My Queue – First things first



As a part of the what’s new series, we look at the My Queue feature which provides all your help desk staff with a view to attend to the most important tickets, as determined by them. 

The My Queue is a customized view of the Tickets view page, where the order of tickets can be determined by the staff according to their role in your organization and the categories that they have access to. 

To begin, the My Queue should be set on the Staff profile page. Log in, as you normally would, and click on My Settings. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the ‘+’ icon in the My Queue section. You will see three drop downs, like this. 

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You can choose the category from which you’d like to see tickets first, using the first drop down. Choose the status of the ticket, from the second drop down and the current assignment status of the ticket from the third.

A bit more on the status of the ticket – each status in Helpdesk Pilot is either a ‘pending’ state or a ‘completed’ state. Among the default statuses, Solved and Closed are completed statuses. The other default statuses shipped are pending states. You can choose a state of tickets in the second drop down, which would include all tickets that fall in that state.

The second drop down also has a value called ‘unresponded’, which allows you to choose tickets which have not yet been responded to by your help desk staff.

You can choose the tickets assigned to you first if you’d like to see them at the top of your list. Help desk staff who only assign tickets to other staff in various categories, can set up the queue to view unassigned tickets first, for example. 

You can set up as many rows as you want and the tickets corresponding to each filter will appear one below the other on the Tickets view page. 

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 The example above shows a queue, where a staff has configured All pending tickets, assigned to them, from any category first and then All pending tickets, of any assignment, in any category.

Think this is useful? Leave us a comment.

 



Give your end users and customers a look at Helpdesk Pilot too!



Now, your end users, clients, customers (as the case may be) can have their own login to the end user panel in Helpdesk Pilot. 

This panel is accessible on your trial at http://[your trial account name].helpdeskpilot.net, while the staff panel can be accessed at http://[your trial account name].helpdeskpilot.net/staff.

What you should know about the End User Panel:

* When an end user creates a ticket via any of the following modes:

 

-email
-end user panel submit new ticket form
-embeddable web form

or when a ticket is created on behalf of your end user, from the new ticket page on the staff panel, the end user will receive a notification (Contact Account invite). The end user merely needs to click on the activation link in this notification to activate their account and set the password. 

 

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* End users may begin the whole process by also registering themselves first

* First time users to your helpdesk can go ahead and create a ticket first, in turn registering themselves
* The contents of this email and when this should be sent can be controlled under the Manage >> Notifications section on the admin panel.

* Once the activation is done, your end users can login to the end user panel and view the tickets that have been raised by them in the past.

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* End users can see all their tickets in their current status, in the same conversation view as in the staff panel

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* Status filters are available for customers too

* They can reply to the ticket from the Ticket detail page

* New tickets can be created from the New ticket form, by clicking on the New ticket tab

* All ticket specific custom fields (that were filled by them, while raising a ticket via any of the forms) will be visible on the Ticket detail page

* All contact specific custom fields, can be viewed and edited on their individual My Settings page

* End user panel supports LDAP mode login too! Helpdesk Pilot currently supports Active directory and Open LDAP

* End users can change their email ID, password, localization settings (timezone) in the My Settings page

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What’s coming:
  • More controls and features on the customer panel
  • Admin section to manage all end users
  • A fully functional Knowledge Base module, which works closely with the end user panel, and more!
Looking forward? Absolutely. We are too.



Coming soon : New features and improvements



Our latest release of Helpdesk Pilot, Version 5.0 is a thoroughly revamped upgrade of the outgoing 4.4.5 release but will retain a number of core features that have existed in previous releases.

These core features are currently being updated and enhanced to offer more benefits to Helpdesk Pilot users, and will be integrated as standard features. Here’s a brief on the features that will be coming soon to Helpdesk Pilot V5:

1. Self-service End User Panel with built-in Knowledge Base

Currently, an embeddable request submission form is provided with V5, allowing you to embed a form on your website so that end users may submit web based requests. 

The self-service end user panel will go a few steps further in offering your end users their own ticket management interface. Through this web based interface, end users can:

  • log in to their individual end user accounts
  • submit new requests to the help desk
  • view requests that they have submitted in the past
  • view responses from your help desk staff

With the integration of a Knowledge Base, you can create articles and categorize them into specific online reference areas, that are accessible via the end user panel. End users can then look through your Knowledge Base articles and find answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs), doing away with the need to raise a request on the help desk. 

2. Advanced search options

The built in search engine will be significantly enhanced and allow you to quickly find the information you’re looking for, by offering advanced options to search by, inclluding:

  • Ticket ID
  • End User or Customer
  • Contact Information
  • Ticket subject
  • Ticket content
  • Tickets assigned to a specific staff member
  • Tag
  • Custom Field content

3. SLA Management

Meeting SLA targets is a key requirement for most businesses nowadays, and with this updated feature, you will be able to define individual SLA targets (for each of your categories or for an end user group). With escalation notifications that can be automated (using the already available smart rules feature), you can then ensure that your help desk staff is actively informed when a ticket threatens to breach an SLA target. Reporting on SLA targets will also be integrated with the reporting module, allowing you to measure SLA metrics across the help desk over desired date ranges.

4. Multi-lingual user interface

The outgoing release (V4.4.5) supported 15 international languages, allowing help desk staff and end users to select their preferred language within their staff and end user interfaces, respectively.

Language packs are currently being developed to offer the same level of language support on V5. Therefore, Helpdesk Pilot will continue to remain a help desk product that can be deployed for international use, with language specific user interfaces. 

Many of our current Helpdesk Pilot users are assisting us with the language translation packs and we welcome support from other users, to add more international language support. All these languages will be available for selection in Helpdesk Pilot, so the more languages we integrate, the more flexibility we can provide to you and your end users. If you would like to contribute to providing a language translation, please let us know.

These enhancements are being integrated into Helpdesk Pilot as standard feature offerings and will be offered as free updates to existing V5 users, by the end of April. 

We’ll keep you updated via the blog, as these enhancements take shape.