Looking ahead to 2012



It’s that time of the year again, when we look at the calendar and count down the last few days of the year, eagerly looking forward to ushering in a new one. There’s an enticing feeling that comes about, when you know a new year is upon you and that it’s the right time to wipe the slate clean and start afresh.

2011 for us, was a big year.

We launched the fifth major release of Helpdesk Pilot this year, marking V5 as the most significant update to the product ever. It wasn’t just an update, but a new avatar of our help desk management software, as we rebuilt the product on a new architecture with significant new features and capabilities over it.

We’ve been receiving great feedback from all our users and it’s helped us in channeling our development roadmap for the next year. During 2011, we were able to consistently roll out new features and enhancements on a monthly basis, which has progressively improved the capabilities that Helpdesk Pilot has to offer.

Support teams can manage their performance goals as a part of their service offering, create and maintain work orders, cater to tickets efficiently whilst out on the field, and more.

Our Enterprise Edition has been a winner in numerous large scale help desk deployments across the USA & Europe, both for its feature packed status as well as its affordability. As more and more businesses look to trim costs but continue to maintain, and excel, in core areas such as support services, Helpdesk Pilot remains a powerful product to help them achieve that.

We can’t wait to bring more powerful capabilities your way, to empower your support services even more. It’s been a great year so far and we’re sure 2012’s going to be even better.

Thanks for supporting us and being a part of this growth. From all of us at Tenmiles, here’s wishing you a Merry Christmas and a rocking new year!



Perform ticket-level actions when replying to end users via email



Till now, 2 way email integration has allowed for staff responses to be added on a ticket, by merely replying to the notifications that staff members receive via email. This is beneficial for staff members or help desk agents in the field, when it may be difficult for them to actually make use of the web interface, to stay updated of new tickets and respond where needed.

With email being directed to their mobile devices, staff responses via email ensure that:

– the ticket within Helpdesk Pilot is appended with the update

and

– the response is sent to the end user, as an email

Helpdesk Pilot is now even more mobile-device friendly, as staff can now perform ticket level actions when replying to end users, via email. These actions include changing a ticket’s status, priority or the assignee (staff member to whom the ticket is assigned).

Be it via a Blackberry, iPhone, Android or any other mobile device capable of receiving and sending emails, staff members need to make use of a simple set of tags to perform these actions:

@@set [action]@@

where [action] could consist of a combination of status, priority or assignee changes.

Let’s have a look at how a ticket’s status can be changed, through this example.

John Doe sends in a request and Pulkit Sankhla (from the Helpdesk Pilot Team) is notified of this ticket via his iPhone, since he’s currently on the move.

Photo_1-1

If Pulkit had accessed this ticket via his staff interface, this is how the ticket would have been displayed, in it’s current NEW status:

Screen_shot_2011-12-07_at_12

Now, Pulkit’s keen on responding to John as early as possible, so he taps Reply on his iPhone and begins the response with the action tag:

Photo_2-1

The tag has to be inserted in the first line of the response, following which the rest of the message can be typed out. Pulkit then sends the response, which gets routed through Helpdesk Pilot and then onto the customer. Helpdesk Pilot will strip the first line of the response, thereby removing the action tag and ensuring that the customer receives only the actual message.

If we now look at the ticket display, within the staff interface, we can see that the reply has been appended (after removing the action tag from the message body) and the status changed to OPEN.

In such a way, the tag used can be extended to include status, priority and assignee, as required. For more details on how these tags can be used, please visit the Notifications page within your admin’s Manage section, or simply get in touch with us.

The ability to perform ticket level actions via email offers more capabilities to field agents and makes for more efficient ticket management, when on the move. Leave a comment and let us know what you think of it!