When a company first starts out, the team is often cross-functional in its nature. This overlapping of responsibilities allows a company to be scrappy and grow quickly without too much overhead. Over time and through this period of growth, companies start to expand and develop more definition in terms of its different internal functions: sales, marketing, customer experience, operations, finances, and more. It starts to become clearer that certain departments are focused on serving external customers while others may also need to support internal teams. The concept of tickets for requests may seem specific to interactions with external customers, but is one that can also apply to internal customers of a team. For this use case, a client came to us seeking an internal-facing ticketing solution.
Our client is the marketing team of a hearing clinic company with 48 locations. They treat each of their 48 locations, as well as other departments, as an internal customer from which requests come in. As each of their locations has an owner, they may have different marketing and advertising campaign needs specific to their locale. The marketing team’s current solution for managing work is sufficient for project management, but doesn’t offer a way to take in and triage requests. Our client’s top priority is efficient and standardized communications between themselves and their internal customers, with a secondary concern of integration of their ticketing solution with some of the other software they use. If their workflows translate well into OneDesk, there is also a potential for our client to extend usage of OneDesk into other departments in the company if possible.
Customizing webforms to gather all the requirements from the start
One of the biggest challenges our client has faced with managing their work is how requests come in to them. They have tried to use a single system to take in requests, but some of their customers have found the system too complex and opt to use e-mail instead, bypassing the established workflow. Where OneDesk simplifies their work intake is by offering a few different avenues through which requests can come in, while automatically bringing all requests into the same system. By default, OneDesk provides an e-mail address through which requests can be sent and automatically logged in the OneDesk system. Although this can be a good fallback option for requests that need more back and forth to suss the details out for, this is not necessarily the ideal workflow. The feature that our client was most interested in, however, is our customer portal and its webforms. The OneDesk customer portal is a separate application that allows customers to log requests via webforms and view the previous requests that they’ve logged. This customer portal can also be customized in terms of look and feel as well as visibility options for the customers accessing it – views can be limited to just what that individual has logged or expanded to allow them to see everything logged by people in their organization. What webforms bring to our client’s workflow and processes is the ability to define upfront all of the details that are needed for work to begin. These details are captured as different fields on the webform, and OneDesk supports a range of input types, from text to numbers to dates and even multiple-choice options. Our client also uses surveys to gather feedback from their customers, and in our customer portal, a webform can be set up to handle that. This way, all responses are automatically captured and logged in the OneDesk system, keeping everything in one easy-to-find place.
Using views and boards to maximize visibility into what matters
Out of the box, OneDesk offers a variety of default views for seeing certain aspects of work at a deeper level. One such view is the Status Board, which has different columns for each of the lifecycle statuses. Based on whatever a ticket or task’s status is, a card is shown under the corresponding column with some basic details, such as the title, assignee, priority, and completion percentage. This serves as an easy-to-use KanBan board where each card can be dragged and dropped to signify progression through the various statuses. As our client is focused on using OneDesk’s helpdesk functionality to provide service to their internal customers, due dates are a vital piece of information that they need to capture and track. By creating a custom field on the ticket type for due date, our client can set this value for every item of work that comes in. In terms of incorporating this field into a view or dashboard, OneDesk’s views are customizable. On the fly, our client can rearrange columns or choose to show or hide particular fields, bringing the most important details to the forefront. These views can then be saved and even exported so their insights can be shared outside of OneDesk.
Managing access and permissions for internal team members
Because our client’s customers are internal members of the organization, they had some concerns about permissions and how cumbersome access might be. In particular, they were worried about the customer portal and how open it can be for other company’s use cases involving external customers. First off, our customer portal can be configured to require a user to have a login in order to see any tickets. This can be a great first line of defense, but for internal customers, this might be viewed as troublesome given that the users all work for the same company. An option we suggested was for our client to use our messenger application for accessing the customer portal. The messenger is a snippet of JavaScript code that can be embedded on an internal webpage accessible only via their intranet. This then limits who can access the customer portal, but does not require as much rigour as a separate login. As the business grows, the company will grow with it, which highlights some questions around permissions and access in general. For a small company where people may wear many hats and have duties in many fields, it may be beneficial to allow everyone access to all tickets and tasks. As departments form and roles specialize, this open access can become a burden to deal with. OneDesk allows access and permissions to be tuned at the team level down to the specific user level. By grouping users into teams, an organization’s structure can be mimicked in OneDesk, and permissions can be managed intuitively at the team level. For any cross-functional projects, user-specific permissions can be granted to ensure skillsets are not siloed and collaboration is encouraged.
On top of all of OneDesk’s features available through our project management, helpdesk, and customer portal applications, more functionality can be unlocked through integrations. By partnering up with Zapier, numerous integrations have already been created to hook OneDesk in to a wide range of software and tools. Although not a comprehensive set of integrations, Zapier’s straightforward system of triggers and actions can be used to create new integrations without too much trouble. This extensibility allows OneDesk to stand out as a suite of tools that can meet an assortment of needs, for organizations both big and small. Regardless of whether service is being provided to internal or external customers, OneDesk can be tweaked and tuned to whatever situation is at hand.