Helpdesk Tickets Are Your Knowledgebase
Helpdesk Databases hold a lot of information
A helpdesk knowledgebase can be a life saver if it has the information you need while talking to a customer or when finding a solution to their problem. The only question is: how do you go about generating a useful knowledgebase? A good place to start is your trouble tickets. No one said a trouble ticket had to have only problems on them. If you have been smart, they contain everything from suggestions for improvement, to bug reports, fixes and conversations about fixes. If you are using multiple threads of information, you can capture that information on the trouble tickets.
But the question is: Why create all of the information from scratch if you decide to build a knowledgebase? You don’t really have to type in, or cut and paste in all the information from all the tickets in to some gigantic database that you have to design, build, and pay for. What if the information you gather during the course of daily operations could be published for the rest of the users to see or even for the rest of the technicians to see?
How often have the users received a specific message while trying to operate the system? It’s probably going to have the same solution. What if you had a knowledgebase with that information in it in a searchable form?
Knowing how to import and publish information:
Being able to publish useful tickets allows others, technicians and users, to read and learn from others problems and, more importantly, the solutions to those problem. A portal in which the users submit their trouble tickets would provide just such an environment. The portal could serve not only as a way of reporting problems, it could also make a very good forum, if formatted and built correctly. A well-built portal would go a long way toward meeting an organization’s knowledge needs. If you plan properly, helpdesk tickets are your database.
As the supporter, you would be able to determine what information you want available to the portal users. You can determine how the information is best searched. And you can determine how the information is displayed.
How OneDesk handles Knowledgebases and databases:
OneDesk can provide just such a capability for you. A problem with a specific portion of a system? OneDesk allows you to capture the information and store it in such a way that access to the information is logical. It won’t just be a matter of looking through all the tickets or, hoping against hope, to remember some more or less related word to search on in order to find the right ticket with the same problem and, you would hope, solution.
OneDesk customer service allows you to connect to the entire community of the users you are supporting. It allows you to manage feedback, support tickets and other customer interactions. The portal is easily configured to allow you to publish tickets, making them available not only to the technicians, but to the customers as well.
This capability creates a self-sustained forum where people express their ideas, their recommendations, and often their solutions to problems that seem to hang on no matter what.
Photo Credit: “letters” / Davide Vizzini / CC BY