Handling duplicate tickets for support efficiency

Helpshift is a B2B SaaS startup that builds Customer Support CRM software. It is used by leading companies like Microsoft, Square, Brex, Tencent Games etc. to provide support to their users.

Context

Helpshift's email and web contact form channels (unlike the in-app channels like iOS, Android and Web Chat), have limitations in seamlessly authenticating the user's identity to restrict them from creating duplicate tickets. In some cases, this problem can also be attributed to unclear expectations set for the user.

Problem Statement

Some companies that use Helpshift's email and web contact form channels were frequently getting duplicate support tickets from their users. This leads to multiple Support Agents helping the same user on different tickets and affects the Support team's efficiency.

Research

I analysed a few of the customers' data and looked at a number of duplicate support tickets to understand the scale of this problem and how Agents and Supervisors currently deal with them.

Furthermore, I had synthesised my observations by identify the stakeholders' major problems.

I also analysed the Agents' current task flow in dealing with duplicate tickets.

Since this problem affects all the important stakeholders in the system, viz., the Support Admin, the Support Agent, and the user, I built personas to highlight their needs derived from the research.

Ideation & Prototyping

One of the ways to solve this problem is by handling it at the source by adding a configurable limit on the number of tickets a user can create in a given period of time. But due to the limitations of these channels in easily authenticating the user and the additional complexities involved, we decided against this approach. We instead focused on making duplicate tickets management easier for Agents.

As a part of this, the below changes were introduced to address some of the problems

Introducing new flows to mark one ticket as a 'duplicate' of another and close it. The other ticket will be referred as the 'original' ticket.
Allowing the Agents to optionally send a message to the user while closing their duplicate ticket.
Making a default reply available to make it faster for the Agents to close a duplicate ticket and move on.
Preventing tickets that are closed as duplicates from not reopening if the user replies to them. If a user replies to a closed duplicate ticket, sending an auto-response asking them to follow up on the original ticket (if it is still open) or to create a new one.
Providing context to others by adding a duplicate/original ticket flag in the ticket's conversation along with their links. These flags can also help the Admins track duplicate tickets using filters and analytics.

Few initial wireframes for marking a ticket as a duplicate.

Final wireframes that I arrived at after some iterations.

Visual Designs

Tickets can be closed as duplicates from their actions popup.

A related original ticket has to be selected from the user's recent tickets to mark a ticket as duplicate.

Agents can optionally send the user a message to direct them to the original ticket for additional help.

Indicators were added to the duplicate ticket (left) and original Ticket (right) for context.

Results

We started tracking a few important metrics when this feature shipped and observed the below things

In ~85% of cases involving duplicate tickets, users didn't create more than 1 duplicate.
While closing a duplicate ticket, Agents sent a reply on it in only ~30% of the cases. Despite this, users tried following up on only 3-4% of the closed duplicate tickets.