What is a ticket-driven workflow?

Ticket-driven workflows are like glorified emails. They involve a help ticket being created via any one of these triggers:

• An email to a pre-defined email address
• A new conversation thread on a social platform
• A phone call
• A new live-chat or message from your website or app

A ticket-driven workflow typically looks like this:

1. A new thread in your helpdesk or ticketing system lights up as unread, and goes into a queue for processing
2. Someone should triage it to determine whether it’s solvable by any customer service agent or if it needs help from another team like engineering. This is where many support processes are very painful for customers. In many companies, there’s no triage step - every agent attempts to solve every ticket, which often leads to frustrated customers - because something that should clearly be escalated or sent to a very specialized team such as legal, partnerships, integration, engineering, etc. doesn’t get there for a while, if ever.
3. Deal with a bad triage decision or response. If any mistake is made in step (2) or enough context is not collected, then the customer and customer support is going to see lots of back and forth to get things right.
4. Attempt to close issue with response.
5. Attempt to figure out root causes for the issue - could there be a permanent fix for it in future by designing something better in our services or products?
6. Attempt to see if the issue prevents a customer from getting value from the product or service and treat it as a new feature idea.
7. Attempt to look at all existing support docs or the product manual to see if this question is adequately covered for the future or if your internal and external knowledge bases need updating.

In most companies (4) may not be a satisfactory or adequate response, and the whole of (5), (6) and 7) is usually not done at all.

This results in a huge set of missed opportunities, because a company is not truly listening, understanding and proactively working to help customers.

The other part that’s annoying for customers is a lack of visibility about what’s going on. Is the company looking into the ticket? Are we waiting for a product or feature to be developed? For the customer, they send emails and messages and then “hope” to get a response. If they have to keep following up - that’s a strong sign that you need a process-driven workflow.

What is a process-driven workflow?

A process-driven workflow removes all the pain points of a ticket-driven workflow and creates a compounding, exponentially growing, continuosly improvement cycle of growth. It ensures customers are happier - which results in growing moats and strong, compounded gains over time.

These are the characteristics of a process-driven workflow:

• A ticket is created as a process, quite similar to the trigger for ticket-driven workflows above - however, the trigger is biased to a structured form.
• The ticket can be pri-triaged by the customer or by internal staff to ensure it’s categorized for the right team.
• A knowledge base can apply specialized knowledge via an AI prompt to either respond or to clarify what the question(s) are. You can also create a custom context around the question. For example, if the person is complaining that your web app is slow - you can auto-create a note showing logs via AI around exactly which areas are slow for this specific user. If the person is asking about pricing - you can augment your sales knowledge base to respond with tailored, personalized information. If you want augmentation of knowledge and use of AI, you must draw on highly specific sources of data for specific questions being asked.
• A process makes sure that a ticket is not simply closed and ignored - every step is followed to make sure that the product improves, the company improves, the knowledge base/website improves and that the value prop is addressing the customer question or problem. Every team should be involved here, not just customer support - including engineering, marketing, sales and management.

Why is a process-driven workflow far more useful and powerful?

• No step ever gets missed
• Things are not just assigned and then left there. Reminders ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
• It’s a repeatable, scalable process - so there’s no uncertainty about who is doing what next.
• The status (progress bar) of every specific ticket can be tracked visually in real-time.
• The customer can be invited into the workflow to see steps visible to them.
• All the follow up questions that should be done to ensure exponential improvement get done right - for example How can we prevent this question coming up in future? or Is our website or product documentation out of date? or Is this a new idea to improve our product?

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