OneDesk differentiates between tickets and tasks to help you better organize your work environment. Tickets and tasks can be made to behave virtually the same; whatever you can do with a task, you could also do with a ticket and vice-versa. They are both work items and have the same functionality. However, there is a best practice for using them in OneDesk.
Tickets for Customer Inquiries and Requests
It’s best to keep tickets for any communications you have with your customers that you intend to resolve in a short period of time. Keeping tickets for these types of customer requests is best for these reasons:
- Gives your team the ability to keep customer requests separate from internal work
- Allows your team to better organize incoming customer communications and divide work into appropriate workflows
- Gives you a way to view and track work being done on customer-facing issues only
- Allows you to assign customer communications into appropriate ticket types (e.g. complaints, questions, problems, etc.)
- Enables you to better assign customer-facing inquiries/projects to the customer support team
Tasks for Planned Work
It’s good practice to keep tasks for your planned work, which is work that might need more time, resources, and planning to complete. Keeping tasks for planned work is best for these reasons:
- Helps your team to organize work assignments and work division on internal tasks without dealing with customer-facing inquiries
- Gives your team a way to view progress on internal tasks and assignments and view upcoming deadlines
- Allows your team to communicate on internal matters and plan large company-specific projects
- Allows you to assign employee work into appropriate task types (e.g. issues, features, bugs, etc.)
- Gives you the ability to better coordinate your internal workflow for company projects, releases, etc.
- Enables you to schedule plans for longer projects and keep track of time-sensitive internal tasks
- Allows you to track budget and spending costs for large internal projects and tasks
Best Practice Recommendation
Keeping tickets and tasks separate allows you to better organize your teams and their workflows in OneDesk. Make use of the unique item types for tickets and tasks to further organize each into distinct categories and to develop independent workflows for each.