With companies going all out digital during the pandemic, it turns out that their accounting & finance function is still struggling to keep up with other departments. According to a survey conducted by APQC, more than 50% of financial professionals feel that manual processes are the biggest challenge to their function.
Freshservice is here to help your finance teams get rid of their manual, paper-based process to bring about the operational efficiency they desire.
Here is how you can achieve that!
1. Declutter your inbox, let Freshservice handle email queries
It is not easy to stay on top of your emails when you have queries pouring in from various teams every day. However, by using Freshservice, you can convert all those emails into tickets that anyone from your department can work on. If you have dedicated mailboxes for specific teams, e.g., payrollhelp@yourcompany.com, travelexpense@yourcompany.com, etc., you can add all of them and assign incoming tickets generated for a particular team directly to that respective group. Just go to Admin> Support Channels> New Email Settings and get started!
2. Ensure data segregation
Apart from creating dedicated workflows to assign tickets on certain topics to specific teams, you can also control the visibility of your service desk information. You can do that by assigning your team members one of the out-of-the-box agent roles or you can go ahead and create custom roles as per your needs.
Additionally, use restricted groups to prevent other groups including the admin from viewing your ticket details, especially when your team is dealing with data related to banking details, contracts, etc.
3. Create a Service Catalog to cater to your employee requests
From employees wanting reimbursements for expenses to customer support having billing-related issues, have a unified place to answer all their finance-related queries. Go to Admin> Service Catalog and create a menu of services so that employees from various departments can choose the item they want directly from your support portal.
Pro Tip: Create an automated approval workflow for requests requiring external stakeholders’ approvals and seamlessly create a comprehensive audit trail (Ticket Details > Activities). You can also use custom objects to help set up complex approval processes where the approver varies from item to item.
Bonus Tip: For recurring requests and queries that require a standard response, you can create canned responses to make the life of your team easier.
4. Use Knowledge Base to document everything important
Create a knowledge repository by using knowledge base to write critical processes and policies. Whether it is tax-related policy, reimbursement procedures, or internal documents like ways to handle a billing dispute, put everything in one place. Additionally, you can expose these documents selectively to the relevant audience.
5. Set the right expectation by defining SLAs
Your finance team handles requests of all types ranging from answering policy-related questions to releasing funds for a campaign; each request takes a different amount of time to complete. Therefore, set an SLA for requests to communicate to employees the time it’ll take for the request to be complete and for your agents to have a target to work towards.
6. Make ticket properties relevant to your team
Use Business Rules for Forms to show only fields relevant to the Finance team for tickets that they handle. This will help make the ticket properties form shorter and less confusing when your team fills out the form.
7. Analyze the status of your service desk with Dashboards
Get an overview of the helpdesk’s data and understand how your service desk is performing using Team Dashboards. Allocate agents, jump on urgent requests, take decisions to improve efficiency based on real-time data.
8. Enable self-service and free up your employees
Setup the Freshservice virtual agent and let it take care of answering FAQs from your employees. It is available 24x7 on Slack and MS Teams, so employees can get their queries responded at any time from the medium of their choice. Don’t let month-end closure affect your ability to answer questions!
9. Stay on top of your tasks with Project Management
Manage your tasks and collaborate seamlessly within your team with project management. If you are taking care of M&As or ensuring that the year-end bonuses go out on time, keeping tabs on your team’s progress has never been easier. Just go to Projects> click on the add sign> Projects and get started!
Note: Project Management is only available from the Pro/Forest Plan onwards and Virtual Agents is only available in the Enterprise Plan
