A modern high-capacity building is a blend of technology and structure. It is why developers have to work with heating and cooling system experts to guarantee optimum living conditions for residents. To meet expectations, heating and cooling system experts can only rely on the right tools needed for successful collaboration between cross-industry experts who develop the systems and the customers who need the solution. A leading industry operator came in contact with the OneDesk interface and reached out recognizing OneDesk could be the solution to their help desk problem.
Our new client is a heating and cooling system manufacturing company. As a pioneering company, they have various departments working together to develop bespoke systems for buildings. The relationship between the departments is more pronounced between the IT and engineering departments, such that both departments are required to keep in constant communication since they have simultaneous involvement in the product manufacturing process. A similar level of communication is required between the company’s support agents and the customers. However, the in-house system is incapable of supporting the need.
The company acknowledges a need for a platform that supports internal and external communication, with the capacity to manage internal operations as well. With OneDesk, our new client can now cater to customer needs and manage internal operations between departments, all in one application.
The OneDesk platform consists of three modular applications: the main app, customer app, and the mobile app. Administrative operations such as creating user and agent accounts, and managing user requests are capabilities of the main application, while the customer app is the customer’s window to the company. To access the company’s support agents, users can always go through the customer web app or a customer widget embedded on the company’s website. The widget consists of a messenger system where users can have a live chat with an agent, a portal through which a user can manage all tickets he has submitted to support agents, and a web form tab to create a new user ticket.
OneDesk recently added a knowledgebase tab to the widget through which the client can pass potentially useful information such as articles and Q/A across to the user. The client can control what users can see through the knowledgebase, and they can easily filter the knowledgebase content to ensure that each user is shown something useful to them precisely. Setting up the widget on the client’s website is done via a pre-written code snippet that can be pasted on the website source code. Clients running WordPress websites can also utilize a prebuilt WordPress plugin to set up the widget on their websites.
On the agent side of the user-agent interaction, agents can respond to users on a live chat and manage tickets submitted by users within the main app. The OneDesk ticketing feature allows agents to receive tickets from users in several ways. One way to achieve this is by sending the ticket as an email to a designated OneDesk address, the company can also auto-forward support email address to the OneDesk address, and OneDesk automatically retrieves these emails to log them as tickets. Users can submit tickets to agents through the widget portal or the customer web app. Agents can also create tickets for their user from ongoing live chat conversations, or they can do so manually through the main app.
The OneDesk ticketing system has a file upload capacity of up to 25Mb. Agents can also maintain multiple discussion threads on each ticket: a public discussion thread to converse with the user and a private thread for a conversation with internal teams regarding said ticket. Agents can involve other agents, users, or even teams in ongoing tickets by merely making them follow the tickets. Moreover, in the case of tickets that require additional actions or planning, agents can easily assign them to the appropriate agent for proper handling. The task feature merges project management with help desk, it makes possible the transition of tickets into tractable, actionable tasks, and supports it with the project management tools necessary.
OneDesk helps the client prioritize users’ needs by implementing a system for assigning priority levels to tickets on a scale of one to five stars. It also features configurable lifecycle statuses which track the current status of tickets based on a predefined set of states. Users and agents following a ticket can receive prompt notification about the current state of the ticket each time the status changes. Agents can send automated messages to users in response to specified events, and rest assured all entities following the ticket gets notified by mail. Users can also respond by mail, and OneDesk captures their responses within the OneDesk app.
To make it easy for our customers to manage tickets, tasks, projects, and the customers associated with the projects, the main app’s project panel gives a carefully structured view of activities. The panel displays in a hierarchy which organizes related tasks, tickets, and other items under the respective portfolio, with each portfolio representing the customer responsible for them. The main app also has other designated views for analyzing operations. The tree view displays the projects, tickets, and tasks as they relate, the flat view presents a plain list of tasks without listing the projects they match. The Gantt view is designed to aid in planning and scheduling. It shows a comparison of the planned schedule against the actual schedule, and it differentiates them using configurable colour schemes. The dashboard gives a breakdown of the activities using charts and graphs, while other views like the calendar and status board also give unique perspectives of ongoing activities. Views have a custom sorting as well as drag and drop features to allow the client to adjust schedules within the view.
The OneDesk mobile app gives agents access to most of the features they can access on the main app. It is essentially their OneDesk installation for the road. The mobile app is available on both Android and iOS platforms.
Automation is a big part of OneDesk, and our in-built workflow automation saves our clients a bulk of the workload. Workflow automation enables automatic update of the lifecycle as updates are made to tickets and tasks. It also enables agents to auto-assign tickets to agents and team once they are created, send automated messages bot messages, and respond to specific user actions, among other things. To deliver personalized user experience, our client can customize email templates sent to users to convey the brand’s personality. They can also customize the automated bot messages and responses to deliver a better user experience.
OneDesk operates entirely as a standalone system. However, when our client needs OneDesk to work with other enterprise software, OneDesk gives you the ability to integrate with other softwares via Zapier.
The entire OneDesk app is designed to be configurable to accommodate changing client operational requirements in a dynamic market. Our client can even rename any of the modular apps, reconfigure them, or even disable them without affecting system performance or functionality.