Issue Tracking Software Buyer's Guide
Table of Contents
Handling and delivering the product with the best quality to the client is essential for every company. However, the quality team has to face many difficulties that arise during product development. These difficulties are bugs or defects that result in errors and deviated behavior of the software. The issue tracking software tracks bugs or issues and comes with several other benefits that increase productivity.
» What is Issue Tracking Software?
An issue tracking software enables a team or an individual to track, record, and follow the issue or ticket progression until it resolves. Generally, the issue tracking software ensures that the issue tracking cycle goes smooth, error-free, and makes customer service easy.
» What are the Features of Issue Tracking Software?
An Issue Tracking System provides end-to-end ticket management for all service-related requests. This also includes capturing customer complaints and requests, while categorizing and distributing them to the appropriate people to solve them efficiently.
Several issue tracking software products available in the market, while most of them offering common features. However, you need to choose the one that suits your company's needs.
› TICKET MANAGEMENT:
This feature of issue tracking software allows users to create customer issue tickets, depending on the specific customer query or request.
› TASK MANAGEMENT:
This feature allows users to create various lists of tasks directly from the issue tickets. This enables users to track the status of their queries and requests right from capturing to the closing of the ticket.
› ASSIGNMENT MANAGEMENT:
The issue management software assigns tickets to the relevant people, using the data from the ticket fields, as well as on their availability and area of expertise.
› INTEGRATION:
Your chosen software should offer integration with other IT tools your company use, which is vital. Check if your software can integrate with your email system. This will streamline communication and resolves more cases in less time.
› LIVE CHAT:
This is another important feature to look for in any issue tracking software, as it makes easy for your customers to get in contact with you. Your employees can also manage these customer contacts easily.
› KNOWLEDGE SHARING:
This feature allows you to maintain all the records of customer tickets within a central location. This knowledge base is useful for your agents and managers to search the database to find solutions from previously solved customer queries.
› ANALYTICS AND REPORTING:
This must-have feature in your issue management tools help you to improve and evaluate your customer satisfaction in the future
Visual Reports: Visual reports allow your manager to understand the performance of their team.
› CUSTOMIZATION:
Your software should enable you to customize labels, tasks, SLAs, and menu’s to run with the processes already in place.
» What are the Benefits of Issue Tracking Software?
Issue tracking tools records all the customer queries and requests, apart from solving them. This information can be used by the companies to recognize areas of improvement in the quality of their services and products. Several other benefits of the software give you sufficient reasons on why you should consider and invest in the issue tracking software.
› AUTOMATE CAPTURING OF ISSUES:
The issue tracking software allows you to capture all customer requests and queries by using various methods such as emails, phone calls, and online forms. The software allows users to categorize the issue tickets and route them to appropriate customer agents.
› CONTENT CREATION:
The issue management system records all customer queries and requests in a central location. Companies use this data to create relevant content such as FAQs or guides by comprehending common customer challenges.
› CUSTOMER FEEDBACK:
The software enables your customers to share their feedback once their query resolves. The organization can improve the quality of customer service by analyzing this information.
› CUSTOMER DATABASE INTEGRATION:
One of the benefits of the issue tracking solutions is, integrating with the company’s CRM software to give easy access to customer data. This feature helps the organization during the validation of customer calls and identification of issue tickets by referring to customer information.
› CONSISTENT IMPROVEMENT:
Companies need to improve their products and services consistently to maintain existing customers and obtain new customers. Analyzing customer requests and queries is one of the best ways to find any vital problems and ascertain areas of improvement essential for customer satisfaction.
› IDENTIFY OPPORTUNITIES FOR NEW FEATURES:
Customer feedback and complaints identify various bugs to fix, that help companies to add new features to improve their product quality.
» What is the Cost of Issue Tracking Software?
As the companies are focusing on improving their product quality and customer service, the popularity of the issue tracking solutions increases day-by-day. An effective issue tracking offers a positive experience to your customers when they are interacting with your organization. The software helps your team to better consolidate customer feedback for your services, products, and process improvements. Therefore, it is important to choose the best issue tracking software for your organization to increase productivity.
One of the biggest concerns of the organizations regarding the issue tracking software is its price. Small and medium-sized organizations often choose cloud-based software that offers easy-to-use, low cost, and subscription-based pricing options. However, large-scale businesses use a variety of CRM solutions that integrates with other IT systems and meet their business needs as well. The basic cost of the software starts from $10/10 users/month and if your company size is more than 10, then it is $7/user/month.
You must enlist your needs and search for the relevant software that meets your needs. You can also try their free version to understand how the system works. If you are comfortable with its functionality, then you can buy the product. However, choosing a monthly package instead of the annual package is a smart decision.
» Conclusion
The issue tracking software acts as a primary platform, where your customers can interact with your organization. Hence, you need to pick an effective issue tracking software to meet your business needs. However, choosing the perfect issue tracking solution for your company doesn’t need to be difficult if you consider features you are looking for to meet your business needs most, your budget, and your company size.