There are a growing number of organisations beginning to use Salesforce as a ticketing system for their helpdesk support requests. This makes a lot of sense in the fact that most company employees will have their own Salesforce login and the CRM platform will already hold a lot of useful information around customer accounts. Our latest blog aims to look at how Salesforce should be setup to effectively manage urgent & problem helpdesk tickets.
Using Salesforce As A Ticketing System
If you’re wanting to utilize Salesforce as your helpdesk solution, you really have two options. You can either upgrade the ‘out of the box’ Salesforce to include Salesforce Desk, which is their own cloud-based helpdesk ticketing solution. Or you can use a third-party application from the AppExchange to manage your helpdesk tickets in Salesforce. SFDC are confident that their new Salesforce Desk solution offers companies a wider variety of functionality & the table below compares the functionality to some of the other leading app makers:
Whilst useful, we would love our own automation applications (Q-assign & Email-to-Anything) to be part of this comparison. Our apps combined can create a powerful helpdesk system within Salesforce, which acts as the central technological hub for managing all incoming tickets, measuring the progress of those tickets & also distributing them to the correct members of the support team. Ours apps are highly customisable pieces of software, which ensure urgent helpdesk tickets get dealt with quicker & by team members best placed to act. Considering 82% of customers would now walk away from a company following an unsatisfying customer experience, increasing the efficiency of how tickets flow through your organisation is big business.
Managing Urgent Helpdesk Tickets In Salesforce
Now you know that Salesforce can be used as a helpdesk ticketing system, the question swings to how we can configure Salesforce to prioritise the most urgent helpdesk requests. The below section focuses on what technology features you should be striving for within your Salesforce helpdesk solution:
Graded Urgency Based On Ticket Information – when new helpdesk tickets enter the business, whatever solution you use should ideally be able to score each ticket based on the original incoming information. Using automation & AI your helpdesk system should be able to pinpoint the severity of each ticket, using a different following methodology depending on the perceived level of urgency.
Customer Profiles & Categories – in order to give your organisation more control, it’s possible to group customers into different related categories which are baked into your helpdesk solution. Examples of customer categories could be Gold, Silver & Bronze accounts or groups based on the spend levels of known accounts. By categorizing similar customers together, it means unique ticketing rules can be created for each of the different customer groups.
Multi-Channel Support – we now live in an omnichannel world & helpdesk tickets can come from a variety of destinations, such as web forms, email or social media. If you are going to invest in a Salesforce helpdesk ticketing platform, then you want to be sure that the solution can work with as many possible destinations as possible. Ideally in a real-time framework, where as soon as a helpdesk request is sent – it is automatically routed to the desired queue within Salesforce.
Immediate Response Messages – even the perfect solution might not get to every urgent helpdesk ticket in time, lapses do happen. Therefore, as part of your setup you will want to ensure that an automatic message is sent to every customer request. The goal should be to let the customer know that their message has been received & that it is being taken seriously, you can even set realistic expectations by letting them know what happens next. This usually boosts customer satisfaction ratings and can provide some extra lead time for periods of high activity.
Automated Ticket Re-Assignment – finally managing urgent helpdesk tickets in Salesforce also comes down to planning for unforeseeable outcomes. If a problem ticket has been successfully processed & assigned to a support team member but isn’t being dealt with quickly – then you need to implement plan B. Within your solution you should setup automated re-assignment rules which re-route urgent tickets to other team members if they haven’t been worked on in a set time. The re-routed ticket should then be marked as mission-critical in the new assignee’s Salesforce queue. This helps protect against slow response times, erratic work volumes & unexpected leave.
We hope you found this piece eye opening on what level of sophistication you can achieve by using Salesforce CRM as your helpdesk ticketing provider. We’re slightly biased but our automation apps do offer one of the best ticketing solutions out there – if you would like to know more fill out a contact form & our team can talk to you about your specific use case.
