8 Best Practices for Ticketing Management in Customer Support [Guide for 2025]

Your support ticket queue explodes suddenly.

You’re bouncing between multiple tools, frantically sorting through requests, and trying to keep track of urgent issues—while also reassuring frustrated customers.

And no matter how many fires you put out, it never seems like enough.

Sound familiar? This is what happens to customer support without a proper ticketing management process.

When tickets pile up, small issues snowball into major complaints. Important tasks get lost in the shuffle. And, before you know it, an angry customer churns and goes with your competitor.

The pressure is relentless, and the stakes are high—a delay from support can mean losing valuable clients.

But there’s a better way. With a powerful ticket management system, you can automate workflows, prioritize critical issues, and track every customer request in one central hub. No more chaos: just streamlined, organized support that keeps your customer satisfaction and your peace of mind intact.

In this guide, we’ll dive into the 8 best practices for ticketing management that will help you take control of your support system and improve customer satisfaction. Let’s get started.

What is ticket management?

Ticket management is the process of tracking, assigning, and resolving customer service requests. It covers the whole ticket lifecycle—from creating a ticket to resolving the issue. An efficient ticketing management process is crucial to enhance customer satisfaction and retention rate, as it helps your business to:

• Organize, prioritize, and record customer inquiries and problems
• Enable systematic handling of support tickets by agents
• Keep customers updated regularly about their request status

Ticket management process is bound to vary from one business to another, but the ultimate objective remains the same: Address the customer request and close the ticket ASAP.

8 best practices for ticket management to boost customer satisfaction

According to a study by Deloitte, 54% of companies regard reducing their customer

service response time as their top priority. And the first step towards reducing the response time is having an efficient ticket management system in place.

So, here are 8 ticket management best practices that you can implement in your organization to make your ticket handling robust and drive customer retention:

1. Prioritize tickets based on urgency and impact

A survey shows 21% of customers expect their ticket to be resolved immediately, 23% expect it to be resolved within an hour, and another 23% of customers expect resolution within 3 hours.

It’s natural for customers to expect quick resolution of their tickets. But it’s up to you to decide which ones need your immediate attention. After all, when everything feels urgent, nothing is. So, set clear criteria for ticket prioritization.

For example, a ticket regarding a security breach should take precedence over a feature request. You could also use criteria like the number of users impacted and the severity of the issue.

2. Build and maintain a robust knowledge base

A well-built knowledge base doesn’t just help customers but your support agents too.

In SaaS, many customer queries tend to be repetitive, like “How do I reset my password?” or “Where can I find usage reports?” By offering clear self-service documentation, you’ll reduce incoming tickets.

A whopping 81% of customers attempt to solve the problem before reaching out to a live agent, a Harvard Business Review study shows. Not only does this improve customer satisfaction, but it also allows your agents to focus on more complex issues.

3. Leverage automation to streamline tasks

Automation is your best friend when managing large volumes of tickets, ensuring important tickets raised by high-value clients don’t fall through the cracks. Set up automated workflows using customer service automation software to assign tickets to the right agents or trigger follow-up emails.

For example, when a new ticket is submitted by a key account, automate an immediate alert to senior support staff. While replying to oft-repeated queries, automate your responses with pre-written templates.

4. Set transparent service-level agreements (SLAs)

A service-level agreement (SLA) defines the level of service you’d deliver as a vendor to your customer. The document provides metrics by which your service is quantified, and the recourse available to customers if your service quality fails to meet the terms mentioned.

Your clients need clarity on when and how their issues will be resolved. So, defining SLAs will set clear expectations for them. For example, your SLA can mention: “High-priority tickets will be addressed within 2 hours, with a resolution within 24 hours.”

Well-defined SLAs will not only increase customer satisfaction, but also keep your support team accountable. With your ticket management system, you can automate SLA tracking and alerts when deadlines are approaching.

5. Monitor key customer service metrics

The success of your ticketing management system hinges on tracking the right service metrics. Keep track of key performance indicators (KPIs), like:

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• First Reply Time (FRT)
• Customer Churn Rate
• Ticket Backlog
• Ticket Resolution Rate

Regularly review these metrics and adjust your strategy accordingly. A weekly review can help you spot trends before they escalate into bigger issues.

6. Foster cross-team collaboration

Many tickets can’t be solved in isolation. Issues often require cross-functional collaborations to get relevant inputs from members of the product team, developers, and sales.

Ensure your ticketing system encourages easy collaboration. For example, a customer facing an API issue may need help from both support and the dev team. Use internal notes within your ticketing platform to facilitate this handoff. The smoother this process is, the faster your client gets a resolution—and they’ll notice.

7. Offer omnichannel customer support

There are at least 7 different channels available for customer service:

• Phone
• Email
• Social media
• Live chat
• Self-service
• Mobile messaging
• Communities and forums

Since different customers will have different preferred channels to report problems, it’s essential to centralize all these queries in one system. So, your ticket management system must offer omnichannel customer support, where you provide consistent service across multiple channels and consolidate queries across channels into your support queue.

Let’s say a customer drops a message on LinkedIn about a critical system failure. If your ticket management system doesn’t consolidate that into your support queue, you’re leaving money on the table.

As per research by Aberdeen Strategy and Research, companies with well-defined omni-channel customer experience management programs achieve a 91% higher year-over-year increase in customer retention rate on average. So, offering multi-channel support helps you be where your customers are.

8. Invest in continuous training for your agents

The way you manage support tickets isn’t just about responding, but about anticipating and meeting these ever-evolving customer expectations before they become frustrations.

Since your ticket management system is only as good as the people using it, regular customer service training for your agents isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s mission-critical.

Equip them with the latest product knowledge, soft skills, and problem-solving techniques. The training sessions should also focus more on empathy, communication, and understanding customer pain points.

This way, you can ensure that every ticket is handled with the care, speed, and precision that defines today’s B2B customer service. And with your customer loyalty hinging on the quality of support you provide, this is something you can’t afford to overlook.

Why should you use ticket management software? [5 reasons]

Having covered the best practices for ticket management so far, you might wonder if all these can be implemented manually.

When your customers expect seamless and fast support, relying on outdated or manual methods can be a bit like trying to put out a wildfire with a water gun. Every missed email or delayed response is a risk to your customer relationships and your brand’s reputation. This is where ticket management software becomes helpful.

Let’s dig deeper into the top 5 reasons why using a dedicated ticket management software is essential:

1. Ticket management software boosts efficiency and saves time

A support ticket management tool automates repetitive tasks. Instead of manually tracking each ticket, you can set rules for auto-assignments and ticket escalations. This automation frees up your team to focus on problem-solving, not paperwork.

2. Ticket management software enables faster responses

Let’s face it: Customers hate waiting. An IT ticket management system ensures tickets are routed to the right person at the right time. Ticketing systems also allow you to set up self-service options, like a knowledge base, which reduces the number of incoming queries.

3. Ticket management tool makes seamless collaboration possible

Complex tickets often require input from multiple teams. A help desk ticket management software centralizes these cross-functional interactions in a unified platform. Whether it’s product feedback, technical bugs, or a billing issue, everyone works on the same platform. This reduces miscommunication and ensures faster ticket resolution.

4. Ticket management software allows data-driven decision making

A ticket management software provides real-time data, helping you track key metrics like average response times, ticket volumes, and client satisfaction. With this data, you can refine your processes and improve overall performance. After all, what gets measured gets improved.

5. Ticket management tool helps scale customer support

As your SaaS business grows, so will your ticket volume. Manual systems can’t handle scale, but your support ticket management software can. You can automate workflows, offer multi-channel support, and onboard new agents seamlessly. Whether you’re serving 50 or 5,000 clients, your system should be able to handle the influx without breaking a sweat.

Why an AI-native ticket management software is the future

Traditional ticket management software have done their job—until now.

Today, customers demand faster, more personalized service and legacy ticket management software simply can’t keep up. Even if these have AI bolted on.

To march into the future, you need to leverage generative AI for customer support. You need a tool that lets your team prioritize and track support tickets, enable cross-functional collaboration, and empower customers with self-service—all using AI.

And that solution is DevRev, an AI-native platform that unifies customer support and product development.

DevRev’s Support App is built to deflect repetitive L1 tickets, assist L2 agents, and elevate your team to support engineers with an AI-native, modern support CRM. Take your ticket management to the next level with features like:

• Real-time inbox and ticket management
• Omnichannel customer engagement
• Customizable workflow automations for SLA adherence

With DevRev Build App, you can bring the voice of your customer to product planning and engineering development to foster collaboration across support, product and engineering teams.

That’s not all. DevRev’s GenAI-powered search and knowledge base management enhances self-service for customers and internal teams. Customers can type their queries and instantly get an accurate solution without having to manually navigate through your knowledge base.

And what can you achieve with all these? An 80% deflection in support tickets. Steep decrease in time-to-resolution. An increase of 25% in your CSAT within the first 3 months of implementation.

Book a demo now and see how DevRev’s AI-first approach to ticket management helps you drive customer satisfaction and gain a competitive edge.