Customer Support Software Featured Articles

Customer support software doesn’t have to be boring—in fact, software providers today are creating ticketing solutions don’t just liven up the customer experience, but that give the agent experience a similar makeover. It might be surprising to think that businesses can lose sight of the employee in an effort to optimize the experience of the customer, but it’s a fate that unfortunately befalls too many support teams. With the right customer support software, however, customers and agents alike can benefit.

One way to spruce up the employee experience with a ticketing system is to give the display and navigation a modern facelift. Open Technology Real Services (OTRS (News - Alert)) Group, a provider of open-source and cloud-based management solutions, recently released Business Solution, which runs on a Facebook-like interface with a live chat option. The visual display of the updated software—the fourth iteration of OTRS’s open-source ticket system—improves workflow by making information easily accessible to agents, even during calls or live chats with customers, as well as aesthetically appealing and enjoyable for agents to use.

OTRS hopes that its new Facebook (News - Alert)-inspired design will facilitate a more natural flow of communication between agents and customers—particularly of younger generations—who are already familiar with social networking sites and feel comfortable navigating them. In correspondence with CRM.com, OTRS’s director of global marketing and communications Josephine Guenther explained, "Facebook is the most common social network that is used worldwide. As OTRS is available in 34 languages all around the world, we needed...a design that most people in the world have already worked with and feel comfortable with."

A strong customer support software solution like that of OTRS will also provide detailed ticket histories that can be quickly viewed by agents, and offer access to professional updates and vendor support. Data from OTRS’s Dynamic Field Database takes streamlining workflow a step further by logging outside customer information and incorporating it into tickets, automatically updating them whenever there is a change. This makes the job of the agent easier, and creates more robust profiles for each customer ticket to ensure better and more comprehensive support.