OneDesk for Creative and Design Firms

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Project management for creative design relies on communication to transform visual ideas into concrete plans. The progress of these plans depend on team collaborations and constant feedback from clients from start to finish. As a result, creative projects have a longer timeline, frequent revisions and constant restructuring of task priority. Yet like any other project, there are deadlines and budgets that need to be met to deliver quality work. This is why it is imperative to invest in a robust system that provides the organization, flexibility and contact management to maximize the team’s creative abilities.

OneDesk is a combination of HelpDesk and Project Management in one application. With OneDesk, you can support your clients and manage projects without the need to purchase, learn, integrate, and switch between multiple applications. OneDesk makes it easy for you to provide proactive support, resulting in better communication and stronger client relationships. In terms of project management, OneDesk allows you to create tasks and organize them into projects or portfolios, which can then be assigned to your team members and tracked in multiple viewing layouts.

In this panel, you can create projects and portfolios. These portfolios act as containers for your projects. Portfolios can be titled according to the customer name, client organization, the project type, or the departments in your operation managing the assigned projects.

Eclectic Studios is a video production company with departments such as graphic design, content management, audioworks, production and more . The studio includes a series of contact request forms for business inquiries, quotation requests and job inquiries on their website. These contact forms generate customer requests, which are then organized into portfolios based on the department name and projects dedicated to the specific customer inquiry.

For example we created a portfolio called Online Inquiries. This portfolio contains multiple projects which include contact request for new business, quotation request and work opportunities. Each of these projects contains client requests and planned assignments that can be viewed using the Tickets and Task application.

Your clients can contact you via your online channels such as your email, website contact forms or live chats. OneDesk will capture the details of these requests and create tickets from all channels into a single unified view. Tickets require immediate attention and can be resolved right away. In OneDesk, you can create tickets in multiple ways.

The first way is by auto-forwarding your support email to the email address found here. When a client sends an email to your support email address, OneDesk will capture that email and generate a ticket. All the critical information in the email will be captured on the ticket.

The second is by receiving a request through the live chat application. OneDesk’s live chat application is a customer-facing application that promotes communication with your clients in real-time. You can customize the chat window with your logo, company colour scheme, and add a BOT avatar. Once the client messages you via live chat, your team members can view this in their Messenger application, reply, and create the ticket from the conversation. In doing so, OneDesk links the ticket and conversation together, enabling your team to view all the necessary data from one platform.

Anytime a client sends an email request, OneDesk automatically creates a customer record and categorizes the requester of the ticket according to their organization. Alternatively, your clients can contact you via web forms that capture all the information and generate tickets on your dashboard.

Your clients can access your portal to ask you questions. These questions could be about business inquiries or about quotation requests, which can then be submitted to you via webforms.

Once submitted, your clients can communicate with your team members and review their tickets. To maintain the confidentiality of this information, you can require your clients to sign in to the portal to track their support tickets’ progress. Additionally, you can control what your clients can see and provide role-based access to handle confidential information. You can also enable viewing options for clients to filter tickets according to ticket request type, the project it belongs to, and more.

Webforms capture all the necessary information from your clients and generate tickets on your dashboard. You can create multiple webforms in OneDesk. These forms are linked to specific ticket types, organizing and separating one from another.To generate webforms, you need to go to the Administration Settings in OnDesk and then scroll down to Customer Apps to select Webforms. Choose a ticket type to create the webform and enter all the properties associated with the form.

The default webform includes 3 basic properties: subject, description and attachments. When the ticket is generated on your dashboard, the subject, description and attachments are also captured in the ticket.

In OneDesk, webforms can be customized by adding custom fields. To create custom fields, you must first determine the type of information you want to collect from your clients. You can choose fields based on text, number, date, cost and choice and then appropriately name the custom field based on your selection. These fields can be set as required to capture important information from your customers.

For example, you can create a webform for clients who may have questions about your explainer videos. They can navigate to your customer portal and select the webform titled ‘Explainer Videos.’ You can then add the standard or customized fields to capture the appropriate information needed to resolve the ticket. You can also configure these fields to be required to ensure all necessary information is captured.

Once your client completes the selected webform, you will generate a ticket in your Ticket application in OneDesk.

The ticket allows you to see the details that were filled out on the webform. You can then assign this ticket to a specific individual, team or department. OneDesk allows you to assign multiple team members and departments to a ticket. However, you can eliminate manually assigning teams through automating the process.

Workflow Automations are rules that allow you to automate actions in OneDesk. These Automations contain 3 elements: filters, triggers and actions. The blue tags represent your ticket type and serve as filters, the orange tag represents the trigger event, while the green tag represents the actions that OneDesk will take when this trigger event occurs on these items. Once the rules are set, OneDesk will generate a name for your automation. Otherwise you have the option to rename the automation.

OneDesk can automate your workflow and eliminate any manual intervention to route tickets to the appropriate team or project. With OneDesk’s Workflow Automations, you can route items to teams and projects, auto-reply to clients, add custom notifications, and much more. To create your automations, you navigate to your administration settings and then click on the ticket tab and then scroll down to Workflow Automations.

You can create new workflow automations or edit an existing one. For instance, if a potential client submits an inquiry about New Business, you can route this ticket to your sales department and rotate between users each time a new ticket is created. An evenly distributed ticket rotation will allow you to provide the best service to your clients.

Another way to increase your efficiency is by using automation to notify your clients about the updates of their requested tickets.This will keep the client in the loop and eliminate the need to send emails to inquire about the ticket status.

Communication is key in creative industries as ideas need to be expressed to clients and team members. In OneDesk you can interact with your clients in multiple ways.

If clients want to follow-up on their ticket, they can either respond via email or create conversations directly from the portal. This message will appear in the messenger and will also be linked to that specific ticket.

Your team members can reply to this existing conversation to communicate with the end-user or create internal messages for their team members. Internal conversations are hidden from your clients as it is displayed as an ‘Internal Reply’.

By typing the @username or @departmentname, you can get your message across to expert team members or departments who are best fit to answer your questions. The messenger application allows your team to carry out your daily correspondences and reduces the long response time associated with emails. The messenger application is especially effective as it encourages prompt reply and eliminates delaying resolutions that are needed for the success of the project.

Additionally, clients can also initiate engagement through the Livechat application feature in OneDesk. Sometimes sharing an image, pdf instructions or spreadsheets are easier than typing out the information in chat. OneDesk’s live chat application allows your clients to send attachments upto 350 MB. These attachments are captured in the tickets and are made available for your team members to download into their computers directly.

Since chat formats are instantaneous in nature, questions or problems can be resolved immediately by your team members. Apart from that, OneDesk’s live chat feature timestamps the conversation, which helps your team check conversation time in case of any dispute.

Those working in creative industries juggle multiple projects at the same time. These projects are concept-based and developed from inspiration. This makes the project planning process difficult as there is no strict sequential timeline. In fact it is very common to jump from one task to another.

In OneDesk you can break down these projects into tasks. Task can be defined as work that requires careful planning and execution. You can convert a ticket into a task or simply create a new task in the Task application.

Your team members can log their time on tasks in OneDesk and enter the percentage complete of the assigned tasks. Work is logged by creating a timesheet or running a task timer. When submitting a timesheet, you fill out how much work was done, the current status of this item, percentage complete, etc.

For graphic designers the design thinking process includes three stages: inspiration, ideation and implementation. The first task in the project includes brainstorming ideas and concepts with the team. Once ideas are noted, team members move on to the second phase of the project, which is research. Once the research is complete and ideas are conceptualized, the team will show it to the client and wait for approval or feedback. If feedback was offered, the team will revise the design concept until the client signs off. Once the concept is approved, the team will then move on to the artwork, which is the sketch and then the design. Each step requires clients approval and may require multiple revisions until the final product is ready.

Simply put, each step requires collaboration with the client and team members. For instance, the graphic design team will share their concept with the video production team each step of the way to make sure their design concepts blend with the theme of the video. In OneDesk, you can carry out conversations from the task forms. This enables you to engage with all parties and helps you make decisions unilaterally. Apart from carrying out conversations, you can also attach and send important folders to multiple individuals or teams, allowing them to locate the attachments and download them into their computers quickly.

You can organize your tasks inside the project structure or add them to different folders or portfolios within the project. You could create a project template for similar recurring projects, such as Video Production.

Simply clone the project each time you work on a similar project. That way, you can have an existing template in place, each time you work on these recurring projects. It is especially useful since you have the option to select the items and properties you wish to copy from the original project to the clone project.

OneDesk has some unique views that help you analyze your tasks . With OneDesk views, team members can visualize ongoing activities regarding all items, which then helps you in prioritizing correctly and in making smarter decisions.

The Gantt Charts view is particularly useful for efficient project planning, workload, and performance management. Gantt Charts consist of horizontal bars that indicate a project’s schedule on a horizontal timeline. Each bar represents a task with the left end of the bar indicating the start date of the task, and the right end of the bar displaying the task’s finish date. In OneDesk we have two types of gantt charts: The task-level gantt (where the bars represent tasks), and the project-level gantt (where the bars represent projects). You can link tasks to create task dependencies to lead your team members to finish one task before starting the next. You can also restructure the task dependencies by using the drag and drop function. Once the tasks are linked together, OneDesk will calculate the critical path and provide your team with the overall project length. You can also add date constraints to prevent a task being scheduled at a later date. The Gantt Chart also shows you your planning vs your actual work. The blue bars denotes your planning, while the green bar represents the actual time logged by your team. Having the blue bar next to the green bar helps you to visually compare how well you’ve planned your project hours.

You can also utilize the Status Board view to update the status of your task. The Status Board is a simple view where each task is represented as a card and you can just drag and drop your card from one column to the next to update its status. This feature will help with the non sequential timeline of tasks that comes with creative project management.

You and your team members may also find the Dashboard View useful. The dashboards provide charts and statistics to show you how your projects or tickets are progressing. You can also use the dashboard to compare how project A is faring compared to project B. You can find these dashboards in the Dashboard view of the “projects” application.

Additionally, you can also use simpler viewing layouts such as the Tree and Flat view to manage your tasks. The Tree view arranges tickets or tasks in a hierarchy. The Flat view shows the tickets and tasks without the hierarchy structure.

On OneDesk, you can create all the views you need to help you manage your tickets and tasks. My Views allow you to customize views according to your requirements. To create your personalized views, you need to select a layout and add filters, groups and columns.

For instance you can create a view to track the time spent by team members on each individual task. With this feature, you can track the productivity of your team members so your team managers know if tasks need to be reassigned. With OneDesk, it becomes easy to reassign tasks to other team members. You can use the Kanban-styled card board and customize the view to see each respective team member’s tasks and move certain tasks around to distribute it to a team member who has the availability to work on it.

Apart from these standard viewing layouts and filtering systems, you also make use of OneDesk’s powerful reporting capabilities.

You can generate reports on tickets, tasks, projects or portfolios using existing reporting templates or by creating your own. Reports are either created manually or automatically – using OneDesk’s workflow automation system. Supported reporting formats are PDF and CSV formats, and they can be mailed to designated email addresses.

Timesheet reports are especially useful when working on complex projects. This is because you can get an idea of how project time was utilized towards different task types and whether spending that time was justified. As a result, you can take the necessary steps to improve your project planning abilities and better manage your project billing hours.

OneDesk allows you to create timesheet reports, which are CSV files that can be imported in Microsoft Excel. These reports are data records of timesheet properties presented in a tabular data format. Item name, priority, billing type, requester name are some necessary information that can be shown within the timesheet reports. However, other critical information, such as the percentage completed, can be displayed for internal reporting. OneDesk timesheet application allows the administrator to delve deeper when creating reports. Therefore timesheet reports could exhibit internal data such as assignee name, the appointed team and more.

You can enable system emails to notify new team members about their user account or password setup. Other than that, you can send invitation emails to invite customers to sign up for your customer portal. You can also set up Workflow Automations to remind the assignees when their tasks are due and create a separate automation to notify the ticket follower for any status change or message you send.

OneDesk has all the capabilities to streamline your workflow. With OneDesk, you can capture, automate, manage and track your support tickets, allowing you and your team to take the necessary measures to resolve the problem immediately. With OneDesk’s project management features, you can assign work to the appropriate team and track your projects’ progress in multiple viewing layouts.

Your team members can submit their timesheets for all their work, enabling you to better manage your hours. In addition, OneDesk also helps to keep your clients in the loop. Through customer applications such as web forms and customer portals, your clients can contact you with specific requests, eliminating the problems associated with long email threads. Additionally, with OneDesk’s knowledge base, clients can access self-service articles, helping you reduce your ticket load significantly.

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