Tickets are a key part of most service businesses, they are the lifeblood rushing through various arteries to and from the beating heart of your business. Tickets mean work and hopefully more billable hours (depending on the contract terms of course) and are generally good to have, unless they’re an indication of things going terribly wrong with your product or service in which case less tickets is probably better!
However regardless of the business or contract type, if there are tickets involved you can be sure that they will get around, one way or another… flying in from customers, being created and updated by technicians on and off-site, through the Web, via mobile devices and Windows clients, opened and closed and acted on in all manner of ways. Sometimes, amidst all this frenetic ticket activity you may find yourself needing to move a ticket or perform some action on a whole range of tickets and with the recent versions of CRM we’ve added some handy new features to help deal with those tricky ticket tasks more efficiently.
If you find yourself with a ticket which was accidentally linked to the wrong account you can easily move it to another account, hopefully the right account this time, along with all related data including charges, history notes and everything else which needs to go with it.
Sometimes you may have a large number of tickets which need to be removed from the Inbox and the last thing you want to spend your precious time doing is going one ticket at a time to remove them – you can easily do the whole lot as a batch and use your valuable time for more important tasks. Also besides the batch remove feature, tickets are automatically removed from the Inbox on completion. But that’s not the only batch feature, you can also do a batch update of the account region. For example if a customer moves their office to a new region and you have a large number of tickets showing their old region, it is now trivial to change them all to the new region code.
All these new Ticket management features can be easily reached through the Tickets > Tools menu in the CRM application and along with the many other new features recently added, we hope will contribute to a more effective and efficient workflow in your business.
Until next time,
Success Team
But what does this type of Professional Services Software actually do? How does it work? What are it’s actual benefits? Well, lets start from the front desk, which in IT services is commonly known as the help desk and is where all customers come to interact with the company supplying them with services. The help desk is typically contacted via Email or telephone and each new issue reported results in a ticket being created to track the entire process from reporting the issue to resolution and even beyond.
Knowledge is power, as the similarly named NSA and other three letter agencies will no doubt attest to and so besides keeping track of support tickets, it is also necessary to know who you are dealing with. Keeping track of your customers is where the CRM aspect of a PSA application comes in to the picture. Every customer, partner, subcontractor, vendor and employee that you work with should of course be stored in your accounts database and easily searchable. Not only do contact details need to be stored but each account record should be linkable to data from other modules within the PSA application, such as tickets, contracts, assets and more which makes it much more than just a contact management software.
Most people want to keep things simple and that includes contracts with customers and so it is common for service companies to start (and aim to continue) with just one or two standard contracts. But even the best intentions can soon go the way of the Dodo and before long that nice simple standard contract has been replaced with a wide array of custom contracts catering to the ever increasing diversity of customer requirements. Blocks of time, money, tickets, global, one time, recurring, MSP, SLA… a PSA makes contract management considerably simpler while allowing for such diversity.
When managing multiple employees, outsourced subcontractors and independent contractors of various kinds, workforce management and time management functions are of course a requirement for maximizing labor utilization and actually getting things done. Knowing who is doing what, where, when and for how long, not to mention the expenses involved each time whether they be hourly rates, equipment, mileage or whatever else, all needs to be logged and tracked in detail. Being able to manage multiple workforce entities in this way makes a PSA ideal as collaboration software.
Undoubtedly when providing IT services this will involve managing assets of one kind or another, ie. computing equipment belonging to your clients. This management could be ongoing maintenance, upgrades and OS patches or it may be one off jobs. Either way keeping a record of every asset, where it is and what has been done with it is of course essential and needless to say clients generally disapprove when you lose their precious assets. A detailed history provides important data which may be required at some point in future and being able to link assets to accounts, tickets, appointments and more is yet another killer feature of a PSA.
In every business there are many documents and yet more documents documenting those documents and they soon start mounting up. Before long there can be thousands of documents in all sorts of exciting formats such as Word, Excel, PDF and others. Storing these somewhere safe while also being available immediately should they be needed is essential as is linking them with the relevant accounts and tickets so they do not become orphaned and lose their usefulness. A well integrated document management system is a key component of a knowledge management system.
The process of logging or finding all the information gathered within an organization, basically the acquisition of intellectual capital, and then making it available and useable in an effective way, is often referred to as Knowledge Management. The proper implementation of such practices can lead to considerably improved efficiency as well as business continuity and competitive advantage so naturally a good PSA needs to include such functionality. The last thing your business needs is to have the one guy with all the knowledge in his head getting run over by a bus!
What is a business without sales? Certainly not a viable business, so managing the sales process is also an important function for any PSA. This sales process can start with the initial opportunity and progress through various stages, such as quotes, involving multiple people with varying influence at the prospective client. Ultimately that opportunity could be turned into a ticket or contract when the deal is closed. Turning those leads into actual paying customers is what the PSA should help with, streamlining and automating as much as possible.
Naturally a PSA makes sure that every minute worked, every ticket completed, every expense, every product, part or service provided, is all accounted for correctly. Everything that should be charged for will be charged for every month or whenever required by the contracts agreed with clients. The variety of charges which could be required in an IT services business is endless, employees who work for different rates, custom pricing for items, pre-paid blocks, recurring charges, it all quickly becomes very complex to manage and a PSA will make that complexity work for you and your customers, making it manageable and efficient and ensuring all are sent for invoicing so your income and profits can head in the right direction.
While a good PSA application contains multiple features and functions to help run a business, it can also integrate with other systems used by IT professionals. For example, turning all those charges logged into invoices and actual money commonly requires integration with an accounting system such as the very widely used QuickBooks. Being all about automation, integrating with Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) systems such as GFIMAX or Continuum is also high on the list of requirements for a PSA so tickets can be automatically created any time the monitoring system detects a problem and the right people can be alerted to take care of it whenever needed. Another popular PSA integration is of course Office/Outlook which is depended on by many businesses.
Fortunately in the new version of our PSA software the spell checking system has been enhanced considerably to help with such issues and so for example that glaring “edumacated” error above would certainly not have slipped through the cracks – unless you actually wanted it to! Which brings us neatly to a key component of the new spell checking system – the addition of your very own custom dictionary which means all those tricky technical terms, obscure acronyms or strange words which are relevant to your business but not normally included in a dictionary, can now be recognized and dealt with appropriately.