Service Ticket Management
From the very beginning the development of Business Manager 365 was focused on how to solve real and relevant business problems with the use of technology and software. This would include a process of active data management, which also put employees into a sustainable, repeatable and manageable work process that ensured the success of the client and ourselves.
We had a basic business need to track activity in a repeatable and sustainable process, so when our software development began we started with Service Ticket Management. We wanted to track all the expected things like: what the issue is, who reported it, and when was it reported, including who was taking corrective action and what that corrective action included. We also wanted to be able to pull business analytics and trending information on both the customer and employee to identify ongoing or repeated issues, as well as time and billing matrixes. In addition to those capabilities we wanted to track ticket detail for historical reference and performance monitoring purposes.
The time came to put our software package to the ultimate test- implementing and putting it into practical use. Implementing the system brought other business related issue to the surface. Issues like translating the conceptual design of the software into a practical work process that is driving business change, increasing performance and more importantly assisting in identifying areas of improvement within the overall business model. Liberty One Software is based on the practical application and use of Business Manager 365 this has led to development continuously upgrading the service ticketing system. Much of the ongoing development has been based on the discovery of needs reported by internal and external use of the software.
One of the continuous improvement areas is the recognition that employee work flow is king, the software must be fully featured yet easy and quick to navigate through. Since the ticketing process is one of the area’s most commonly used by our employees and customers we have spent considerable time and effort into making the software function in a practical use environment. Workflow and process management is something that is reviewed continuously in order to streamline workflow processes so employees are encouraged to properly use the system which makes it a valuable tool for the clients to report, track and prioritize their ongoing issues.
Data management and retrieval within the employee service management must be quick and easy to use. Time is money and key to customer satisfaction because when employees are trying to repair an issue or move from one task to the other the information they need to support the customer must come in a timely and easy to read format. One of the primary long-term goals of Business Manager 365 has been to ensure that in one single system all the information that our staff needs to support a client is available at their fingertips. This means that there is a huge ongoing effort to collect and track as much data as possible about the client. This requires that data entry be easy, quick, and to the point when it comes to the work flow processes. Having technical teams changing screens or worse systems to simply input data and move onto the next task is not acceptable. As a result, the Service Management part of the system has become one of the most fully featured parts of the system.
Another key area that we have worked to address throughout the system is what we call “Employee Brain Drain”, which is the intellectual knowledge about a customer or issues with a customer that are often only in the minds of the people actually doing the work. It is our opinion that by putting employees into a repeatable workflow process that requires certain tasks and activities to be reported and documented will reduces the overall brain drain of intellectual knowledge and assists in historical data tracking as well as assist in prediction of future needs and activities.
The ability to report and track service requests from anywhere at any time is key to customer satisfaction and data collection processes, which is why development of our mobile app began with Service Management. The importance of Service Management has been a foundation of Liberty One Software and will continue to be the focus of Business Manager 365.
About the author: Scott Lewis is the President and CEO of Winning Technologies Group of Companies which includes Liberty One Software. Scott has more than 30 years of experience in the technology industry and is a nationally recognized speaker and author on technology subjects. Scott has worked with large and small business to empower them to use technology to improve work processes, increase productivity, and reduce costs. Scott has designed thousands of systems for large, medium and small companies and Winning Technologies goal is to work with companies on the selection, implementation, management and support of technology resources. Learn more about Winning Technologies at winningtech.com or call 877-379-8279.
