One of the largest source of knowledge inside your organization is buried in your support department.  The answers to questions posed by your customers represent the collective knowledge base of some of your most experienced troubleshooters.  Yet, there's a good chance that your customers do not have access to this wealth of information - which causes them to open support tickets about the same issue over and over again.

Many customers have become conditioned to searching for answers before opening support tickets.  In fact, a lot of customers prefer it!  This is because they want instant gratification - in an age where physical product can be ordered online and sometimes show up the same day, they have no patience for unnecessary delays in seeking the answers that they need.  Yet, there's a good chance that their search on your site is limited to your formal documentation and your FAQs which limits the chances of them finding the answers they need.  The result?  More tickets for your agents to handle!

What if you could turn your entire set of tickets (or a portion of it) into a searchable archive while still hiding the details of the tickets that should remain private?

Awesome Support Public Tickets

Our Public Tickets add-on gives you some useful options for opening up your usually private tickets archive to public searching.  Once enabled you can decide:

• WHO makes a ticket public (Agents, users or both)
• WHICH tickets are made public (selected by agents, users or both)
• WHO can tag replies as public or private (Agents, users or both)
• Customize the layout of the page on which the tickets appear (Grid, List or Accordion)
• Show the tickets on multiple public pages (eg: one page for each of your products or departments)

FAQs vs Public Tickets

Awesome support's FAQ add-on allows an agent to take any reply and make it an FAQ in one click.  However, generally this still requires a bit more work since FAQs are usually a more formal extension of your documentation. So there is often an extra step where someone cleans up the new FAQ, selecting categories and otherwise making it pretty.

With Public Tickets, there is no expectation on the part of the public that the archive is clean.  So the agent can simply set the PUBLIC or PRIVATE tag on a ticket or reply, save the ticket and move on.

Caveats

Before implementing a Public Tickets option you should make your customers are aware that their data could be public information.  Surprising your customers by converting what they think was a private conversation into a public one is certainly not a good idea.  One way to ease the transition is to make just NEW tickets public by default.  Then as your customers get comfortable with the idea of their conversations being public you can go back and selectively turn on the public option for the best of your older tickets.

Wrap Up

Public Tickets are a great way to improve the productivity of your agents.  The less tickets that they have to deal with in the first place the better.  To encourage users to search first, you can add a link to the top of your submit-ticket page that outlines the benefit of searching the public archive first - something such as "Get faster answers by searching our public archive of prior tickets".

Have questions about how this all works?  Then drop us a line via our contact form!  Or, if you are a customer of ours already, just open a new support ticket.  Either way, we'd love to hear from you!