Transcription
Hi there. Today we’ll be looking at getting started with OneDesk and an overview of key capabilities. Here is our agenda for today.
In today’s webinar we’ll cover the main sections of OneDesk, including what the customer applications are; the organization of your OneDesk; how to view your information; how tickets are created; planning tasks and projects; tracking time, workload, and other performance indicators; budgeting and invoicing; and finally your account settings.
I hope you enjoy.
OneDesk combines helpdesk and project management into a single application. You can serve your customers, collaborate with your team, work on projects, track time and more.
All you need to sign up with OneDesk is an email address and you will get access to a 14-day full-feature trial. Just click the sign up free button on our homepage.
Once you register, you’ll be greeted by this Getting Started Guide. This is always available on the top navigation for you to reference and is full of helpful videos, tutorials, and importantly, the getting started wizard. If you take a few minutes to go through these steps in the wizard you will be ready to start using OneDesk.
Now let’s get started.
There are 3 main parts that make up OneDesk. The first is the main web application, which we are looking at now. This is where you or your team will spend most of their time. The second is the mobile app. While I will not be showing the mobile app today, it IS available for iOS & Android and is intended for your team to be able to access their assignments, reply to customer questions, and log time directly from their phone.
Finally, we have the Customer applications.
Customer Apps are the end-user, client, or customer-facing side of OneDesk. They are meant to aid in communication and support, allowing customers to get updates, submit tickets, and more. Customers can also create tickets and respond via email, which I will show you later.
You can view your customer apps by clicking on your name, and hovering over Customer apps. The customer apps include the web widget, the messenger, portal, webforms, and knowledgebase.
Let’s click on the Web Widget. This will open up a new window of a sample page, with the widget.
The widget here is embeddable onto your own website with a JavaScript snippet. The widget contains the other applications in the tabs. Essentially the widget is an easy way for customers to access the apps. You can alternatively provide customers a link to individual customer apps.
The apps themselves, include:
The messenger, a live-chat between you and your customers. They can send you messages and include attachments. Let’s pretend I’m a customer and send a message. Any live chat messages from your customers will appear in your main web application so your agents can reply. We’ll see where that is shortly.
Next, is the tickets portal, where your customers can log in and see their tickets along with the progress made on them, provide attachments, see conversation history, and more. The portal helps to minimize the customer questions regarding their ticket progress.
Next are the Webforms, this is one method a customer can use to submit new tickets. You can customize your form by adding custom properties, making fields required, and so on. Webforms are helpful to ensure you receive all required information for tickets.
Finally, the knowledgebase is a self-service hub of information. Your team can write articles on common questions, your company, services, or anything else. The knowledgebase can cut down on common questions and keep everyone on the same page.
Please note that these apps are highly configurable, including colors, logos and more. I will cover that later on.
Let’s get back to our main web application. OneDesk lets you easily capture new tasks, tickets and other items. The 3 main apps on the left side here are the Tickets app, Tasks app, and the Projects App. Now let’s talk about how your items are organized in OneDesk. At the top, we have your organization name. Next, we’ve got portfolios. Portfolios are containers for your projects and are primarily organizational. Common practice would be to have these named after customers you serve or by departments in your company.
Inside of the portfolios we have projects. Projects act as containers for tickets and tasks, and you can see the number of each reflected in the columns. Finally, we have items – tickets and tasks.
What’s the difference? Well, the ticket is good for logging quick solutions achieved with simple replies while tasks are for planning a more in-depth solution that requires more time and resources to resolve. You can escalate tickets into tasks or create tasks independently. I’ll show you how this looks shortly.
Now if you would like to see tickets or other items in more detail, you can do that in one of two ways. You can double-click on the item, which will open up the detail panel in a new tab at the top. However, if you don’t want to navigate away from this page. Go to the Tools menu in the top bar and select ‘Dock details panels to the right’. In this view, you are able to browse through the items on the screen. Both options display the same information, just differently.
Now on the left side we can see our work views.
First are the system views, you can think of these as our base layouts. I have the tree view for a hierarchical look at my tickets grouped into their respective projects. The Subtask tree groups our parent item with its child. We will learn more about subtasks later. The Flat is a list view. The status board is a Kanban board, it allows you to drag and drop tickets into different statuses and visually understand our workload.
Under our base views are custom views. Custom views are configured versions of our base layouts; they can have filters, custom groupings, sorts, and different columns. These are some out-of-the-box views, for example ticket inbox sorts and groups my tickets by creation date. You can also create your own custom work views. Click on the icon beside My Views. First select the system layout. Let’s choose the Tree view. Then add any filters you desire. For example, let’s choose narrow tickets to tickets assigned to myself. Select filter, assignee, is, me. Finally add any groupings to your view. Lets group these tickets by priority level. Now let’s save my view. As an admin level user I can choose to share my view. This is helpful for creating unified views across your organization. Anyone can create views and save them for themself on the side here but only admin users can share them. So here’s the view we created with my tickets grouped by priority. You can get pretty granular with your views for example add or remove columns, change column size, or even apply searches. You can then go in and save these changes to your custom views. There is also the Project-level selection. This enables you to select the scope of 1 project or portfolio at a time. The project scope works independently and on top of your custom views. It also follows you as you go through other applications.
Finally, please note that the view you’re looking at is always reflected in the breadcrumbs up above. You can easily clear filters or selections this way.
So, how do you get tickets into your OneDesk? Well, the Helpdesk flow begins when a ticket is submitted to your company. There are 5 ways to get tickets. The first way is manually. Click the Add button, you can then fill in the form to create a ticket. You could do this on behalf of a customer for example, if someone comes up to your desk about an issue. Second and probably most popular is by email. Let’s navigate to our administrative section and click on Emails and Settings. You can directly connect your Office 365 or Google support email account. Customers will then email your regular support address and a ticket gets created automatically in OneDesk. Let’s go look at a ticket and I’ll explain what happens. The email subject line will become the title of the ticket. The body message becomes the description. The customer is added as the requester here. THeir name and email is captured if they do not already exist in your Onedesk account. You can reply to the customer directly from the conversation tab here. These replies will go to the customer’s email. Likewise the customer can reply from their own email and responses will appear here connected to the ticket.
The third way to get a ticket into OneDesk is through the Import tool. You can import the details of your tickets through the import tool by clicking on Tools, Import.
The fourth is from a customer submitting a webform. Remember the customer apps we saw earlier? Customers can use that form to submit tickets. The fifth way to get a ticket into OneDesk is through chat. In the customer app, when a customer starts a conversation, it is sent to you as a message.
Now if we navigate to our messenger application, here. We can see all our conversations. Messages from email, portal or chat will be here. You can see this conversation is linked to a ticket. So we can send messages from the ticket view, which we can access by clicking on the ticket name, or you can send messages from inside the messenger here. Everything is synced. You will see this message I sent earlier from the live chat. This conversation is not linked to anything. It is an independent live chat conversation. We can have the conversation with the customer or if we want we can create a ticket from this conversation. Click the action icon above the conversation and select Create ticket from conversation.
Now we see this conversation is linked to the ticket.
Let’s go into the ticket detail panel by clicking the ticket name. Here we can do a few different things: We can change the Lifecycle status with a click of a button. Keep in mind these statuses are configurable. We can also change the percentage of completion. We can assign this ticket to someone. We can move the ticket into a different project. And add details and attachments to the ticket.
In the ticket detail panel’s side-menu here, we’ve got a few tabs that we’ll go through. The first is the conversations tab, which is where you will find the internal and external conversations regarding this item. Let’s reply to our customer from here. Once you’ve replied you’ll see that a countdown has started. If the customer doesn’t see your reply within 1-min, it will go out to them by email and an email icon will appear here. This way you never lose touch with your customers. You can also create internal conversations with your users. Click on Create New Conversation, then on the internal messages tab. @ mention users or click add to loop teammates into the conversation.These conversations are internal only and your customers will not be able to see them even in the portal.
The next tab is the timesheets tab. This is where you can log time worked on this ticket, be it through timesheets or timers. You can assign yourself to the ticket and start the timer by click the start work button or clicking start timer. Or you can manually log time by clicking add timesheet. On the timesheet you can include notes and billable status. Next we’ve got the activities tab. This shows you a history of actions taken on this item, such as when it was created, when an assignee was added, and so on..
Finally, we’ve got the subtasks and links tab. Subtasks are used to identify short or simple work that is linked to a main item. This could be for work that you do to help to complete this ticket. Linked items is where you can link two different items and decide what the relationship between them is.
Let’s say this ticket is related to this other ticket. When you add a link it’s easy to navigate between them
Now, if your ticket is requiring more time to resolve and you need to do additional planning to achieve a resolution, then you can change the item from a ticket into a task. To do this, simply click on the icon and select the task. You can also create new tasks from the add button. You can see our task looks similar, and the conversations are maintained, However we can now add agile points to score task effort. We can also plan the progression and estimate the effort of this task. Clicking on the dates here to give the task a planned schedule and planned work. The planned work is the estimate of how long the task should take, for instance an estimate of 5 hours. The planned schedules are the dates in which the task should be worked on. So it might start on Monday and be due by Friday. As well, let’s add a constraint to this such as it must start on this date.
Since, Our ticket is now moved from the tickets app to the tasks app. All our tasks are housed in this app. In our tasks application as well, we have additional work views to assist us with planning and monitoring progress. There’s the Gantt view. Here you can click and drag ends to change planned duration, move them along on the timeline to change planned dates, and link the starts or ends of tasks to create dependencies. The blue represents the planned schedule while green is the actual work in progress. The actual progress is generated based on logged time. The blue bar for the project gets darker as more tasks are scheduled at the same time. Next we’ve got the calendar view. This is similar to the Gantt view in that you can drag items around to reschedule plans. There is also the workload view. This is an informational resource management tool that allows you to see how much planned work each user has assigned versus how long they work in the day.
Now let’s take a look at the applications on the bottom left navigation. At the top, we have the messenger. This shows you external conversations from customers and internal conversations as well.
Next is the Timesheets application. For your employees, tracking time can be done by using Timesheets. The timesheets application keeps track of all logged hours. Like the other app, you can filter, sort and group your time entries to get the information you need. You can also export your timesheet data in csv.
Next is the Knowledge Center. In this app we can manage our knowledgebase articles and saved replies. Articles can be created from the add button.
The description of the article will be the content of the article and the name will be the title. Click create to continue working on the article. When you want to publish an article, go to the detail panel and add it into the appropriate category. The next tab of our knowledge center is the categories tab. Categories are how your customers browse your knowledgebase. You can also utilize parent categories to organize your categories further. Lastly are saved replies also called canned responses these are pre-written responses that can help you answer common questions. You can create new saved replies and manage them from here. If we head back to our ticket detail panel, We can insert a saved reply from the action menu of our conversation. This will generate the pre-written response, then we can send it to the customer.
Next is the Customers application. Customers will be automatically captured from emails and the Customer Portal. They can also be added manually from the add menu or through import or integrations.
Next is the users application. Users are those working inside our main OneDesk app here. Now users can be in one or multiple teams.An important point about teams is that when creating projects you share projects with one or multiple teams. If a project is not shared with someone they will not see the project or any ticket or task inside it. This is one way to segment your work for multiple departments or keep teams interested in only what is relevant to them. A user can have permissions in the team as well. Lets click to open our user. Here Jon is in two teams. I can set his permission in this team to be restricted, limiting his abilities in projects shared with this team. The next tab is our user calendar. You can create vacations for the user here. This will affect their availability for the workload and resource management features. Lastly, is the permissions and notifications tab. A user can be admin or non-admin. Non-admins have no access to admin settings and can have different application permissions. For instance They can be given less access to the customer app or timesheets app. User notifications allow you to configure whether this user receives emails and other notifications from customers or other users.
Next is our analytics application. Here are various groupings of charts and graphs to analyze your key performance indicators. See the chart series at the top for more chart groupings. If you find certain charts are most helpful for your organization, create a customized dashboard by clicking on the views icon. Select the charts you want on your dashboard, give it a name and save it on your side panel. You can also change the date range or filter these charts by various properties. The next tab here is the reports. Reports are a way of extracting your data. There are a number of pre-built reports to choose from. The benefit of reports is also the ability to send reports to customers, or teammates by email on a scheduled basis. The final tab is Activities which acts like a history of actions done with OneDesk. This way, if you ever have any questions about how an item got to be a certain way, you can see the steps that were taken, and by whom, to get it to that state.
Next we have our financials application. The financials app for invoicing and budgeting your work.
The first tab is the invoicing tab. You can create a new invoice from the add menu. Invoices can be created for billable time entries. Select the relevant customer organization, monthly or ad-hoc. Add time to the invoice. You can add time that is marked billable and for the selected customer org. The invoice will be calculated based on your rates. Which can be configured in your admin setting, which we will see shortly. The other tab in our financials app costs and revenue. Here we can estimate and monitor our budget. The planned columns are based on your rates and the planned effort of your work. THe actual columns are calculated as your team logs billable time.
Administration settings
Lastly, at the bottom we’ve got our administration section for your company preferences and settings. In Company Preferences, you can change your name, the logo, the Bot name and avatar. You can define a work schedule for the week, change your company language, and subtask settings.
Next is the Email Settings, which has some tabs at the top that I’ll go through. First is the messaging center, which shows automated replies to creation of items, closing of tasks, forgotten password requests and the like. OneDesk has created a certain automation response already, which you can modify and change.Here is an automation that runs when a ticket status is updated and here is the message itself. You can configure the message including the dynamic properties that are embedded automatically.
Automated emails are sent directly to a selected email. Often these are used as a notification. You can create your own email templates that send through automation rules.
The next two tabs are the outgoing and incoming tabs. These tabs show emails sent and delivered or failed for the past 72 hours.
The next tab here is the Appearance tab. This is where you can edit the look and feel of emails to fit your organization’s branding. You can add an email signature or header, as well as configure your satisfaction survey messages.
Last tab is the settings tab, where we can connect our support emails. There are also a number of filters to prevent certain emails from creating tickets.
The next is the integrations. OneDesk includes built-in integrations with some of your favorite applications. If you already use an existing system with your company, you can integrate it with OneDesk directly. Or, if you don’t see what you use from in the list, you can always look to see if the 3rd party Zapier has an integration ready for you. Zapier provides a way to automate workflow between different web applications and they have hundreds of applications you can choose from. We also support Single-Sign-On. You can enable it for users as well as Customers through SAML2.0 and Open ID Connect.
Next are custom fields. Custom fields can be added to any of your items such as tickets or tasks. Custom fields allow you to capture information specific to your needs. Simply select: create a custom field and give it a name and data type then add it to the item you want. Here you can also create conditions for your custom fields. This will allow you to display another field if a customer selects a certain option. For example when my customers fill in my Department field here, if they select sales I want them to see my Customer Approval field.
Next is our automation center, where all our automation rules are housed. Automations let us perform actions based on a variety of triggers. There are a number of out-of the box integrations that post messages or update statuses. Automations can run on tickets, tasks, articles, timesheets, or projects. Select what you want it to run on. The automation will then trigger based on the defined condition and then perform an action. For example I can say all tickets, when created, can be assigned to myself. Or I can filter these tickets, let’s say if the ticket comes from a certain customer it would be assigned to me. There are many other options such as moving tickets into a project, changing priority or sending a message.
Next is the ticket settings. You can modify up to 10 different types of tickets. You can change the icon, as well as the ticket type name. If you click on Manage Statuses, you can adjust the lifecycle status for each enabled ticket type. Enabling ticket types is helpful if you have different workflows for different services.
Below that you can configure the detail panel of your tickets, such as removing a property you do not use. If your company has SLAs, service level agreements, you can modify them here . SLAs let you set resolution and response targets based on the priority of your ticket.
In the Tasks application, you can see that it’s very similar to tickets. You can enable and disable up to ten different task types and manage their unique statuses. Configure the task details panel,and apply SLAs. The same applies to our articles.
In the Timesheets settings, you can also configure their detail panels. Configure service types to use for billing or defining timesheets. As well as defaults and timer preferences.
In the Users application, you can manage the type of users that you have. You can decide if they are full, part-time, and configure their details including any custom fields you’ve created.
The next application is our Customers. Same as users, you can create various types and configure the detail panel.
In the Projects and Portfolios section, it’s very similar to the tickets and tasks. You can enable different types of projects and portfolios. You can also configure unique lifecycle statuses for all your project types and configure your project detail panel.
Next our Forms, which refers to your internal creation form, when creating from the add menu. We can edit the defaults and properties that appear on the form. We can also create multiple forms for each ticket type. This serves as a ticket template. We can set a separate name, default values and properties in this form. Now when I create a ticket using this form those default values are already set for me. Making logging tickets manually faster.
Next is our financials settings, we can set our cost and invoicing levels. You can set each from a variety of levels. You can then set your rates, hourly, with a monthly minimum or mixed. You can set default values for your invoices here. As well OneDesk integrates with QuickBooks Online to copy over or send OneDesk invoices.
Next is our Customer Apps. Here you can create additional customer apps, rename your apps, or disable ones you won’t use. Below this is the widget appearance, where you can select the size or messages in the widget. The next two tabs are for the classic or mobile friendly app settings. There are two types of customer apps in OneDesk,you can learn more about the differences in this link. The settings here will configure which applications appear in the classic widget, the logos and colors of the classic portal and the widget bubble. Next is the messages within the live chat messenger. And lastly the snippet to add the widget to your site.
THe other messenger settings on the left side will configure the appearance of the mobile friendly messenger.
Next is the ticket porta settings. Here you can configure which tickets customers can see in the portal. Below that are the properties the customer can see and edit.
Next is the webforms settings, the forms for your customers. You can edit which properties your customers can enter to create a ticket, add additional properties including your custom fields. Make a field required by checking the box. The knowledge base setting here, again allows you to configure the messages in your KB, Plus add your categories the KB from here. Last is the settings for the classic portal, again which items the customer can see and properties that are visible.
Now, when you are ready to go pro you can do so from your trial account OneDesk. You get unlimited projects and customers. Pick your plan depending on which features you need. You then pay based on the number of users. Users are the individuals logging into the main web application, assigned to tickets and so on. That concludes the OneDesk webinar for today. Thank you for your time . If you want more details on anything we looked at today check out our video guide or knowledge base, or reach out to our support team through live chat or at support@onedesk.com