How professional services organizations use OneDesk to manage their projects and stay on track

This article is part of an ongoing series where I discuss how a particular customer in a specific industry uses OneDesk.

When your team is responsible for a multitude of customers, you need to ensure your clients’ needs are met at all times. It’s inevitable that systems and products face issues from time to time, and urgent requests will come in as a result of that. But regardless of your competing priorities, you have to keep your team focused on what’s important in spite of the chaos. For teams using OneDesk, it’s straightforward setting up the views, workflows, and processes needed in order to do so.

For a lot of teams, providing professional services is the name of the game. This means keeping your customers happy, regardless of whether your team is focusing on the support or the implementation side of things. OneDesk can be set up to track all of your customers’ requests, and even offers a portal to facilitate communications with customers by allowing them to interact with your team in threads on tickets.

Customers’ emails can be forwarded into OneDesk as tickets to start the workflow without manual intervention using custom rules. By creating distinct and automated workflows for each of the different kinds of service requests, you make it trivial for your team to stay focused without worrying about the administrative details. OneDesk also creates records of your customers automatically as their requests come in, allowing you to group and arrange tickets relating to them without relying on an integration to make that connection. For sensitive conversations, communications on tickets can be marked private or public so your team can discuss all the details without worrying about the customer having complete visibility.

Conversely, for service teams that work on the implementation of projects to meet their customers’ needs, OneDesk shines when it comes to project management. Most importantly, you need to be able to see the status of your projects, whether it’s for communications with upper management or for you to see the larger picture of your team’s progress. OneDesk allows you to put together your own view to surface all the tickets for a project and their statuses. The customizations are extensive, including the ability to view tickets against customers affected, time estimations, and projected revenue. This gives you visibility into how your team is progressing on various dimensions and how your project’s timeline is looking from multiple standpoints. This also surfaces any areas where your project is lagging behind. Combined with the Gantt view already provided in OneDesk’s standard set of views, you can pinpoint the tickets taking longer than expected and get down to the particular due dates and deadlines that are in danger. The views you put together can serve as a dashboard for your whole team that is the starting point for deeper conversations into problem areas, or be filtered down to a report tailored to the details that answer your current questions.

By using OneDesk, professional service teams get full visibility into their progress on projects to the ticket level and beyond. As a project manager, you can use OneDesk at a broader level to check your project’s pulse or dig into the nitty-gritty as much as you need. The customizability and flexibility offered by the OneDesk suite of tools gives you everything you need for status meetings by way of reports and dashboards shaped by the views you put together. The options scale with you and your team’s needs, making OneDesk the ideal software to handle everything you throw at it.

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