Multiple staff answering the same ticket?

R

RobinF

New member
I'm messing around in WHMCS right now and a thought occured to me. For those who run a company with lots of staff to answer tickets, does it ever happen that two staff members respond to the same ticket at the same time?

And if not, how do you prevent that from happening?
 
Every now and then this will happen, however in WHMCS, when you start to type a reply, there's a note that is posted at the top of the screen to say "Robin is posting a message" or something to that effect. Basically as long as it's not taking 15 minutes to read a question and then start a reply, you shouldn't have an issue.

What we instruct our staff to do is to read the message, and then before they start their reply they must refresh the page (or re-click the ticket), this insures that nobody else has already started typing on the message.

WHMCS also does a check when you are finished typing the message and click REPLY, so it gives you a second heads up to cancel your reply and see what someone else did first.

It's rare that two replies go out to the same customer, but when it happens, usually our customer is more than happy that two people are trying to address their problem rather than just one. And when both answers are similar to each other, that's just further reinforcement to the client that the process provided is the correct one to resolve their issue.
 
Yes it happens. What I do now is have a shift manager assign tickets to each member so they have a dedicated staff member helping them. It looks better then 4 different people doing it and then having them repeat at the same instructions when it didn't work the first time.
 
The disadvantage of ONE person handling a ticket is that only ONE person is involved, and when they end their shift and go home for the day/night or worse, take their 2 days off, then the ticket goes unanswered as it's assigned to a specific operator.

Having multiple people work on a ticket (especially since everything in the issue is being documented in the ticket) is that the client gets the fastest possible answer from whatever staff is online and available to answer the issue.

I can't tell you how frustrated I get with eNom and other places where my ticket is assigned to a person, and I have to wait for them to come back on shift, or come back after the weekend so I can get a response. I'm all for assigned representatives etc, but if that person is not available, I shouldn't be forced to wait for them to come on staff. Any able body personal with answers to a question should be answering the question.

At least that's how we've operated, and clients seem to be more than pleased with their results. When specific staff members are requested, tickets are assigned to them, but beyond that, the primary mission for our staff is to answer tickets as quickly and accurately so that the client can resolve the issue and close out the ticket once resolved.
 
Using a software that prevents question/request being answered by more people simultaneously is very important!
 
And WHMCS does just that. It places a warning on the page that someone else has already started answering the ticket. If the staff proceeds with the posting, then that's on them, not the software.
 
I always look at support tickets, even though I only reply to sales tickets. I do see the notice that I'm looking at the ticket, just as Conor pointed out. If I see something out of the ordinary, I will follow up with support. Add to that, we have our Support Supervisor watching as well and our VP of Operations. The client never sees two reps working their ticket simultaneously.
 
Wait for your clients reaction, that will tell you.

We usually get, wow, you guys really are on the ball :)
 
That might happen, but as Conor said it in unlikely to happen if the support staff rad the messages the WHMCS display. When someone has already opened a ticket and another user does the same, the 2nd one gets a message in read, which says that someone else is working on the ticket.
 
It happens to us sometimes as well but the clients see is at "hey at least there are more then 1 rep working at this company.
 
It does get a bit hectic with multiple staff. But usually it says where a member of staff started to reply to the ticket with date and time.
 
It happens, but your staff should communicate with each other about which tickets they are addressing. It's amazing how many companies have poor communication skills between the employees. Even fortune 500's have this issue.
 
FRCorey said:
It happens, but your staff should communicate with each other about which tickets they are addressing. It's amazing how many companies have poor communication skills between the employees. Even fortune 500's have this issue.
Click to expand...

Agreed. Communication is a large part of any company, it could come between succeeding and failing.

Back to the original topic:

As far as it goes with WHMCS, refreshing the ticket status page should solve most of your issues. Assigning the ticket to a staff member would provide poor customer service due to not having replies when that staff member is out of the office. (Unless being monitored otherwise)
 
One must check before who replied and what or what have been replied before , its not difficult to control such situations, while you can distribute the customers in two section , so one operator reply to one and vice versa, this way you can control on replying twice,
 
Most systems will give the representative some indication of who has and/or who is working on a ticket. I agree with Conor that it is rare for two replies on the same question to go out on the same ticket especially if the responder is paying attention to the system alerts. But, it does happen and again it is rare to get a complaint. Double duty is far better than no duty.
 
handsonhosting said:
The disadvantage of ONE person handling a ticket is that only ONE person is involved, and when they end their shift and go home for the day/night or worse, take their 2 days off, then the ticket goes unanswered as it's assigned to a specific operator.

Having multiple people work on a ticket (especially since everything in the issue is being documented in the ticket) is that the client gets the fastest possible answer from whatever staff is online and available to answer the issue.

I can't tell you how frustrated I get with eNom and other places where my ticket is assigned to a person, and I have to wait for them to come back on shift, or come back after the weekend so I can get a response. I'm all for assigned representatives etc, but if that person is not available, I shouldn't be forced to wait for them to come on staff. Any able body personal with answers to a question should be answering the question.

At least that's how we've operated, and clients seem to be more than pleased with their results. When specific staff members are requested, tickets are assigned to them, but beyond that, the primary mission for our staff is to answer tickets as quickly and accurately so that the client can resolve the issue and close out the ticket once resolved.
Click to expand...

The other point to bring up is each staff member has a different experience and level of knowledge. If one person doesn't know and they are to proud a they could keep a ticket held up for longer than what it needs to while they try to research it.
 
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