Redmine Service Desk
Professional business plugin to improve your customer support in Redmine
Created by AlphaNodes, 2023. Use the Space key or the arrow keys to navigate through all slides.
Hello and welcome to our basic session on Redmine Service Desk Plugin in about 5 minutes.
Chapter 1: The Basics
What is Service Desk Plugin for Redmine?
Core function: Helpdesk
Handle incoming email requests
The plugin takes questions from your customers sent by mail and pulls them all into one place into your Redmine.
Those external emails are converted into issues. You can organize and manage them in Redmine and ultimately solve problems. This way you gain better visibility into your support processes.
Providing support to your customers is powerful and it can grow very fast. The Service Desk plugin is a flexible tool. It can scale with your business as you grow.
What you can do: collect HTML5 webform information with your issues
It is easy to be more productive and manage customer interactions if you already know a bit about your customer. So collect information up front by linking HTML5 webforms with your helpdesk tickets.
What you can do: provide quick answers via canned responses
Give your customer faster support by using predefined issue responses. Great function for those who continually receive the same questions or comments and wish to use prepared answer templates to send via email.
Work smarter not harder
With a tool to measure the impact of your work. And that allows you insights to make better business decisions.
Chapter 2: Best practices
Get started with Service Desk plugin for Support
#1
Configure your essential channel
Companies start using Service Desk Plugin because they want to make sure, that their email inbox can be shared with the team. No support request is getting missed, when someone in on vacation or out of office.
Put your inbox into Redmine:
- to be able to share incoming request with the team.
- to triage issues to different teams like marketing, sales, HR etc.
- to push email requests via issue further using your regular workflow.
#2
Define User permissions
Only administrators have unrestricted permissions in Redmine. All other employees should have only the permissions necessary for their job.
To ensure that your team can work efficiently, your agents must be able to:
- view
- triage
- and respond to requests.
Set relevant permissions for your helpdesk in the administration area
#3
Custom fields for helpdesk issues
Decide what data you want to track on those requests and on your contacts.
Recommendation
- Create your own Tracker (e.g. Helpdesk).
- Use the default issue fields like: Subject, Status, Priority.
- Work with additional custom fields (CF) for issues.
Custom fields for issues: resolution area
Example
Impact
Important impact if you work with custom fields on issues:
- Additional information
- Graphical evaluations
- Increase agent productivity
#1: Additional information
Collect useful information and feedback on areas that can be improved.
- A custom field for resolution types might help to identify topics for self-service articles.
Tipp: Prefer dropdown lists versus text fields if possible. For easier reporting, search and standardization of business relevant information.
#2: Graphical evaluations
#3: Increase agent productivity
- Multiple select options increase the productivity of the employees compared to manual text input.
- This will result in faster resolution times and makes the employee's job easier.
#4
Get to know your business rules
Gain efficiency through repeatable actions and a customized dashboard for your agents.
Recommendation
- Prepare canned responses to help agents provide support.
- Implement variables to create standards.
- Adjust project dashboards to the needs of your agents.
Impact
Increase agent productivity by:
- Eliminating repetitive answers in a time consuming, manual way.
- Making work easier and response and resolution times faster.
Canned responses management
Canned responses implementation
Support specific dashboard
When to switch from an inbox to Redmine Service Desk Plugin?
When your business grows you will recognize, that the volume of incoming requests will increase. Your phone won't stopp calling. This might be the right time to start using ServiceDesk Plugin. To handle incoming requests inside Redmine.Assign ownership, prioritize tickets, set deadlines, get a comprehensive overview of all customer requests.