Categories: Help

Useful Ticketing System Tips

Author TerryPosted on

Over time, software solutions no longer meet the needs of the company and its objectives. The reasons may be very different:

  • The development of the project has changed a direction;
  • You have decided to change business processes and a team set up;
  • You have found suitable tools available at a lower cost or the price of the current solution is unreasonably high.

One way or another, there may be a need to replace the ticket system for technical support.

What Not to Forget When Choosing or Changing the Solution?

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  1. The key point is the allocation of resources within the company. They are required for any conversion, even if it is performed by third-party contractors. Without this, it is impossible to implement an info system that adheres to the needs of the company.
  2. Before starting any transformations, it is necessary to identify the processes the existing ticketing system or its equivalent is responsible for. You are to also identify the people involved in them. It is important that the new automation system opens the way for the firm development, so it will be necessary to “sort” the processes: to understand which ones should remain unchanged and which ones are to be modernized.
  3. It is necessary to evaluate the usage scenarios and functionality of your existing ticketing system with other IT solutions in the company. And if there are integrations, plan work in this direction.
  4. Migration should take place in close contact with users because they will have to change their working habits. To simplify the switch for employees, it is necessary to plan the training and subsequent consultations, and even better – to involve the user in choosing a new product.

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Checklist for Selection & Migration to a New Solution

Before selecting any ticketing system and performing the switch, it is necessary to allocate some time and your attention to the following aspects:

  • The test environment, as well as the test period of the new solution, will allow you to work out the planned migration without affecting the entire infrastructure or mastering the entire budget. So you can make sure that the data and processes are transferred correctly, without distortion, and the system works as it was stated by the manufacturer.

  Migration often includes a period when the old and new system of technical support tickets function in parallel. This is quite a difficult stage for employees because simultaneous work in two solutions can bring confusion. This period can be shortened if you understand how to motivate employees to use a new solution in order to complete the process faster.

Deploying from scratch or changing the ticketing system is always a difficult process. Even if it seems that everything was foreseen at the initial stage, there might be a negative reaction of some employees connected with the need to get used to the new environment. You need to be ready for it and try to show your colleagues the advantages of the solution for them.

Categories: Help

Help Desk Ticketing System and Security

Author TerryPosted on

The IT infrastructure and the way of its handling is a skeleton of an enterprise. The company will not take a step with a properly set up and competently managed helpdesk ticketing system. The success of a business depends on how efficiently the processes within the company as well as its external communication with clients, suppliers, and partners are built. Therefore, it is critically important to make sure that the system is wisely configured.

What Are Security Functions of Help Desk Systems?

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In the era of globalization, business is constantly subject to external influences; thus, projects and systems are becoming more complex, while the time for their implementation being reduced to the max. There are various IT solutions for optimizing many processes; however, most of them increase the requirements for help desk service specialists and related ticketing systems. As a result, the process approach improves the quality of services.

The facilities of a modern enterprise require a high level of info protection against possible cyber attacks by intruders on telecommunication solutions and systems for process control. The popular majority of modern security systems cover all key areas of holistic IT data protection:

  • Data protection against viruses and malicious codes;
  • Firewalls, intrusion detection, and prevention systems (IDS, IPS);
  • Hardware platforms – BIOS level security.

All these are to be taken into account into your help desk ticketing system once you decide to build it. Of course, you can hire in-house help desk specialists to work on the task. As an alternative solution, it is also possible to go partners with a dedicated Help Desk company and have all done by it.

What Tasks Do Modern Help Desk Solutions Approach?

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  1. The problem of incidents management – Incidents are any situations that require a reaction. These can be requests from users, system crashes, etc. For the most successful implementation of this process, the Help Desk is to identify and eliminate problems within the company, minimize the risk of their occurrence, a special service.
  2. Configuration management – This setup helps to obtain accurate and current info about the IT infrastructure. The purpose of the process is to allow only necessary and reasonable changes
  3. Release management – This process is associated with the implementation of changes and control of the preservation of IT infrastructure during their implementation.
  4. Power management – The goal of the process is to find the optimal power for the implementation of the main tasks. If the power is small, then the speed is not enough, which, in turn, slows down the work.
  5. Continuity management – In case of an emergency, the IT infrastructure should continue to work, no matter if it is fire or flood in the building or power failure.

Apart from all the above functions, the helpdesk ticketing system should allow for tracking and immediate reacting on security-related issues and their quick resolving.

Categories: Choosing

Comprehensive Guide to Choosing the Best Help Desk Software

Author TerryPosted on

Every company is seeking to improve Internet communication with its clients and partners. Therefore, every advanced and modern leader understands that it is simply impossible to reach target goals without having an all-covering and highly intuitive help desk software. It is not anymore a question if using such a system is beneficial to the business. Companies do not know what ticketing solution to choose.

Ticketing System Requirements

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Taking into account the size and department number in big companies, with each having its own type of tasks and specificity, it is critically important to pick a universal and highly flexible solution that can be re-configured. Applications should be moved between departments in the process without affecting the entire workflow. In addition, it should be possible to install the product on your own server so that you could do the fine-tuning of it for yourselves.

Based on these assumptions, we have compiled a list of requirements that should be taken into account when picking a ticketing system for the business:

  • Developer and community activities – the product must be developed and maintained by the company offering the ticketing solution;
  • Ability to install it on your own server;
  • Implementation in PHP open source – for the possibility of modifying the system for yourself;
  • The source code must be clear and clearly structured;
  • The product should use a MySQL or PostgreSQL database;
  • Availability of a web interface for working with applications;
  • Correct work with UTF-8 and with other relevant encodings;
  • Automatic creation of a ticket from the incoming letter (Email to Ticket Gateway);
  • The employee’s response should be sent to the user via email; user response is to be attached to the original ticket;
  • The history of correspondence should be displayed in a convenient form;
  • The ability to see which employee responded to the application;
  • Support for multiple departments; ticket notifications should automatically go to the right department;
  • The ability to restrict employee access only to specific departments/ boards/ databases;
  • solution photoThe employee should be able to move the application to another department;
  • The ability to separate the message from the existing correspondence in a separate application (split ticket);
  • Support for template responses;
  • Availability of ticket search by employee name, subject, content, department, date, etc.

Among other great features that would be great to have in a ticketing solution are the following ones:

  • An API for creating/working with tickets from outside the corporate network;
  • Counting statistics: how many requests were processed by the employee, what is the average response time;
  • Opportunity to leave feedback: user assessment of the response of the support staff.

Of course, the list of requirements and technical specs for a ticketing system can be different depending on your team set up, workflow, and functionalities you are going to use. No matter what you require from a ticketing solution, it is important to have that all defined before you purchase the software.

Categories: Things

Things to Consider When Choosing a Help Desk Ticket System

Author TerryPosted on

Picking a help desk ticket system is not an easy task since there are a lot of nuances to pay attention to. Let’s dig deeper into the question to understand what it takes. According to The Standish Group in the USA and Europe,

  • 32{10c3b7a840b650e0c49f4c1ade68bee05b6fe896eec93cf36470e50d4ab5031c} of all IT projects are stopped and not completed;
  • only 53{10c3b7a840b650e0c49f4c1ade68bee05b6fe896eec93cf36470e50d4ab5031c} of all IT projects were completed within a deadline;
  • only 17{10c3b7a840b650e0c49f4c1ade68bee05b6fe896eec93cf36470e50d4ab5031c} of all IT projects met timely and budget expectations.

As a total, you can see that businesses have got only 86{10c3b7a840b650e0c49f4c1ade68bee05b6fe896eec93cf36470e50d4ab5031c} (actually 8 out of 10) failures versus 17{10c3b7a840b650e0c49f4c1ade68bee05b6fe896eec93cf36470e50d4ab5031c} success cases.

The Introduction of  Help Desks – What Is to Be Considered?

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Over the past 10 years, these figures have remained virtually unchanged – when implementing projects, the business faces typical problems that can be grouped as follows:

  • Organizational difficulties and problems;
  • Errors in the planning and administration of the implementation project (budget, time and other errors related to the project approach);
  • Problems related to infrastructure and work tools (including practices and systems that should assist implementation).

Problem #1 – No Dedicated Team & Project Manager

When companies do not allocate people responsible for the result of the service desk system implementation, nothing happens. If the project is small and there are few people in the company, the dedicated team is, of course, not needed. But there must be a project manager. He is obliged to lead the project to its final point, is responsible for budgets and people, having the opportunity to apply organizational influences or motivational schemes.

Problem #2 – No Time Allocated for Those Affected by It

The company often has a dedicated project team and even its leader, but those who are affected by the system implementation do not have time. When their time is not allocated and people do not have the motivation and understanding why this all is needed, the project rests on internal resistance.

Problem #3 – There Are No Real Requirements & Use Cases

At the start of the project, there are no clear requirements for the help desk system or for the project results. This leads to an endless decision-making process. Such customers have a desire to automate everything – to tighten the system on their requirements – or the requirements for the system are constantly changing.

Problem #4 – No Impact

Having received primary results, many companies stop improving the system and the processes intended for automation. They cease to control the indicators and undertake subsequent impacts. Any project resembles a “spiral.” And when it comes to the help desk, then one of the typical tasks of implementing such a system is to reduce the delay in SLA. Without this, the final satisfaction from the project is impossible to be obtained.

So no matter if you are going to have an in-house help desk or hire an external company for the purpose, we strongly recommend you to pay attention to the following problems.

Categories: Reasons

5 Reasons to Not Choose a Hosted Helpdesk Solution

Author TerryPosted on

Nowadays, there are many options for creating websites in the global network. As an easy solution, you can always use either paid or free hosting to host an online resource of yours, whether it is an online shop or a helpdesk platform. If you do not know all the technical specs and differences between the two options, we will discuss these below.

Drawbacks of Having a Free Hosted Helpdesk Solution

To create a profitable project with big traffic, you need quality hosting. It is also critical to register a suitable domain name and pay attention to a big number of criteria. When creating a helpdesk platform of any complexity, you should use a professional management system.

The Main Probs with Free Hosting

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  1. One of the main drawbacks of sites hosted on free hosting is their bad reputation. It will adversely affect the number of site visitors, who may find it low-grade to spend time in. Even the presence of useful and high-quality content does not allow for improving the image of the project. Any search engine can easily see that the site is hosted on a free hosting by domain, IP-address, or server response. One of the main criteria for a good website is high-quality and fast hosting. The issue is that free hosting services are overloaded servers and (or) severe resource constraints, which leads to an increase in site response time and a reduction in the page load speed.
  2. In addition to hosting, sites also receive a free domain, which is of great importance as well. It is quality hosting that allows you to attach your second-level domain. Its main drawback is its great length and low quality. You can promote such a domain, but it will be quite challenging for you since the “attitude” of search engines towards the third-level domains is highly negative. Therefore, you will have to work hard to prove the opposite.
  3. Low speed of free sites indexing by search engines. This is due to the instability of such online resources. They may be functioning for a short time and then disappear. Without indexing in the main search engines, your site will hang out on the Internet. And it is only you who could enter it, well, except maybe bots and spammers. Therefore, there will be no sense from such a site; it will be hardly possible to make a profit by selling its services.
  4. An insufficient number of functions, as well as a small space provided by the hoster, will also negatively influence your helpdesk. Because of this, the functionality of the project will be low. In addition, providers do not allow different files to be placed on free resources: programs, audio, and video are originally blocked.
  5. Some free hosting as a “payment for their hosting services” embed a link, banner or even any advertisement on all pages of your site, which not only spoils impression, UX, and UI of your site but also is a negative signal to a search engine.

We do believe that it is low security which is the main disadvantage of free hosting. Taking into account the general availability of free hosting, there can be a huge mass of poor-quality sites that are unprotected from hacking and all kinds of spam. Only a few hosting providers filter the hosted site and close substandard ones.