Our client is a large telecommunications services company based in the United States. Over the years, they have grown, but have pinpointed one product in particular that they need help with managing. As leads come in from their sales force, these potential constomers enter their system. Account managers are brought in to nail down the particulars of the consumer’s needs and figure out who should be involved in installation. Once they become a customer and are fully onboarded, our client also wants to track any requests for support that the customer raises. The support that our client offers is ongoing and needs to be scheduled, managed, and analyzed. In a single customer’s experience, there are many team members from various departments and teams involved, from sales to account managers, tech specialists, and account managers. Currently, our client is using a number of different tools that allows them to track the individual phases of a customer’s experience. Their goal was to find a single tool to help them do project management, tracking of sales deals through the workflow, and support ticketing.
In terms of project management and support ticketing, OneDesk has both of those covered from the start. These two are core offerings in the OneDesk suite that are fully-featured and work smoothly together. On the project management side, OneDesk has robust task management that provides a user-defined workflow for tasks to move through as well as various dashboard views for teams to get the best visibility into their work and metrics. These views are customizable and can be used as a basis for reporting, which our client highlighted as being crucial given how many team members might be involved in a single customer’s experience with their product. By specifying the e-mail addresses of everyone who needs to receive a report, our client can ensure that the necessary people get the info they need without requiring them all to log in or even have OneDesk accounts.
As with any technology, our client sees a number of support requests come in from customers needing help with their products and services. By default, OneDesk offers a helpdesk software which can be paired with a customer portal to facilitate the creation of support tickets. These tickets are managed similarly to project tasks and follow whatever workflow our client specifies. OneDesk also offers the ability for both tasks and tickets to be set up for workflow automation, based on criteria and filtering that our client sets. Along with this automation, OneDesk also automatically creates customer entries for every e-mail address that interacts with a support ticket. This reduces the onus on our client to enter their customers into the system. From there, our client can group their customers by organization. This customer management feature also provides a means for using OneDesk as a communication channel. Our client noted that in the case of outages, they want to notify all of their customers about the failure. By logging the outage in OneDesk as a ticket or work item, our client can then add all of the customers as followers onto the ticket and post a comment. When the comment is posted as public, all followers are notified by e-mail.
Although there are a number of project management and support products out there, not a lot of them have the means to capture the sales-focused stages of a customers’ journey before direct interaction with the product. This is where OneDesk differs from the rest. The concepts that drive OneDesk’s management tools are work items and workflows, both of which are customizable. By creating a work item type specifically for deals, our client can define each stage of a deal’s workflow and develop a framework that captures their sales funnel. From there, automations can be set up to move deals through the pipeline automatically based on our client’s criteria. Paired with OneDesk’s dashboard views, our client can create reports on all of their deals wherever they are in the pipeline.
OneDesk’s true power is in its flexibility. With our defined and well-established project management and helpdesk software, there already exists a natural and easy flow from implementation to support that can be extended from there. As our client discovered, what OneDesk brings to the table is much more than those two tools. OneDesk’s tickets and tasks can be customized and adapted to manage more than project management or support work. From sales to content to communications, there are no bounds to what the OneDesk software can capture. This freedom in management enables our clients to tailor their OneDesk experience to meet all of their needs.