For large, Fortune 500 organizations that provide solutions across multiple areas, it helps to have the entire organization use a single website as their point of interaction with the company. These widely-used internal websites are crucial for the business to keep running, and oftentimes are overlooked in favor of more customer-facing projects. Sometimes these websites also serve as the main customer-facing website due to commonalities in what information is displayed. Because these websites are used by so many people from different departments with different needs as well as customers, it can be tricky capturing all of the requirements and ensuring a prioritization of work to encompass all of it. One client, who has a high-traffic website, came to us seeking ways to manage their work for it.
Our client is a Fortune 500 company, having presence all over the world, with a large website to maintain. Employees in various departments, such as design, engineering, and sales, all use the website as their portal for communicating with the larger organization. Across the organization, employees are organized into business units who submit requests for changes to the website. These requests can be updates to existing functionality or even the addition of new features. There is one team that manages this website and all of these incoming job requests. Our client was looking for a solution that will allow them to capture, triage, reply to, assign, and track these requests.
Out of the box, OneDesk has a robust ticket tracker that easily handles our client’s main use case. Work-items logged in OneDesk are treated as tickets which have multiple attributes to hold all of the relevant information to capture requirements and details. As a ticket is worked on, it moves through different statuses that our client can define to provide the appropriate level of visibility. Our client noted that they often get job requests that they end up rejecting. By creating a status for these declined tickets, they can simply change the ticket status in order to keep their website team focused on the right work. A workflow automation can even be set up so that anytime a ticket is moved to the declined state, a comment is posted on the ticket making it clear that the work is rejected. In OneDesk, each ticket has a record of interactions with it, which includes any discussions that happen directly on the ticket itself. Any updates to this thread of discussion are e-mailed to all followers of the ticket, which ensures everyone is kept abreast of what’s happening at all times.
As our client sees employees from across their organization putting in job requests for website changes, it makes sense for there to be one unified place for incoming requests. OneDesk offers a customer portal that our client can use to field incoming job requests. The customer portal is a customizable application that allows users to log tickets straight into the OneDesk ticketing system. By logging requests through a customer portal, users are able to see updates on the tickets they log and interact directly with the team on status. Our client had concerns about discussion visibility internal to the team being seen by other departments’ users, but OneDesk’s customer portal’s permissions can be tuned. Users can be limited to just seeing tickets they’ve logged, or if there are more general requests then permissions can be opened up to everyone in an organization. In terms of individual discussions on tickets, the team doing the work has the option of posting private discussions. This allows the team to collaborate without pushing communications to the end users that might not make sense.
As our client intends to use OneDesk tickets to represent job requests, it was important for them to fully understand what information can be detailed on a ticket and what interactions are possible. From time tracking to assignee, tickets in OneDesk have nearly limitless amounts of data they can hold. Comments on tickets also feature in-line editing so our client can insert links to external webpages and format their text. Tickets can also have attachments, for their creative team to send graphics and designs back and forth. This way, nothing gets lost and there is one place everyone knows to look when questions arise. OneDesk has no limits around what filetypes are supported as attachments, and files that are large in size can be attached as well. In addition to attachments and comments, OneDesk allows for the creation of custom fields on tickets. These fields can be set up for any piece of data our client wants to capture. For example, if they know there are different business units requesting work and want the tickets to list which unit is associated with a request, they can create a “Business Unit” field and populate a drop-down menu with all the units’ names. This can then be required information when new requests are logged via a form on the customer portal.
For large products used by many different people, it can be difficult tracking all of the work for it. Some might be update requests, others might be bugs or questions. With OneDesk’s ticketing application, our client is able to use one tool for capturing, tracking, triaging, and assigning the work that needs to be done. As is often the case, issue trackers aren’t necessarily able to capture the whole picture. By providing an interface for customers and users to log requests, OneDesk enables our client to control work from the moment it enters the system, all the way until completion. This gives our client complete visibility and empowers them to work collaboratively and efficiently.