We maintain support requests specifically through our ticketing system for a variety of reasons.
First, it provides an audit trail of communication so that all the facts can be passed on to whomever may be working your problem and these are then available for future reference to save time .
Second, There’s no record of what’s discussed with the customer over the phone. The caller or the agent won’t have an easily available and searchable record of what’s discussed on a support call, unless the call is recorded and transcribed. On the other hand, with a ticket support functionality both parties can easily store details of help desk ticket transcripts for future reference.
Third, You can’t transfer documentation on the phone. This is a critical problem especially if we need to refer clients to resources that might be present on their site or elsewhere. You can’t spell out a long link on the phone, or email a document without constantly repeating and confirming the destination address. On the other hand, that’s easy to do that with written content.
Fourth it allow support staff to focus on fixing problems instead of answering the phone.
Lastly due to there being multiple people in different locations available to handle requests it saves additional expenses which allows us to keep our hostings costs down.
All the above are used to enable us to keep our overheads to a minimum and thus ensure a quality of service at a reasonable cost.