FRESHDESK.COM – An Evolved Ticketing Tool

As the title suggests, before we start with what Freshdesk is, let’s first get acquainted with 2 important terms that will be often used in this article, namely, ‘Application support’ and ‘Ticketing tool’.

What is Application support?

Application Support, in IT, is a streamlined process defined to assist the business users of a particular application to successfully execute their tasks without any obstructions, with the help of the application support team.

What is a Ticketing Tool?

Ticketing tool can be defined as a platform/application which is used to track issues raised by the business users which captures details related to the issue like the description, request date, status, owner and other relevant information.

Now that we know what application support is, and the role a ticketing tool plays in application support, we will proceed further to what ‘Freshdesk’ is:

‘Freshdesk (http://www.freshdesk.com/) is a ticketing tool which is used by over 150,000+ customers for application support and ranked in various lists of top customer services software’

Let’s have a look at what Freshdesk bring to the table based on the below criteria: 

Features – 

• Agents –Freshdesk classifies application support team members as ‘Agents’, which can be created through the ‘Admin’ panel. As there can be multiple ‘agents’ working on a single application support project, Freshdesk provides features like ‘Intelligent ticket assignment’ which automatically assigns a ticket to a relevant agents based on their skills, workload and other relevant criteria. Along with this, automatic email notification, event triggered actions are provided.
• Various communication channels – Multiple modes of communication can be configured in FreshDesk and business users can contact the application support team via emails, phones, live chat, social media and website as well.
• Task Automation – Freshdesk provides the ability to convert the ticket responses into KBase (Knowledge Base) to be referred for future use. This feature provides ‘automatic pop up solutions’ on new tickets raised having similar nature of the issues which have been encountered before.

Ease of use / UI:

Freshdesk provides a very user friendly UI which presents all the important features in one screen. For e.g. All required admin features are made available in one tab and switching to various windows for performing certain operations is not required which saves a lot of time and efforts and increases productivity.

Figure 1 - Freshdesk - Dashboard

Reporting:

Even though reporting is one of the many features provided by any ticketing tool, we are considering it as a whole different module, as it is a very important feature in application support, as the application support process includes lots of reports generated and sent to the client at different time intervals for various purposes, which give valuable insights into the status of the tickets and the project based on various parameters.

Freshdesk provides a significant number of readily available reports which will give you an important insight into the current working of your application support project. Along with this, it also provides the ability to slice-and-dice and generate reports as per required fields and criteria.

Flexibility / Adaptive:  

Freshdesk is flexible and adaptive to a great extent according to the respective business processes as it provides a feature called ‘SLA Management’ which allows the user to set and define processes, workflows and deadlines for ticket response and resolution on the basis of your business working culture, hours and other important aspects.

Additional features provided by Freshdesk –

• Available in 33 different languages
• Provision to prioritize tasks according to SLA policies
• Available as a mobile application

Conclusion:

Freshdesk comes out as a very well rounded ticketing tool that helps to enhance the overall quality of the application support process. It offers a significant amount of features in its ‘freemium (free)’ version and also serves many more functionalities in its paid version.

About Author:

Shreyas Sagvekar is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at: shreyas.sagvekar@spluspl.com

Role Of Training In Application Support

What is application support? It’s a SERVICE.

Application support involves providing assistance to IT services delivered to the business users in an organization. This may entail an application support team to have knowledge on basic computer programming, administrator skills and analytical skills. Identifying the root cause and providing the right solution or passing it to the right team for resolution also plays an important role. The application support team deliver these needs in the form of a SERVICE.

Some tasks undertaken by an application support team are as below:

• Analyze and manage issues in ticketing system on timely basis
• Create new business users and manage access levels
• Create and maintain necessary documents for operational and security audits 

An application support team need to be equipped with knowledge of responding to the dependencies via acknowledgment, updates and resolution. They should be provided with structured training as they will be dealing with different people, both on business as well as IT level of understanding.

It becomes important for an application support team to understand the domain thoroughly for resolving the problem and providing the right solution. This becomes possible when the application support team is provided with training on the domain and application. 

Training is imparted in different ways, depending on the type of business process.

When is the training required?

• It is required when a new executive/resource is on-boarded on the project
• Whenever a new feature/functionality is added to an existing product
• When a new project is assigned to the application support team

Following are some attributes essential for an application support team:

1. Communication skills and Active listening: This is the most important aspect in application support. In order to communicate with the business users to understand the queries and provide resolution all the executives should be trained on verbal and written communication. It is important that the details of the query are interpreted correctly. Soft skill trainer should be appointed to provide the training to the team. Evaluation (verbal and written) should be conducted periodically to confirm if there was value addition due to the training

2. Investigation and analytical skills: Queries raised by the business user’s need to be addressed and investigated within the given response time. It’s important that an application support team understands the query to analyze and provide solution. Many companies plan to build analytical skills through mentoring. Analytical skills can be tested by conducting quizzes, providing small assignments relevant to the project etc.

3. Business and domain awareness: It is important for a support team to have a proper domain knowledge about the client business. Having the domain knowledge makes it easy to understand the requests or queries raised by the client or business users. Training on the domain can be provided with the help of training materials or domain experts. Also, prepare test materials to check the understanding of the executive.

Conclusion:

Training presents a prime opportunity to expand the knowledge in a particular domain and is important in terms of dealing with the customer. Proper training will not only help in the development of the company but also the support team to understand and gain knowledge about the business. This would increase the productivity and quality of service.

About Author:

Tresa Kursingal is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at: tresa.kursingal@spluspl.com