Why You Should Stop Tagging Tickets In Your Support Platform

Most companies are already sitting on thousands of conversations filled with actionable feedback that could help them prioritize issues and dramatically improve customer experience. Where are these golden nuggets hiding? In their support tickets.

Data from feedback like support tickets can be incredibly powerful. However, making sense of these tickets on a larger scale is getting increasingly difficult as the volume keeps growing with new channels like live chat.

Why You Should Stop Tagging Tickets In Your Support Platform

Analyzing Your Support Tickets

How do you mine the valuable insights you need from your customer feedback data? Most support teams use tags to categorize and group the customer feedback to report their findings to the rest of the business. There are two ways to analyze your support tickets:

Tagging In Support Platforms

Tagging in support platforms doesn’t require any third-party tools — it relies on your support agents to assign tags to new tickets when they arrive. This can lead to a few issues, including inconsistency, limited tag coverage, and higher costs.

While you can automate this process within your support platform by using its tag rules, those features are dependent on you and your team to create static rules based on keyword matching. A ticket is assigned a relevant tag when it matches a predefined rule in your support system.

Customer Feedback Analytics Platforms

A customer feedback analytics platform integrates with your support system to improve the insights you gain from tagging. This type of platform is usually powered by artificial intelligence — including machine learning — to offer sentiment analysis and tag suggestions.

Tagging In A Support Platform Vs A Customer Feedback Analytics Platform

There are four key differences between tagging in support platforms and tagging in customer feedback analytics platforms.

1. Retrospective Tagging And Flexibility

Reports based on tagged tickets are most effective when all of your tickets have been tagged. That’s often difficult, though, because you’re bound to discover new tags as you go along. This is why the ability to retrospectively tag tickets that have already arrived in your system is a crucial feature.

Support Platforms
Tagging in support platforms only works for tickets that come in after you create the tag. Also, whenever you receive new or slightly different tickets, they remain untagged, hard to find, and difficult to report on.

Let’s say you have a tag for all your “Pricing” related tickets. Later, if you want to include interactions in which the customer asked about discounts, a support tool won’t update the historic tickets that match the new criteria. Your reports won’t be able to make the distinction between general pricing interactions and questions about discounts.

Customer Feedback Analytics Platforms
Customer feedback analytics platforms index all of your tickets when they sync with your support platform, meaning you can create a tag and track all the relevant tickets, regardless of when they were submitted.

These tags can also be altered in the future to include new keywords, as they automatically update to include old tickets. This is extremely powerful — after all, you can’t accurately predict all of the tags your customer support team will ever need in the future.

2. Tag Discovery And Alerts

The time it takes from when new issues occur to when your team gets them fixed can be the difference between happy and unhappy customers. This is why it’s important to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to discovering new tags.

Support Platforms
There is no way to automatically discover new tags that you should be tracking in support platforms. The best way to discover new tags is to schedule a regular monthly brainstorming session with your support team and generate tags based on recently mentioned topics.

Customer Feedback Analytics Platforms
The best feedback analytics platforms feature tag discovery by scanning your conversations and surfacing the most important tags that you should be tracking. This means you don’t have to waste valuable time scrutinizing tickets for new tags every month or worrying about completely missing important tags for several weeks.

Look for a solution that not only offers tag suggestions but also includes alerts, which notify you when new tags are discovered. This will ensure that you’re kept up to date on what is happening in your tickets as quickly as possible.

3. Root Cause Analysis

To design effective solutions, product teams need deep insights to fully understand the root cause of the issue. Therefore it’s important to not only know what the high-level tags are but also be able to drill down to find specific details.

Support Platforms
Tagging tickets in your support platform won’t allow you to break down your tags to see which keywords are responsible for the overall tag volume. You’ll have to set up entirely new tags and retroactively tag all the tickets to gain this additional information, which can be impossible if you’re getting hundreds of tickets every month.

Customer Feedback Analytics Platforms
Customer feedback analytics platforms allow you to dig deeper into your tags by breaking them down into sub-tags. You’ll be able to see additional data, such as how many tickets in the “Technical Issues” tag came from tickets that mentioned “Login” or “Sign-up.”

This is crucial because it provides the team with actionable information on how to reduce the support volume for the overall tag.

4. Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis allows you to understand how your users feel about your company, your product, and its features — rather than solely relying on conversation volumes to prioritize issues.

It also allows you to gauge overall customer satisfaction based on all of your support tickets. These datasets tend to be much larger than common surveys like NPS, where only customers that proactively provide a score would be counted.

Support Platforms
As of now, none of the major support platforms allow you to perform automated sentiment analysis on your tickets. You either need to export your data to a standalone sentiment tool or use a third-party plugin for your support platform.

Customer Feedback Analytics Platforms
Robust customer feedback analytics platforms offer in-depth sentiment analysis, which allows you to see all of the tags that are driving positive or negative mentions. When you better understand customer sentiment, you’ll be able to solve any issues you find faster and give customers more of what they love about your product.

Understand Your Customers Better Through Feedback Analytics

While support platforms are a great place to start tagging your tickets and gain basic information, customer feedback analytics platforms are built specifically to analyze support data. They’re much more powerful, intuitive, and flexible than support platforms.

A platform like Playvox Customer AI allows you to seamlessly integrate with your support platforms to supercharge reporting, let you deep dive into data, and help you test your hunches in seconds. It can effectively empower anyone from product, customer success, or even the C-suite to get actionable insights from existing data sources quickly.

Want to learn more about how tagging can change your customer support insights? Read all about it in our free eBook, The Ultimate Support Tagging Taxonomy Guide.