Here's how you can set your Sales & Marketing Teams up for success in Freshservice:
1. Say hello to collaboration-friendly ticket inboxes
If you use a shared email inbox to handle requests, you can now resolve them more efficiently by converting them to tickets in Freshservice. To do that, set up your support email so that all the messages handled by your department and their associated notifications can be sent from this email id. In case your department has a separate email for each group such as crm@acme.com, markops@acme.com, and so on, you can add each one of them separately.
You can then choose to assign all the incoming emails to a specific group or use workflow automators to assign them to groups/agents on the basis of certain conditions such as agent skill-sets, requester location, and more.
2. Offer an array of sales & marketing services via the Service Catalog
Let your employees place requests for all the Sales & Marketing services that you offer such as collateral creation, campaign services, or PR in one place on your Support Portal. You can set up as many service categories as you see fit, create custom forms for each service item so that you capture all the relevant information in one go, and even choose the set of people each service item needs to be exposed to.
Tip: When there are 100's of service items to sift through, proper categorization + having a proper description for each of these items will make it easier for employees to search for them using keywords.
3. Control any agent's access to service desk information
With multiple departments using the same helpdesk, it is important to ensure that your agents have access only to those areas that you want. To do that, you can choose multiple out-of-the-box roles for them or define custom roles in Admin > User Management > Roles and further control their visibility when you’re mapping these roles to their Agent Profile. You can also choose your groups to be restricted groups to prevent other groups including the admin from eyeballing your tickets.
4. Define time-based targets for how soon different requests should be handled
Some requests such as uploading lead details may not take much time to resolve whereas some other requests such as event or campaign planning make take more time than other requests. To set such expectations for agents as well as employees, you can define standards for how soon your agents should respond to requesters and resolve their problems by setting up ticket or group-specific Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and stay on top of any violations by notifying the right stakeholders.
Pro Tip: Add your Business (Working) Hours and apply SLAs on the basis of that
5. Reduce support time by automating mundane tasks
a. Set up supervisor rules to monitor all your requests by setting time and event-based alerts and taking action on them. For example, you can flag a ticket and notify someone if it has been lying unassigned for 3 hours.
b. If similar issues come up often or you find yourself typing the same response multiple, set up private or group-level canned responses to save time while replying to emails.
c. Apply a bunch of changes to similar tickets easily with bulk actions and scenario automation
d. Set up a few rules in the workflow automator to automate routine tasks such as assigning requests and sending approvals. A complex scenario like a sales lead-related request getting sent for approval to a different manager depending on its region can be set up in one go using a custom object and workflow automation.
6. Design a marketing-specific ticket details page
Show your agents only those fields that are relevant to sales marketing and not to any other function. By adding fields that are specific to your group (Admin>Form Fields>Ticket Fields) and making them visible only when tickets or service requests meant for marketing teams are created (via ‘Business Rules for Forms’), you can design a ticket details page view that makes sense to your team and doesn’t confuse them.
7. Stay on top of what’s happening with real-time dashboards
Get a bird’s eye view of all the requests that need your attention with dashboards. Customize your own dashboard or build a team dashboard and share it with your groups.
8. Deflect tickets by setting up a solid Knowledge Base
Set up a robust repository of solution articles that answer frequently asked questions such as what are the brand or messaging guidelines or what brochures can be shared with customers. They pop up when an employee is about to raise a ticket and can also be inserted by agents as responses.
9. Plan your resources better
Set up a private analytics report to measure agent performance, monitor request volumes, and understand how you can allocate your workload better among other things. You can also schedule it to be emailed to you regularly so that it becomes easier to keep tabs on what’s happening.
10. Project Management
You might need to work on projects such as implementing a new lead capture tool two months down the road with your team. You can now collaborate seamlessly on such initiatives via the inbuilt Project Management tool and streamline your work.
Note: Analytics Pro and Project Management are only available from the Pro/Forest Plan onwards
