Location management in Freshservice is still a major problem for administrators and customers. While it improved with the ability to use Locations as a Data Source field in tickets and service requests, there’s a lot of work that still needs to be done to make it not agonizing to use in practice.
- You cannot report on Locations in Analytics, because you can’t report on a data source field. You can report on Requester location, but not on Location itself.
- There’s no practical provision to close a location. If you close a location, you have two primary options:
- remove the location from the location list—which removes the Location field information for any Incident or SR ticket that was ever assigned there, and rendering the prospect of reporting on ticket history by Location useless; or
- hide the location from requesters and agents—which requires one Business Rule for Forms for the Incident form, and one ticket for each and every SR that uses Location as a field. SR BRFs cannot be cloned, so each of those rules must be created and maintained by hand. I’ve done it, and It’s a nightmare!
- There’s also no documented method to move a location. Say a company uses areas and regions to organize stores within a country instead of (or in addition to) states/provinces. How do you move a location from one area or region to another? If you import a new set of Locations via CSV, does it look for existing locations by name and update the existing set like it does for requesters, or will it just overwrite the current information and disassociate your existing tickets? The KB article has no information on this process.
I did just discover that you can move a location by changing the Parent Location field and updating it, but this isn’t documented as far as I can tell, and it should be. Furthermore, if a company is reorganizing its locations en masse, handling this one-by-one by hand will be another nightmare: it doesn’t scale well at all.
Feature requests to correct these issues:
- Allow reporting on data source fields, including Locations.
- Provide a toggle switch (or some similar function) to hide any specific location from new forms of all types, but still allow it to be visible and reportable in Analytics. Let us just… turn Locations on and off! In one place!
- Alternatively, provide the option to make a Location-related BRF that can be applied to all SRs. This isn’t as good as a toggle switch because we’re still then responsible for hiding locations across multiple BRFs, but it’s better than what we have now.
- Provide a useful, non-destructive, and documented method to batch-update existing Locations.
Thank you for making such a useful product; implementing these ideas will make an overlooked-yet-critical feature vastly more useful and flexible. I appreciate your time and attention! 😊
