2019-01-22

To be effective, enterprise ticket management should be thoroughly organized. If it’s not streamlined, there can be instances when two agents are working on the same ticket, or a ticket is not addressed at all and gets lost among other tickets. Ineffective ticket management may hinder the quality of customer service (customer help desk) and employee daily work (employee help desk), which can have a negative effect on an enterprise’s overall productivity.

In this article, we’ll take the SharePoint platform as an example and describe how its customization capabilities can help to meet business needs and facilitate ticket management at the enterprise level.

SharePoint ticketing for enterprises: use cases

The scope of enterprise-level ticketing spreads far beyond customer support, as it also involves tracking tasks of an internal help desk, which helps to improve the overall efficiency of an organization. Flexibility, diverse out-of-the-box features and customization capabilities enable SharePoint to process different types of requests coming from various enterprise units:

  • HR ticketing (conducting onboarding, developing and implementing HR policies and programs, coordinating performance reviews, medical leave or vacations tracking, travel requests, etc.).
  • IT help desk (incident and change management, service mapping, project management, etc.).
  • Finance ticketing (purchase order processing, invoice approval, budget approval, etc.).
  • Legal ticketing (contract review, case management, patent processing, etc.).
  • Facilities support ticketing (equipment ordering, equipment repairs, outsourced catering, etc.).
  • Security ticketing (tracking security breaches, conducting security checks or audits, etc.).

SharePoint ticketing for enterprises: features

Let’s have a look at the requirements that are crucial for enterprise ticketing and see how SharePoint-based ticketing can meet them.

Multichannel communication

Usually, an enterprise’s ticketing team receives requests by many channels: email, phone, live chat, social media, etc. To avoid a mess that may be caused by this, it’s a must for enterprise ticketing to enable centralized accumulating, storing and managing of such tickets. This will enable a help desk to respond to tickets faster and never miss another email in the clutter.

SharePoint can allow for automatic ticket generating from multiple channels due to integration with other software. For example, if integrated with Outlook, Exchange or other email services, a SharePoint ticketing system will generate tickets from emails.

Custom views & personalization

As an enterprise’s employees and customers regularly generate numerous tickets, it’s important to sort them by certain parameters: category (subcategory), status, agent, etc. to make handling tickets more convenient.

SharePoint enables assigning unique case numbers to tickets and sorting them based on the indicated category. It also allows sorting tickets by priority, creation date, due date, and more. The navigation panel of a SharePoint ticketing system allows showing tickets with various statuses: new, pending, canceled, etc. And a SharePoint ticketing system can display status icons in different colors. For example, it’s possible to add a red mark to high-priority issues and the ones with a coming due date.

A SharePoint-based ticketing system can show different ticket views for a requester, an assignee, and a manager to create a personalized experience for all participants of ticket management. Thus, a requester can have access only to the tickets they created, and a manager can see if there is an SLA breach. What’s more, it’s also possible to personalize auto-responses for each department in the employee help desk.

Multilingual support

Big enterprises are mainly international with offices in different countries. To be effective, employee and customer help desks at such enterprises should be ‘fluent’ in several languages at least.

Although SharePoint doesn’t have multilingual support out of the box, a SharePoint-based ticketing system can use Bing translation APIs for that purpose, which have replaced the Machine Translation Services deprecated in SharePoint Online starting from September 2018.

Processing multiple tickets simultaneously

Since enterprises can get dozens and even hundreds of tickets every day, it can be challenging for a help desk team to handle them effectively. So, enterprise ticketing is required to optimize processing multiple tickets.

Processing multiple tickets simultaneously is not a problem for SharePoint-based ticketing. For example, it offers grouping tickets by category and mass replying to similar tickets. SharePoint offers advanced search that enables customers or employees find issues not only by request text, title or tags but also by type, category, due date, assignee, ticket-related assets, status, etc., which facilitates finding answers from similar requests.

To reduce a ticketing queue and enable a help desk team to focus on the most urgent issues, SharePoint allows for creating a searchable knowledge base for requesters that contains FAQ or how-to articles categorized by sections. Such a knowledge base helps requesters to find information about the most common tickets by themselves. Thus, agents have fewer repetitive, predictable or routine tasks. Also, SharePoint enables requesters to see the estimated time for their ticket’s processing and its place in the queue. If it takes long to wait for a ticket’s resolution, requesters can start looking for an answer in the knowledge base by themselves.

Integration with enterprise systems

To keep their complex business processes productive, most enterprises require integrations of various types of software. So, a ticketing system should be compatible, for example, with CRM. Both systems need to work smoothly together and facilitate processes they govern. For example, a ticket management system can extract data about customers from CRM for easy and fast ticket creation and resolution.

SharePoint is a flexible platform that makes it easy to integrate with enterprise systems like CRM, ERP, asset management systems, etc. For example, integration of a SharePoint ticketing system with asset management system allows associating tickets with related physical items and checking availability, cost and description of these items. Thus, a ticket on a computer failure can be associated with a specific computer. This enables technicians to have a full picture of hardware and software, which helps to handle the current problem faster and more efficiently.

To sum it up

Enterprises opting for a ticket management solution can benefit from SharePoint ticketing functionality, as well as flexibility and customizability of this platform. These capabilities enable SharePoint to create a ticketing system tailored to the business needs of an enterprise.

About the author 

Sergey Golubenko