should be your CEO, but with visibility to the rest of your team in case the CEO is occupied.
Tags
Tag these issues as #user-education. If your ticketing tool supports it, add a subcategory for the specific flow or area of the product to which an issue is related to. This will help you know where to clarify your copy and documentation.
Recommendations
The best way to reduce knowledge-based issues is to update confusing product copy and provide relevant help center documentation. Session recording tools can help you identify what product copy to update.
A high-touch approach is good here. Your goal is to deeply understand your customers and deliver a product experience they love.
Try the following:
- create help center articles so your users can self-serve
- create canned responses for common questions
- create product tours to help customer understand complex parts of your product or to quickly define the happy path
- analyze confusing user flows and update your product to remove complexities
- add a unified search to your product that allows customer to quickly find answers on their own
- add an LLM-based chatbot to give your customers a more flexible method for finding answers
🐞 Bugs
Early on, 30-50% of your tickets will typically be bug reports. Keep in mind that bug reports include not just errors, but also missed customer expectations which can be common in an early product.
Priority
While support tickets can tell you how users feel about a bug, when you prioritize, you’ll also want to lean on usage and error logs in tools like Sentry or Datadog to know how pervasive a bug is. Typically only 10-30% of users report bugs.
Assignee
Assign these issues to the engineer who worked on it. If you’re not sure who that is, you could ask the engineering lead to triage in a daily standup (if not urgent) or send them directly to an #engineering channel in Slack (if urgent).
Giving engineers responsibility over bugs in their code path helps them feel ownership.
Tags
Tags for bugs should be descriptive of the area of the product where they originated and be associated with project management issues to provide context for engineers.
When it’s possible, associate session recordings, errors logged, and product events with bugs to help your engineers quickly understand and resolve these bugs.
Recommendations
Review bug tickets regularly to find the areas of your product that you should focus on covering with tests, clarifying, or redesigning.
If a particular category seems to pop up again and again, you should ask why this is happening.
🙋 Feature requests
Feature requests are one of the smaller categories of tickets – usually around 10%.
Because they are raw customer thoughts, they do provide valuable feedback, which you should try to understand.
Priority
Feature requests are almost never urgent. Prioritize by:
- whether it blocks a key customer workflow
- alignment with your long-term roadmap
- the number of customers requesting each one
Assignee
These issues should be delegated to whoever owns product.
This person should close the ticket, put the information a dedicated channel (eg, #feature-requests in Slack or an internal feature request form) or in the backlog of your project management tool, and let the customer know when or whether to expect the feature.
Circle back again when the feature is shipped. Customers love hearing that their input influenced the roadmap!
Tags
Tagging these issues is helpful for product roadmap planning. The best practice is to have a #feature-requests tag with subcategories for the product area and the specific request.
Recommendations
Listen to product feedback to understand whether your vision is aligned with what customers want.
Listen especially for which parts of your product your customers are passionate about and which ones they are willing to pay for.
💪 Ops tasks
Any time a customer asks you to complete a task that they can’t do themselves, this is an ops task. You might reach for something like Retool or ask an engineer to, say, update a user’s settings in the DB directly.
Ops tasks are almost always blocking for customer flows and should have high or urgent priority.
Assignee
Your ops team should own these tickets, delegating subtasks as necessary.
Priority
Tag these with #ops-tasks and a subcategory related to the task. If relevant, you can add another tag for the related user flow.
Recommendations
Over time, you should identify the ops tasks that are most time-consuming for your team and most important to your customers. Automate these or enable customers to self-serve.
Conclusion
So that’s how you handle support tickets. Stay tuned!
Next time we’re talking about how you measure your team’s performance :)
