In our previous post, we discussed evaluating your Customer Education program based on your company’s average time to value (TTV) by looking at this data from multiple perspectives. In this post, we will delve into an area primed for inter-departmental collaboration and optimization: support tickets.

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Why Support Tickets Matter

Support tickets offer real-time insight into many different facets of your product and businesses. Based on both the topics and volume of support tickets, you can learn:

  • How your product is being used,
  • If your user experience is working as desired,
  • If your customer onboarding and support resources are relevant and effective, and more broadly,
  • Are your customers frustrated? If so, how frequently and about what?

This leads us to our second assessment question: How many support tickets is your company fielding in a given period and what are the common topics?

Tracking Support Ticket Trends

The volume of support tickets is a very concrete measurement of how customers are doing (and feeling) with your product. In most cases, the more tickets a customer submits, the less happy and satisfied they are.

When looking at support ticket data, consider tracking some or all of the below metrics:

  • Support tickets month-over-month
  • Support tickets related to similar topics
  • Support tickets before and after relevant training content is released
  • Support tickets submitted during different phases of the customer lifecycle

Support ticket data is also a goldmine for both reactive and proactive content development. If a notable portion of customers is experiencing the same challenges – whether feature-based, performance-based, or administrative – and are requesting help, this should be an immediate red flag that something isn’t working.

Perhaps customers are struggling with the navigation of a new feature. In the long term, it may make sense to reconfigure the navigation entirely, but in the short term, consider creating a video tutorial that walks users through the necessary steps to access the feature.

If You Build It, They May Still Not come

Once you release the resource, monitor support lines to see if the volume of tickets on that particular topic decreases. If they do, great! If not, it’s time to head back to the support tickets and confirm that the resource you created really does address the question. If the resource still seems appropriate, perhaps customers simply aren’t seeing the content. If that’s the case, it’s time to work with your Marketing and Customer Success Teams to surface that support.

Keeping track of support ticket topics can also help inform the proactive development of resources (lest we only acknowledge customers when they are considering a divorce). If your company regularly releases product updates or you know that customers have been frustrated by similar changes in the past, consider launching new educational materials in tandem with the release of the product.

The benefits of using support tickets should now be clear, but what if your company or Support Team doesn’t currently track tickets? If you have access to your company’s support software or Google Analytics, look into search queries and determine which pages and articles get the most views. For more information about working with your Support Team, download our eBook: How Customer Education and Support Can Solve Each Other’s Biggest Problems.

As you establish where your customers are struggling through and examination of time to value patterns and support ticket analyses, the next question to explore relates to the state of your Customer Education program and whether or not it is effectively addressing the previously uncovered challenges. In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more, I encourage you to check out some of our other resources:

If you’re interested in learning more about how Skilljar can help your company, request a demo below and we will reach out!

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