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Ticket Etiquette
Maybe it's a difference in culture, maybe it's modern day impatience. Either way sometimes it feels like etiquette is lost on some people. In particular it seems really common in certain demographics. For that reason I am considering implementing a notice to handle one of the common miss-steps in a client -> provider relationship, ticket spam.
Shown only on new tickets opened where there is already an open ticket (open, customer last-response).
This is a bit of knee jerk reaction to a customer who thought opening huge numbers of tickets (over 3 hours) would help them get a quicker response (bonus, it was for a non-critical matter - help with setup).
What do you think? Anyone offended?
Comments
Reasonable and serves simply as a reminder that there are open tickets that may be related. Good idea actually.
I wouldn't be offended, I love straight and direct communication like this. It makes things very clear and I think it benefits both parties.
I doubt any ticket spammer will read through this though, they are usually very impatient.
am need fully managed ticket service
up to $20
Nah. Nah. Nah. $7.
The only problem is, such type of customer will not read any warning like the one you are planning, or will not obey by it, so it will not actually improve anything -- while the potential to offend other way more benign ones is still going to be there.
Just send any ticket >1 straight to /dev/null unless it's for another service.
Add:
"4. Multiple tickets opened for the same issue will incur a $5 administration fee per ticket."
Only actually enforce for your problem customers, that is, unless you just wanna dump customers that are causing issues.
Surprised none of the boomers have said "fucking Millenials"
There are crazy ones out there. The only possible solution is when you start charging them for the number of tickets created within 24 hours, then this impatient behaviour can cease.
Add this:
4. If there are more than 2 new tickets created within 24 hours - then we may charge $10 to answer your 3rd ticket (solely depends on our discretion and situational) and $10 for every new ticket you create within the particular time frame.
EDIT:
@MasonR beat me to it
That's exactly why I built in a rate limiting system for new tickets per customer. If they have gone over the max allowed amount of tickets in that timeframe, it asks them whether they want to post it as a reply to an existing ticket.
Nice! You can extend it by adding an option, "Or if you still wish to create a ticket then we'll create an invoice of $10, once paid you'll get a token to create an additional ticket in the specific time fame"
Not sure if there's much incentive for them to pay for that.
Have to agree with this. Nobody reads any more. They just want someone else to solve their problems (for free). If that requires them to do anything - which includes reading - then that's just too much of a waste of their time.
Is this ticket service sustainable?
Acceptable.
This is fine for a person with one or few services, but not a lot for someone with many services.
Tickets should be single issue only, so issues with different services should be another ticket, IMO. Depending on how much shit hit the fan on a particular day, a few services may be affected.
So maybe "4. If there are more than 2 new tickets created within 24 hours for the same issue/service" ?
Perhaps also a limit on the number of open, unreplied tickets. I can't see any reason why a user with a few services needs 2 or more unreplied tickets, can you? I think at that point forcing @CConner's solution sounds the best.
Of course any user with a large number of services could easily be excluded from such a limit. Large users are normally businesses (in some way) and rarely do they behave so unprofessionally.
To add on, why limit the number of tickets to be the same number as their services + 2?
If I dont have any services, I can open a max of 2 tickets.
If I have 1 services, I can open a max of 3 tickets.
If I have 50 services, I can open a max of 52 services.
Also, I was with a host that would add delay to every additional ticket created. Something like a max of 1 ticket every 2 hours or something (if under same department). I never ran into that limit, but the notice was always there when opening new tickets.
Personally, I feel that 1 open ticket per department is sufficient. If I have issues with my server, I go for support. If I have issue with my payment, I go for billing. That's it.
I think you are approaching this from a wrong angle. Why does it make a difference for you in the first place, whether a customer has 50 spammed tickets, or 50 spammed replies in the same ticket? Perhaps the answer instead is to improve your backend ticket processing system, so it groups all tickets per customer? So when your support agents view the overall ticket list, each customer only appears once at most (and to see all tickets they created, you need a click-through to their list), and no longer able to spam the entire ticket view with their own tickets only.
@rm_ Not a bad idea, but seperate tickets is actually a good thing.
This is what I think we have decided on:
1) A notice at 2 tickets
2) A limit of three tickets that have not had a staff reply, only applies to customers with less than 10 services.
I wrote a database query to roughly calculate peak open tickets grouped by user_id, and the value going back 1 year maxes at 2. Most customers never get more than one open before getting a response.
Interesting stat - worst spammer opened, 2.2k tickets in total. Of those 175 resulted hit their target, ~2k of them went straight to a /dev/null department silently. The spammer continued for 2 days before they gave up.
No i think is helpfull and invite client to calm down.
I've always thought that you get a lot more done by being polite. Regardless of whether I'm the customer or the provider I always try to nice! It's worked well for me over the years.
I often ask people to do push-ups when they request something from me, so:
Upload video of 30 push-ups for each ticket after the first one in a week.
Machine learning can verify the video is authentic.
I laughed. Good for you.