News:

Loving SimpleDesk? Help us spread the word!

Main Menu

A walkthrough of how my company does helpdesk

Started by tfs, February 22, 2010, 02:38:48 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

tfs

I don't know if any of this will help you guys here at SimpleDesk, but since I'm hoping to be able to use this product in the future, here's a written out description of how our current help desk web page works.  Maybe it'll give some useful ideas.

===CUT===

Customer comes to our web page and clicks on Helpdesk

Login screen gives them nothing unless they're logged in.  Their login is for their particular user account, but their user account is actually tied in with their corporate account.  So there's multiple users who can see each others tickets, because they are all under the banner of a parent account.  That's because we may deal with several people at one company, and they need to be able to see each others tickets.

Once logged in they have the option of looking at their existing tickets, searching their existing tickets, or creating a new ticket.  By default they only see their open tickets, but they can choose to search through their closed tickets as well.

When they create a new ticket they can choose several options...

Trouble Type (Dropdown)
Trouble Priority (Dropdown)
Short Description (Text)
Full Description (Long Text)
Keywords (Text for searching)

And then there's some user-defined fields, which we have set to...

Database Platform (Dropdown)
Software Version (Dropdown)
Operating System (Dropdown)

Once they create the ticket there are emails that are generated to our support staff.  Who gets the emails depends on the "Trouble Priority" level that the client chooses.  A low priority shoots one off to me, but a medium one shoots one off to my boss, and a high or critical priority would shoot one off to 3 or 4 of us.

Our priority levels as of now are...

1-Suggestion
2-As time permits
3-Low
4-Medium
5-High
6-Can't Work

Who gets those emails is set in the system users settings.  My account is set to get an email for 2 and above.  My boss is set for 4 and above, and a couple of our other guys are set for 5 or 6, which means that if a client fills out a ticket at level 6, everyone gets an email unless they're not set to get them at all.

If a ticket is entered and then ignored, the priority is automatically updated one stage at a time over the course of a couple of hours, so that eventually everyone is getting an email until someone responds.

Once I get to a ticket, I can change any of the fields that the customer had filled out.  For instance, I may immediately downgrade the priority, or change the status to "In Progress" so that when our other people get there they can see right away that it's not as critical as initially indicated.  I normally do that right away in case any of our other guys are coming in on a high priority email, to let them know that someone is addressing the ticket.

Now that I'm there at the ticket I have some additional fields that aren't available to the customer.  They are...

Status (Dropdown)
Assigned Admin (Dropdown)
Billing Code (Dropdown)
Hours Worked (Text)

The status choices are...

None
In Progress
On Hold
Waiting on Customer
Closed
(There should also be a "Ready To Close")

The billing code choices are...

Contract
Contract-Limited
Donation
Hourly
No Charge
Warranty

So now I usually change the Assigned Admin to myself, unless the problem is about something that we have a specialist on staff to cover, in which case I assign it to that specialist.  Whoever is the assigned admin automatically gets an email whenever there's changes saved on the ticket.  Whoever is the End User assigned to the ticket also gets one.  (Remember there's more than one person per client/company, and only one of them are assigned)

I don't normally modify the billing code.  I leave that up to the person who does the billing.

So now I can either contact the client directly, or we can maintain a conversation on the ticket itself.  As I add comments to the ticket they are automatically emailed to the client, and when the client makes a comment on the ticket they are automatically emailed to me because I'm in the (Assigned Admin) field.

Also, when making a comment there's an option to NOT email it to anyone.  I may just want to make a silent update.

Also, when making a comment there's an option to email the comment to other users of the system, be they one of the people on our staff, or one of the other people at the client company.

When making a comment we normally enter the hours at the end of the comment, in 10ths of an hour. (1.2)  But it would be nice to have a field to enter that seperately so it could be more easily tracked and added up.  If there's a field to enter hours then there should be at least one companion field to flag those hours for different things, such as billable, non-billable, etc.

And that's about it.  When a ticket is finished I can change the status to closed if I want, or lately the way we've been doing it is that I change the (Assigned Admin) to our business office lady who does the billing and she closes the ticket.

I hope this was of some help... -TFS
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit.

[FailSafe]

Just curious, do you guys have your own business-given email that receives all of the emails generated from this ticket system?

Also, what is your rate of tickets coming in per day about?

tfs

We each have an email %username%@companyname, as well as an email address for support@companyname, which is currently forwarded to me since I'm the first line of defense, or the "Air Traffic Controller" as we like to call it.

We're a small company, and because of how specialized our niche is, our volume is pretty low.  About 1-4 tickets on a regular day.  We also use the tickets for other stuff, such as if we're working on a particular project for a customer.

When things are slow I sometimes cold call clients who haven't used the ticket system recently to remind them that the tickets are there for more than trouble.  If they just have a question they want answered they can fill out a ticket.  They're paying us a yearly maintenance fee for ongoing support, and when we send them that bill at the end of the year I want the person who opens the bill to remember how nice it was for them to have access to our trouble ticket system all year, where they get their questions answered right away.

We're currently paying Exdesk about 2k/year to provide and host our helpdesk, but I'm tired of their system.  I've been looking high and low for one that I could run myself on an average "shared" host.  (We don't have our own servers)  And since I'm familiar with SMF and Joomla, I thought PHP would be the way to go.  I've looked at purchasing some packages, and I figured I'd go as high as 2k purchase price, because after a little over a year it would pay for itself.  That's assuming a 2k purchase price and $20/Month for a decent shared hosting package at 1and1 or something like that.

I suppose I'm hoping for a bit more than is likely to be when I look at a free package to compete with packages that cost $$$, but I'm intimately familiar with SMF, so I figured I'd keep SimpleDesk in mind.

Another thing to consider, if the devs are paying any attention to this, would be the ability to import client information and historical data.

Whichever way it works out, I'm looking forward to playing with SimpleDesk, be it for business or just my tiny little forum.  So hurry!!!  :)
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit.

Gruffen

Some definitely interesting insights there - it's more grand than the helpdesk solutions I've been exposed to before (both as user and 'staff' on)

To answer your concerns, 1.0 won't have most of the grand features you're talking about, but given that I've planned out what I see the future being for the next 5 releases after that... it's entirely possible that you won't have to wait too long. I've also been careful to specify a series of nimble releases rather than massive feature releases, so you'll get a new release every few months with 4-5 biggish new features in, at least that's the idea.

Custom ticket fields are very much on the horizon, the ability to set 'departments' up also. We have our own list of statuses and urgencies, but the former is driven by the system not user (New/Pending User Response/Pending Staff Response etc) and the latter maps reasonably closely to what you have (we have Low/Medium/High/Very High/Severe/Critical).

Converters is something I guess we hadn't thought that much about but it is something I'd like to see us add at some stage.

In terms of SD's future, we [the dev team] have very much short term goals right now, which is mostly getting 1.0 done and out there, and then looking to move towards 1.1 with the new features for that - already I'm mentally considering how I'm going to be implementing the 1.1 list and 1.0 isn't even to beta testing yet, for example.

tfs

#4
Understood completely that building a new airplane starts with a pair of wings and a fuselage.  :)  I'm very excited to be here to watch you guys take off.  I just wanted to make sure to plant a few idea seeds early for the things that I like about our existing help desk, because if they're taken into account early then it's easier to shoehorn them in later.  :)

Once you do make it to Beta I'd be glad to be a part of that.  At any give time I've got half a dozen test forums running in various subdomains.  Something that excites me about where you're at with SimpleDesk... you are in a position to use your own product (SimpleDesk) in the role of keeping track of the support and production of your product.  I hope you use that business model.  Use SimpleDesk as the primary tool for testers and users to report and track issues with SimpleDesk.  I've found that when a developer is also a user, things get done.

Edit: Fixed a typo
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit.

Gruffen

Well, we have already discussed using it in place of Project Tools once it has a few more features ;)

But yeah, most of what you've said is notionally there in the back of the mind; fortunately the underlying framework we've got for 1.0 is sufficiently flexible we can take it in any number of directions thereafter, it's actually very awesome.

Hopefully the core stuff will be finished very shortly (most of the core stuff is done, really, it's more spit and polish than fundamentals at this point) and we can get a beta release out to folks.

[FailSafe]

Reading this actually made me think of a feature that'd be kind of useful. :) Would the possibility of being able to edit the statuses/urgencies to your own text and levels be something to consider in the future?

Also, thanks tfs for your reply. :) I like the "Air Traffic Controller title". Are there any other titles that you give each other at work?

Gruffen

You can of course change the text; they're regular language strings as in SMF so editable through the language editor, however their meaning wouldn't be changing any time soon (since certainly for the foreseeable future, there is a distinct logic attached, i.e. ticket with no replies is 'new', ticket that has been replied to by staff last is 'pending user comment' and so on, and that's automatically managed)

[FailSafe]


tfs

Quote from: [FailSafe] on February 23, 2010, 07:03:07 PM
Also, thanks tfs for your reply. :) I like the "Air Traffic Controller title". Are there any other titles that you give each other at work?

Not in mixed company.   ;D
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit.

[FailSafe]


Gruffen

I had various titles at my old job, but I shudder to think what some people called me when I wasn't around, heh...

Senkusha

Hi, newbie here, but long time worker in the  help desk field.

I thought of something while reading through your description of a typical call....yup, it's pretty typical.  I have to mention one thing, in some point of the development cycle, are you going to have the ability to 'lock' entries so that a technician can't modify a previous entry without a manager's approval, or maybe a supervisor level (all determined by membergroups ;) ) that can edit tickets, to clean them up?

Also while on the subject of a supervisory role, one thing I know is very helpful to a tech is having a good formated knowledge base.  In my old job, we had a 'senior' support tech go though and format all the calls we had into a single format for easy review, troubleshooting steps, and resolution.  Also helped with searching (that I can see by the keyword tags you've got in your Features List).

Just a couple of things to think about down the road...

Gruffen

Editing of tickets/replies is already permission based so you can simply just not give the permission out to folks (and is already built into 1.0)

Knowledge base is also on the todo list, but not yet.

Senkusha

Thanks!  I was reading your "Get to know me post", and thought of another useful feature...later on.

Since this is an internet based help desk, that implies that some members may be working during different times of the day/night.  Are you planning on adding an interface for staff scheduling?  In my old job, it sometimes was a hassle when taking a call, and assigning it to a Tech, only to find out they were off that day, or out to lunch, etc...   Then again, we also had a Support Administrator, who primarily answered the phone, but sometimes she was at a loss as who was working and not, since we had not only in-house workers, but Tech's that worked via remotely.