Workflows: How can they help improve support processes?
Have you ever heard of workflows? Today we’re going to take a quick look at what workflows are and how it can help us improve our company’s support processes. This article is suitable for all types of people, you do not need to be a technician or engineer. Let’s try to explain this in the simplest possible way so that anyone who has to use Integria IMS can get the most out of all its tools.
What exactly are workflows?
Workflows help us to organize and control all of our activities and resources. Workflows could be considered as a basic and much needed tool to save time, improving customer service and even work productivity. This is possible because they allow us to understand the order of the tasks, their synchronization, and to see which rules should happen and one of the most important points, it allows us to make a good follow-up of all the tasks.
Workflows have a lot to do with the protocols that a company must follow. Let’s say you work in an office selling trips to Taiwan and you are also responsible for emptying the office in case of fire. The most logical thing is that you have taken a course and have also been given a sheet with a protocol that you must follow outlining the steps you have to take in case the whole office catches fire. You could start by making sure everyone is out, blocking the doors so the fire doesn’t get into the other room, calling 911, etc. This protocol must have an order of action and may be printed on different posters.
Now imagine that this is an incident, similar to the fire, the problem must go through different steps until it is solved. For example, the ticket enters through the network to the helpdesk software that we have; in this case, the incident is from a lady who does not have a domain name for her website and is losing money. The problem reaches the support group and at this moment they are really busy, because with the weather conditions, some DNS servers don’t work as they should. They cannot yet offer a solution and regardless of whether it is fixed or not, this ticket may end up being forgotten. Workflows allow us to ensure that this ticket is not hidden in the sands of time and that all dissatisfied users feel that at least the customer service is good.
Going back to the subject of workflows, among all the applications that can include workflows, it stands out “the creation of rules to automate a sequence of tasks”. Integria IMS allows us to customize these rules to make our work easier, it usually works with condition-action, i.e. if A is accomplished, B will happen. It is no longer necessary to have a sheet with the protocol to follow in case A occurs, directly B will run itself. As you can imagine, this situation will save you a lot of time and will provide peace of mind for users so that they will be happy with customer service. In the case of a DNS server failure, a condition might be to send an instant message with a pre-established e-mail apologizing and explaining the problems they are going through.
What kind of company can benefit from this?
It will be useful for any company that needs to offer good customer service. Among the most common areas we find its application in IT environments, in human resources, internal IT departments and in the financial sector. But actually, any company can benefit from workflows. From a shoe store, to a furniture store, to a restaurant or hotel, everyone will notice the difference in the customer experience when it comes to solving tickets and incidents.
Yeah, but what’s the point of workflows?
At this point you may already have a slight idea of what workflows are, but in order to understand concepts it is always better to see simple examples:
- For example, in the field of customer service, especially when working with tickets, it is possible for a customer to open a ticket with an incident, we receive it, but 10 hours have passed and nobody has solved it or updated it. Thus, thanks to workflows, an email is sent to the person in charge of resolving the ticket stating: “This ticket has not been answered, please check urgently“. This message was previously included by our administrator and could not be accessed by other users with different profiles.
- Another example could be the automatic delivery of an email notification to the person in charge of the ticket when there is an incident with high priority and it has not been updated for more than 5 days. If it has not been updated 2 days later, another warning message is sent to the group leader. The group leader will be able to see what is going on and let his or her employees know that they need to solve the ticket, find out what is wrong with the incident and start solving it in the best possible way.
- It may also happen that the ticket reaches one group and when it goes to high priority it goes to a different group specializing in “mess-up”.
It will make it easier for all of us to resolve tickets and incidents, avoiding the overload and lack of control of our employees, as well as reducing waiting times and mistakes in organization.
We now know what workflows are and what their main tasks are. Now let’s continue to see how they are used in Integria IMS as a user:
There are certain conditions associated with each rule that must be met for an action to be executed. These conditions can be modified, and they do not have to be a single one: Integria IMS allows you to create several conditions.
For example, if these three conditions are met:
- If you are the owner of the ticket you are” Manolo”.
- It’s a high-priority ticket.
- And it’ s been more than 3 days without updating.
The action of “changing ownership to Ana” would be implemented. Now Ana is in charge of the ticket. In this way we can add new rules and conditions to make our work easier. Other features we can do include changing the ticket priority, changing groups, changing status, sending a message to your mobile phone, sending an email, etc.
Here you can see how workflows work in Integria IMS:
If you’ve made it this far, you know the basics about workflows and how it can help us improve organization and customer service. If you want to know more about this topic or anything related to Integria IMS, you can visit our website or you can download the free guides to learn more about this helpdesk software.