Introduction to Service Desk Module
Service Desk is a fully featured ticket management system which allows enterprises to implement strong and effective work-flows for internal and customer-facing support departments. The system allows help desk staff to respond to and manage tickets raised by users, reassign them to other departments or organizations, generate reports, manage time-sheets and more.
Key Features:
- Dashboard – At-a-glance overview of ticket activity over time. The charts and tables on the dashboard allow you to quickly view the overall status of your operation. The dashboard also provides a starting point from which you can deep-dive into more detailed areas.
- Customer Web Portal – No account registration is required for users to submit tickets. Service Desk allows end-users to view their ticket thread by logging in with their email address and ticket number.
- Ticket Creation - Allows users to raise tickets in multiple ways - via email, over phone to staff members and web portal as a guest or as a registered user.
- Service Level Agreements (SLA) – Easily define service level agreements and configure ticket due dates and warnings to match.
- Ticket Categories - Ticket Categories, in combination with custom forms, can be used to gather better information from customers and to assign tickets to specific departments. Ticket Categories can be configured with a basic workflow, allowing automated re-assignment of tickets to different departments/staff at successive stages, with different SLAs.
- Custom Forms and Fields – Custom forms are designed to gather the precise data your support department needs from end-users in order to solve an issue. Custom forms and fields can be provided with ticket categories to route tickets to the correct department and so cut down response time.
- Ticket Filters - Ticket filter rules ensure tickets matching certain criteria are assigned to specific departments/staff members or have default actions applied to them. Ticket filter actions include reject ticket, auto-assign, canned response and more.
- Ticket Assignment and Transfer – Tickets can easily be reassigned to different departments and staff members as required. Internal logs are created to to keep track of ticket transfers.
- Auto-Responder – Configure automatic replies sent to user for new ticket creation. Personalize the auto-responders by inserting variables such as first name and more.
- Knowledgebase – Post solutions to frequently asked questions (FAQs) and create canned responses so staff can quickly answer routine enquiries. FAQs can help customers find answers to common questions and so reduce the number of tickets submitted. Resolved tickets also can be posted to the knowledgebase.
- Projects - Staff members can create Gannt charts to plan and track progress on company projects. Individual tasks and sub-tasks can be assigned completion percentages, time spent and billable time. Service desk tickets can also be bound to any task, meaning any updates in the ticket regarding completion, time-spent and billable time will be dynamically reflected in the parent task.
- Time Sheets - Time sheets allows administrators to track staff working hours and evaluate their performance. Staff Members can create and submit time sheets in the 'My Time Sheets' interface of the staff panel. Admins can review and approve time sheets in the admin interface by clicking 'Staff > Time Sheets'.
- Calendars - Create appointments and events.
- Charging Plans - Charging plans are templates that define custom hourly rates for specific service types or assets. Charging plans are applied to customer contracts. The rates in the plan are applied after any prepaid hours in the contract have been used up.
There are two types of charging plans:
- Default Charging Plan - A global plan that lets you define default hourly rates for different asset types. This rate will be charged if:
- A customer does not have a contract
- The contract with a customer does not include a charging plan
- Custom Charging Plan - Set different hourly rates for work on certain assets, or for providing support of a particular type (telephone, remote, on-site). The plan can then be associated with a contract. Each custom charging plan includes:
- Default hourly rate (mandatory) applied to sessions not covered by a variable rate
- Variable Rates (optional) for specific types of work. Variable rates are implemented by constructing a conditional rule. Work which meets the criteria will be charged at the rate you set. For example, you might want to charge a different rate for on-site visits, or for work on a particular type of asset, or for work that exceeds a certain length of time.
Guide Structure
This guide is intended to take you through the configuration and use of ITarian - Service Desk and is broken down into the following main sections.