Automated ticketing system

When businesses receive high volumes of support requests from customers, agents can easily fall behind. Aside from taking a toll on customer satisfaction, this can also lead to burnout amongst customer service representatives and lower job satisfaction.

The good news is that your reps don’t have to burden themselves by taking on all support requests. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2023, 73% of consumers expect to interact more with AI and believe it can improve the quality of service they receive.

Invest in an automated customer service system to improve ticket resolution rates and allow your specially trained agents to focus on more complex issues. When you do, you’ll invest in a better experience for your customer base and staff.

Follow along and choose the best automated ticketing software for your business’s needs, or jump to the section of your choice using our menu below.

• What is an automated ticketing system?
• Overview of the top 10 automated ticketing systems
• Comparison chart of the top 10 automated ticketing software
• Features of the automated ticketing system
• Benefits of automated ticketing software
• How to implement an automated ticketing system
• FAQs
• Try an automated ticketing system for free

An automated ticketing system is an important component of help desk software that uses AI to manage inbound customer support requests, providing assistance to customer service agents.

Automated ticketing software processes incoming messages from customers and can:

• Deflect high-volume support requests so agents can focus on more complex issues
• Open tickets with contextual information and automatically route them to the most appropriate agent
• Direct customers to help centre resources
• Remind customers when they need to reply to an agent
• Manage support workflows

In this section, we break down the 10 best automated ticketing systems of 2023. We based rankings on features, pricing, customer reviews and efficacy.

1. Zendesk
2. Zoho Desk
3. Freshdesk
4. LiveAgent
5. HubSpot Ticketing System
6. SupportBee
7. TeamSupport
8. HappyFox
9. Jira Service Management
10. Web Help Desk by SolarWinds

1. Zendesk

Keep your organisation firing on all cylinders with the Zendesk automated ticketing system. Zendesk helps businesses automate ticketing with intelligent routing and optical character recognition (OCR). AI can understand account context, customer sentiment, language and intent. OCR can then account for agent status and capacity and prioritise conversations to quickly route customers to the most appropriate agent.

The two work together to create a seamless experience for customers.

Also, all productivity automations – or tasks running on a pre-set schedule – run on open tickets according to the cadence your system administrator sets. You can also set triggers to automate menial or repetitive tasks that must happen when an action occurs. Actions can include anything from sending an email to confirm receipt of a support request to dispatching a customer satisfaction survey once a conversation ends.

Our automated ticketing software is also highly adaptable, so it’s easy for system administrators to make customisations that empower agents to provide better customer experiences, deflect tickets and boost productivity.

You can even use Zendesk bots to create customised workflows and serve customers around the clock, reducing agent workloads and giving customers back some of their time.

Features:

• Intelligent routing
• OCR
• Easy-to-set-up automations and workflows
• Unified omnichannel agent interface with customer context and conversation history
• Real-time reporting and analytics
• Ticket tagging
• Integrations with other systems
• No-code chatbot builder
• Self-service
• Suggested responses

Pricing:

• Support Team: $19 per agent/month
• Support Professional: $55 per agent/month
• Support Enterprise: $115 per agent/month

Free trial: 14 days

2. Zoho

Zoho Desk, Zoho’s ticket management system, can help you streamline support request handling and nurture long-term customer relationships. This ticketing software helps make businesses more accessible to their clientele through omnichannel support and its proprietary AI assistant, Zia.

Zia deflects tickets away from busy support agents by directing users to informative help centre articles. She can then report to system administrators on any insufficient documentation to ensure they’re aware of gaps in the existing knowledge base.

Zia can also decipher user sentiment to collect ticket context and provide reps with the information they need to properly triage support conversations.

Features:

• Omnichannel ticketing
• Unified customer view
• AI assistant
• Sentiment analysis
• Advanced response editor
• Self-service

Pricing:

• Standard: $20 per user/month
• Professional: $35 per user/month
• Enterprise: $50 per user/month

Free trial: 15 days

Learn more about Zoho for Zendesk.

3. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is Freshworks’ help desk solution, and it provides customer service agents with the tools they need to deliver better customer experiences. Freshdesk offers a single customer view and blends with the AI-powered bots in Freshchat to streamline multichannel support.

With Freshworks’ robust help desk tool, you can automate an array of ticket management tasks, including:

• Creating workflows based on customer location, language and keywords in their support request
• Ensuring the ticket status remains current as agents make progress on a resolution
• Reminding agents of service level agreement (SLA) policies when tickets are open too long
• Escalating a ticket to management if SLAs aren’t met

You can also create customised routing rules that set your organisation up for success.

Features:

• Agent collision detection
• SLA management
• Thank you detection
• Pre-written replies
• Repetitive task automation
• Ticket field suggestions
• Contextual ticketing

Pricing:

• Growth: $18 per agent/month
• Pro: $59 per agent/month
• Enterprise: $95 per agent/month

Free trial: 21 days

Free plan: Available for up to 10 agents

Learn more about the Freshdesk integration for Zendesk.

4. LiveAgent

You can equip your team with LiveAgent’s ticketing system to improve your business’s overall support capabilities. This help desk is user-friendly, offers many customer service features and can be a viable solution for personalising support.

LiveAgent’s automated ticketing solution can condense inbound customer communications from email, phone calls, website chat messages, social media mentions and more in a central location without requiring additional work for agents.

Use LiveAgent’s advanced automations, triggers and integrations to revolutionise your customer support operations.

Features:

• Universal agent inbox
• Pre-written messages
• Internal contextual notes
• Customer portal with built-in knowledge base

Pricing:

• Free: $0/month
• Small business: $12 per agent/month
• Medium business: $35 per agent/month
• Large business: $59 per agent/month

Free trial: Up to 30 days

5. HubSpot Ticketing System

While HubSpot’s bread and butter is marketing, the company’s ticketing system is a worthwhile solution for businesses that need to manage customer support requests on a budget.

Users report that HubSpot is easy to set up, and they enjoy the built-in ticket management features, email automation and feedback surveys.

However, some users state that it can quickly get pricey if you need to add a lot of contacts to the system, and it could benefit from better chat flows that automatically open tickets for live chats.

Features:

• Unified customer view
• Ticket prioritisation and management
• Automated ticket tagging
• Ticket assignment and escalation

Pricing:

• Free: $0/month
• Starter CRM Suite: $30/month
• Starter Service Hub: $20/month
• Professional Service Hub: $500/month
• Enterprise Service Hub: $1,200/month
• Starter Operations Hub: $20/month
• Professional Operations Hub: $800/month
• Enterprise Operations Hub: $2,000/month

Free trial: Not available

6. SupportBee

SupportBee’s ticketing system enables help desk agents to collaborate to resolve customer issues efficiently.

Streamline interdepartmental conversations to ensure quick ticket resolutions whether your agents are sitting at their desks or on the go.

The SupportBee ticketing system has an integrated knowledge base, a customer portal and a shared inbox. Customers appreciate the platform’s customisation capabilities and the ability to set up multiple knowledge bases.

However, others say they wish SupportBee had more no-code customisation options, faster load times and better formatting for email replies and forwarding to reduce disorganisation.

Features:

• Shared inbox
• Integrated knowledge base
• Customer web portal
• Mobile ticketing system
• Easy installation

Pricing:

• Startup: $15 per user/month
• Enterprise: $20 per user/month

Free trial: 14 days

7. TeamSupport

TeamSupport brands itself as a holistic B2B customer service solution with ticket management functionality. The platform is designed with team collaboration in mind and the goal of reducing overall customer churn.

TeamSupport is one of the more expensive ticketing solutions, but users report that the catalogue of features, customisability and ease of ticket assignment make it worthwhile.

However, other users note that the TeamSupport mobile app could benefit from better integrations. Also, since it isn’t HIPAA enabled, TeamSupport isn’t a one-stop solution for healthcare companies that must adhere to US federally mandated privacy requirements.

Features:

• Email integration
• Ticket automation
• Customisable workflows
• Knowledge base article suggestions
• Sentiment analysis
• Mobile ticketing
• Ticket collision
• Customised ticket fields

Pricing:

• Essential Support: $49 per agent/month
• Enterprise Support: $69 per agent/month
• Complete Customer Support Suite: $119 per agent/month

Free trial: 14 days

8. HappyFox

HappyFox is a simple ticketing system built for operations teams. Use HappyFox smart rules to speed up first-contact resolutions, modernise your customer service processes, reduce human error and eliminate grunt work.

HappyFox prides itself on the simplicity of its ticketing system and offers customised ticket queues that streamline customer conversations from email, social media, chat, phone and more.

With this automated ticketing system, you can also set up auto-timers to track resolution times, understand trends, pull data from integrated apps and direct users to self-service whenever possible.

Features:

• Ticket tagging and sorting
• Omnichannel ticketing
• Private note collaboration
• Pre-written replies
• Anti-agent collision
• Integrated applications

Pricing:

• Mighty: $39 per agent/month
• Fantastic: $59 per agent/month
• Enterprise: $79 per agent/month
• Enterprise Plus: $99 per agent/month

Free trial: Not specified for the ticketing system

9. Jira Service Management

Jira Service Management by Atlassian is a comprehensive automated ticketing system for legal, IT, HR and other teams.

With Jira, users can get up and running quickly, view all conversations and use integrations to import communications from applications like Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Jira Service Management offers numerous integrations and out-of-the-box capabilities to support your business’s unique collaboration, task management, compliance, productivity, planning, self-service, reporting and pipeline needs.

Features:

• Request management
• Organised customer interactions
• Customer support integrations
• Ticket resolution metrics
• Repetitive task automations

Pricing:

• Free: $0/month
• Standard: $21 per agent/month
• Premium: $47 per agent/month
• Enterprise: Contact sales

Free trial: 10 agents free for 12 months or 7-day free trial for up to 5,000 agents

10. Web Help Desk by SolarWinds

SolarWinds offers omnichannel ticketing software to help customer service agents resolve support tickets more efficiently.

To break it down, SolarWinds uses an IT Service Management (ITSM) approach to automated ticketing, meaning every asset, configuration, automation and piece of contextual information will flow well within a centralised system.

Build a service desk to customise specifications for:

• Problem management
• Issue management
• IT management
• Change management
• Customer self-service
• Customer self-service

Features:

• Machine learning
• Ticket classification and routing automation
• Centralised support requests
• Service desk dashboard
• Custom reports
• Employee service portal

Pricing:

• Team: $19 per technician/month
• Business: $39 per technician/month
• Professional: $69 per technician/month
• Enterprise: $89 per technician/month

Free trial: 30 days

When searching for the best automated ticketing system, look at features first. Here are six primary features you should look for in ticket management software.

1. Routing: Your ticketing system should help streamline routing and ticket assignment. Ideally, it will have intelligent routing capabilities that automatically assign agents to tickets according to the business rules you set and agent specialities.
   
2. Productivity: A good automated ticketing system will handle simple tasks that keep productivity high by allowing agents to focus on work that requires their expertise. Your ticketing system should include automations, tagging and workflow management tools.
   
3. Unified customer view: Choose an automated ticketing system that stores customer data in a centralised location where agents can quickly access it when needed.
   
4. Real-time reporting and analytics: Ticketing system data is important to any operations centre because analytics can provide key insights that inform hiring needs, help with business decisions and inspire ideas for improving the customer experience.
   
5. System integrations: Select a ticketing system that is compatible with the integrations you use daily to ensure continuity of service and to maintain your high level of customer care. Some common ticketing system integrations include password protection tools, project management software, chatbots, bug-tracking tools and security compliance technology.
   
6. No-code chatbot builder: AI chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in the world of customer service because they can help deflect tickets and collect customer information. A no-code chatbot builder makes this technology accessible to companies that may not have the resources to build or acquire one otherwise.

These features will lend themselves well when it comes to cultivating a more organised help desk, ensuring that your chatbots provide relevant self-service recommendations and foster a better agent experience.

Automating your help desk ticketing system allows you to automate workflows, use ticket deflection, streamline omnichannel support, create a uniform view and uncover recurring issues.

• Automate support workflows and task management: One of the key benefits of automated ticketing is that it allows you to automate tasks that don’t require the expertise of a trained agent.
  
• Deploy ticket deflection: AI-powered ticketing software can deflect simple questions and automatically suggest knowledge base articles for internal or external support tickets based on the keywords present in the support request.
  
• Streamline omnichannel support: Omnichannel customer service is essential to any modern help desk. An automated ticketing system can help eliminate information silos and keep all staff members aware of each customer’s history.
  
• Create a uniform customer view: A single customer view and ticket tagging can keep tickets organised and support interdepartmental collaboration.
  
• Uncover recurring support issues: A good automated ticketing system will also collect data so you can regularly run reports and take proactive steps to resolve recurring problems. This information is a great way to understand what your customers need.

You can implement a fully optimised IT ticketing system in five steps:

1. Identify business needs
2. Research customer needs
3. Create ticket automation rules
4. Build a knowledge base
5. Write pre-written responses

1. Identify business needs

Review past ticket data to better understand business ticketing needs. This data can include:

• The types of support requests you receive most often
• How many tickets you receive on average
• The resources you need to resolve them
• How long it takes to resolve customer requests on average

2. Research customer needs

Aside from taking note of past customer requests and their frequency, think ahead to any product releases or changes that may confuse customers.

Review help centre data to identify opportunities for new knowledge base articles that your AI chatbot can use to provide a more robust automated self-service experience.

3. Create ticket automation rules

Once you select a ticket management system and fully understand your business’s needs, you should set up ticket automation rules. A system administrator can create smart automation rules that will complete an action under specific conditions.

Some ways you can automate ticketing and create more dynamic workflows include:

• Routing tickets to agents based on skill
• Using standardised inputs and fields
• Setting and managing SLA agreements
• Using triggers to minimise repetitive tasks

4. Build a knowledge base for agents and customers

Use the insights you gained from your assessment of previous knowledge base data to write articles and expand your help centre. Add them to your knowledge base so your system’s AI can recommend relevant articles to the customers and agents seeking information.

5. Write pre-written responses

Pre-written responses are previously created replies to simple yet common questions. You can also use these standardised responses in ‘no-reply’ situations to speed up response times.

For example, you can compose a pre‑written response to let customers know that you’re working on their ticket or that you’re closing a conversation due to a lack of response.

You can create a pre-written response by:

• Addressing the customer by name
• Re-stating the situation
• Explaining the next steps
• Providing a way for the customer to follow up
• Signing off with a real agent’s name

While features play a key role in choosing the right automated ticketing system for your business, you must ensure it ticks off some other important boxes.

All the essentials we list below will help you deliver a more satisfactory experience to your agents and customers and ensure that acquiring the new software won’t set you back operationally or financially.

Checklist for choosing automated ticketing software:

• Creates a frictionless agent experience
• Makes financial sense (consider time to value and total cost of ownership)
• Ensures your support platform is reliable and secure
• Increases profitability and the likelihood of a return on your investment
• Provides dedicated training and customer support

Zendesk sets each customer up for success with dedicated account management and easy access to CX experts to make sure you get the most value out of your purchase with the least amount of headaches.

Learn the answers to the most common questions about automated ticketing.

Why does your business need an automated ticketing system?

Omnichannel customer service ticketing systems can open problem tickets and use skills-based routing to ensure all customer issues get in front of the right agent for the job. They can also track open tickets, escalate tickets with unresolved issues, send surveys when tickets close and perform repetitive tasks when a pre-defined trigger occurs.

Why is automation an important part of a ticketing system?

An automated ticketing system for customer service has some serious potential to speed up ticket resolution times. Automated ticketing systems and chatbots provide quick answers to most support queries and can make representatives more readily available to handle tougher issues that the robots can’t.

An automated ticketing system can also:

• Lower payroll costs
• Free up specialised agents to focus on complex issues
• Deflect basic or repetitive issues to prevent agent burnout
• Speed up resolution times by collecting essential customer data
• Facilitate cross-team collaboration by documenting conversation history in a centralised database

What are some best practices for ticket automation?

Here are nine best practices that businesses should follow after adopting an automated ticketing system:

1. Rely on AI chatbots to handle simple tasks and collect customer information.
2. Train agents to make the most of your automated ticketing system.
3. Document your strategy for ticket prioritisation.
4. Ensure tickets are always organised and up-to-date.
5. Understand your system’s automation capabilities.
6. Create pre-written responses for repetitive messages.
7. Use SLA management capabilities to meet contractual obligations.
8. Monitor ticket statuses and reward high-performing agents.
9. Send a survey to the customer after you close the ticket.