Here are some best practice tips for teams in your Operations department that handle various processes such as procurement, supply chain, or production management and want to utilize Freshservice to supercharge their service delivery to end-users:
1. Collaborate seamlessly with requesters and other teams
You can now receive work from requesters and collaborate with them more efficiently via ticketing. To do so, you can 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. 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.
Similarly, you can go ahead and list a form for each possible request such as Laptop Procurement or Delivery requests on the support portal so that your agents have all the information they need to resolve the request.
Via our ticketing tool, you can stay on top of all the requests that need your attention easily, collaborate with different departments, and track them till resolution in one place.
2. Define time-based targets for how soon different requests should be handled
Some requests such as delivering available assets may not take much time to resolve whereas some other requests such as procuring new assets make take more time. 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). You can also stay on top of any violations by escalating the ticket to the right stakeholders.
Pro Tip: Add your Business (Working) Hours and apply SLAs on the basis of that
3. Manage your assets, purchase orders, and vendor contracts in one place
It’s time to get rid of messy spreadsheets and store asset, vendor, and invoice information in a single place. Standardize the data with specific views to inventory age, replenishment, and replacements as well as vendor information. You can track your purchases, notify stakeholders at different stages of procurement and manage them till their retirement. Get started here with a detailed walkthrough of how assets can be added to the service desk.
4. 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 new purchase 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.
5. Design an operations-specific ticket details page
Show your agents only those fields that are relevant to your team 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 your team 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.
6. 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.
7. Project Management
You might need to work on projects such as identifying a new vendor/asset or managing the setup of a new production plant with your team or other teams. You can now collaborate seamlessly on such initiatives via the inbuilt Project Management tool and streamline your work.
Note: Analytics Pro, Contract Management and Project Management are only available from the Pro/Forest Plan onwards
