Ticket systems in software development

Whether problems with the PC, cryptic insurance rates or incorrect electricity bills: When customers contact a company’s customer support, they do so today via all kinds of channels, such as telephone, e-mail or chat with the AI bot. Digital customer care is an important part of the digitization of business processes at companies. In this context, ticket systems are used to process various customer inquiries via diverse channels. For example, many companies offer their customers the option of submitting support tickets directly via websites. These are then processed in the support department and the customer receives an info mail whenever there is a change in status. Ticket systems have a number of positive effects for customer service:

• Structured communication: customers submit requests or complaints by ticket. The support team can process them according to priority and keeps track of open, ongoing, and closed tickets.
• Faster response: Thanks to prioritization and concrete assignment, support works faster and is less prone to errors.

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• More satisfied customers: The faster and more efficient processing of requests in the ticket system increases customer satisfaction. In particular, the transparent information on the status of processing provides a more positive customer experience with the support.

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Planability and budget control over all project phases

In addition to effort estimation and bug fixing, our developer units also use so-called feature tickets. These are created after a new software project is commissioned. The tickets are structured hierarchically and reflect the chapters and subchapters from the software concept. Each ticket corresponds to a programming task from the effort estimate. Thus, we can also specify the estimated programming effort in hours.

A major benefit for customers is the transparency of the developer work performed. When an employee performs the programming of the task, he can post the hours worked to the ticket. Thus, a target-performance comparison is possible at any time. Corresponding evaluations can be used to determine not only the degree to which the programming tasks have been completed, but also whether the programming is within the calculated hours.

After completion of the custom software, we at trinidat also use tickets – for example, when testing the new application. The tasks for the testers are created and managed in the Redmine ticket system we use. At the same time, the testers can create bug tickets for the errors they find. These are then assigned to the software developers who are to fix the bugs.

For change and extension requests or later versions of the software, the ticket system Redmine offers so-called target versions. These can be named per project or across the board and, if required, also provided with a deadline. Subsequently, the desired tickets are assigned to the target version. The calculated effort for the target version can be called up at the push of a button. If work has already been done on some tickets, the degree of completion and the programming effort already invested can also be queried.

For our customers, the ticket system used by trinidat is also helpful because they have a real-time overview of the status of development via Redmine – and that in all phases of software development. This means that customers can carry out evaluations themselves and also set error tickets, for example.