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.

 



What’s New Series – Part 1: Dashboard – A great place to start



It’s a great feeling to be able to share some of the new features that Helpdesk Pilot V5 offers. This series will cover some of the new features and functionalities of the product, along with side notes on what’s been planned for the future enhancement of each of these features. We start with the Dashboard page. 

When your help desk staff log in to the software every time, the Dashboard provides them some information about recent activities on the system with an emphasis on the tasks assigned to him or her. 

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The Tickets Overview section shows the overall state of the tickets in your helpdesk. Your help desk staff could work towards bringing down the count of each of these numbers. 

The Pending tickets shows a count of the tickets in your help desk, that are in pending state, in categories that the staff is a part of. Note, you could have any number of statuses in pending state.

The Assigned tickets shows a count of all the tickets in your help desk, that are assigned to the logged in staff user, and are in pending state.

The last number shows the number of tickets in pending state across the system and not just in the categories that the staff belongs to. Note, by default Critical is the highest priority order. You can add your own priorities and the one with the highest order will be shown in this section. 

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The Ticket Inflow, represented in the form of a line graph shows the number of incoming tickets over the last 7 days. The X-axis denotes the days and the Y-axis denotes the number of tickets. This shows the number of tickets that were created in your help desk on each day. You can zoom in further to view the break up of incoming tickets per day. 

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The two pie graphs, Tickets by Status and Tickets by Priority show a distribution of all the pending tickets in your system, split up by the various statuses and priorities in your help desk. Clicking on the pies in the status graph, will take the user to the tickets view filtered by the status clicked on. The same feature, for the Tickets by Priority graph, will be coming soon!

The Just In section shows the five most recent tickets that have been created in your help desk along with the name of the customer who created it. Clicking the refresh link at the bottom of the Just In section, updates the set of tickets right there. 

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The Recent Replies and Recent Private Notes shows the recent updates on tickets in the categories that the logged in staff has access to.

What’s more, you can reorder all of these sections on the page, as you please. Simply click and drag any of these sections around the page to view all this information in the order most relevant to you.

What’s coming up: A more comprehensive news feed of all other activity that has been performed on the help desk. Such as any new update on tickets (due date, moving a ticket to another category, tickets deleted etc), new reports created, new smart rules created and much more.

Do let us know what you think and leave us a comment! 


Website Update



We are pleased to unveil the revamped and refreshed Helpdesk Pilot website, now available for your viewing pleasure!

Aside from infusing a cool and aesthetic feeling to the website’s theme, one of our main objectives was to highlight the importance of Customer Support/Help desk Management software and so portray how Helpdesk Pilot can effectively meet your organization’s needs.

We trust that we’ve made it easier and more informative for you to browse through our website. Remember that the best way to get a feel of Helpdesk Pilot is to sign up for the full featured, hosted Trial, which allows you to make use of Helpdesk Pilot for a period of 15 days, absolutely free. A great way to setup your support environment and evaluate its efficiency prior to making a decision to purchase Helpdesk Pilot!

Sign up for your trial right here.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the new website as well as any other feedback you may have. Leave us a note here or reach us at sales@helpdeskpilot.com



The Low-down on Help Desk Management



Whether you’re a small team of independent consultants or a large scale business with international operations, one of your key business objectives will certainly be to effectively manage your help desk.

In a nutshell, your help desk is your means of ensuring that every incoming request is efficiently managed and responded to; be it IT related issues from your internal employees, sales enquiries from prospective customers or product/service support queries from existing clients.

Everyone has something to say, but how do you ensure that every voice is heard? Communicating these requests has progressively advanced in line with available technology; from making actual visits in person to contacting a call centre to harnessing the power of the Internet and relying on email & the Web. That just widens the playing field for the amount of incoming communication that you’re probably going to receive.

Whilst mail handling software provide you with the ability to perform certain management tasks, such as setting up rules to organize incoming mails automatically according to subject type, etc, they just aren’t cut out for core help desk management requirements, which typically include:

  • Assigning incoming requests to specific staff members
  • Auditing a request right from the time of its creation to the point of resolution; being able to track the manner in which a request was handled
  • Treating each request as a uniquely identifiable record, commonly referred to as a ticket
  • Notifying multiple staff members on a single request in a method more efficient than CC’ing everyone in on an email

These are just a few of the many critical requirements that reinforce the ever-so-important need to have in place a comprehensive help desk management software solution.

A dedicated help desk management solution provides you with a host of integral tools that allow you to do much more than just efficiently act upon incoming requests. Requirements in terms of how requests are handled differ from business to business, so it is important to first understand how you wish to manage your help desk before opting to deploy a solution merely because it claims to address all help desk requirements.

How strong is your help desk management capability?

We’d be happy to discuss your requirements and recommend how best you could implement an efficient help desk solution within your business. Feel free to contact us at sales@helpdeskpilot.com