Hi everyone,
We are currently looking to centralise the management and follow-up of requests or incidents in a single tool. One of our options would be to do this in FRESHDESK. As of today we are using FRESHDESK only to handle the AGENT ↔ CLIENT relationship.
In this message I would like to have your opinion on what you would do to “enrich” our use of the FRESHDESK solution in order for us to be able, for the same request, to cover :
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AGENT ↔ CLIENT discussion
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AGENT ↔ SUPPLIER discussion
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AGENT ↔ ANOTHER INTERNAL TEAM discussion
I know there are plenty of ways of doing things in FRESHDESK (Forwards, Child tickets, Shared Ownership etc.), and they all have their strengths and limitations, so I would love to get your view on how you would do this and why.
Let me share how we work today and what we are looking to achieve. We are running quite a complex operation but I will do my best to share the relevant level of information.
1 - What we do today
We get requests from CLIENTS but also notifications from SUPPLIERS.
When a CLIENT gets in touch, we get the message via a ticket in FRESHDESK. If the agent has to get in touch with the supplier to handle the situation, he / she does it via OUTLOOK. So the Agent uses FRESHDESK on the CLIENT side and OUTLOOK on the supplier side and has to track feedback in both tools, which is not optimal.
Note that we use a dedicated email address to answer CLIENTS and another specific email address to get in touch with our SUPPLIERS. This is something we need to keep in our target.
When a SUPPLIER gets in touch, we get the message via OUTLOOK. Indeed, we haven’t set the email address dedicated to SUPPLIER contacts as a FRESHDESK support email address (we receive a bit of everything, from useless ads to very important informations, from hundreds of suppliers). In case the notification is important, the AGENT has to get in touch with the CLIENT to discuss it : this is done be creating on OUTGOING TICKET from FRESHDESK with the CLIENT as the contact. Then, the Agent has to follow the SUPPLIER’s situation in OUTLOOK and the conversation with the CLIENT in FRESHDESK.
Extra notes :
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When the Agent needs to involve another GROUP of agent to solve the issue, it seems that we have different methodologies depending on the teams : some use Forwards, some use Child tickets and some just manage this “offline” using emails or slack discussions.
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We use custom STATUSes in FRESHDESK such as “WAITING FOR ANSWER FROM CLIENT”, “WAITING FOR ANSWER FROM SUPPLIER” or “WAITING FOR ANSWER FROM INTERNAL”. For these statuses, the SLA TIMER is OFF as we consider them as Pending and, as we systematically use the Automatic Ticket Assignment in GROUPS, they are then not assigned to an AGENT (until they are reopened when someone gets back to us or when an AUTOMATION RULE is triggered).
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We have a program that un-assign all tickets daily in the middle of the night. Our agents are being moved from one GROUP to another by their supervisors during the week depending on what tasks they are planned to work on. The processing of a ticket can be started by an AGENT, put into a “WAITING FOR ANSWER FROM SUPPLIER” status and resumed by another AGENT 2 days after, when we get the answer from the supplier and the ticket is reopened.
2 - What we are targeting
So one of our ideas is to try as much as possible to use FRESHDESK to handle all the communications with the different parties. We need to keep in mind the Ticket daily AUTO ASSIGNMENT policy that we have in place when thinking about solutions to implement.
When a CLIENT gets in touch, we would get the message via a ticket in FRESHDESK as it is done today. Then :
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If the AGENT needs to involve one or several suppliers, we would want this to be done via FRESHDESK (using the email address dedicated to the SUPPLIERS communications),
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If the AGENT needs to request information from another Group of agents, we would want this to be done via FRESHDESK.
When a SUPPLIER gets in touch, we would get the message via a ticket in FRESHDESK rather than using OUTLOOK. Then :
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If the AGENT needs to involve the CLIENT, we would want this to be done via FRESHDESK (using the outgoing email address dedicated to the CLIENTs communications),
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If the AGENT needs to involve one or several other suppliers, we would want this to be done via FRESHDESK (using the outgoing email address dedicated to the SUPPLIERS communications),
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If the AGENT needs to request information from another Group of agents, we would want this to be done via FRESHDESK.
Looking forward to reading your answers and thank you for your advices, thoughts and ideas.
Regards,
Timour