Tip of the Week: Creating an Automation to Close Old, Solved Tickets

We previously posted about the difference between closed and solved tickets and briefly mentioned creating an automation to help you keep your help desk clear of old, solved tickets. There is already a pre-created automation for this in the automations section of the helpdesk which can be activated at any time.  However, if you have never created an automation in Mojo Helpdesk before, this is a perfect one to start with due to its simplicity and usefulness.

Watch the video and try your hand at creating an automation for your help desk. You'll be glad you did once the automation clears out old tickets and makes it easier to keep track of open tickets that need attention.

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Happy Holidays to Our Customers from Metadot

We've almost reached the end of 2011 and while it feels like the year flew by way too fast, we're excited to ring in 2012. The Metadot team, the people behind Mojo Helpdesk, Das Keyboard, Montastic, and typrX, thanks you for your continuous support. We wish y'all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Enjoy this video of an Angry Birds Christmas Light setup:

(Cross-posted from the Metadot blog.)

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How To Provide Excellent Holiday Customer Service

The holidays can be a trying time for customer service representatives. People often feel rushed and overwhelmed in their efforts to complete their holiday shopping in time for celebrations with family and friends. The need to maintain excellent customer service throughout this period cannot be underestimated. When tensions are high, it becomes ever more important to handle customer concerns and inquiries pleasantly and effectively.
Businesses should make efforts to ensure the customer service staff is well prepared for any issues likely to arise in the holiday season. These seven suggestions can help make sure your company maintains the superior level of service your customers deserve and expect.

Hire Extra Seasonal Staff
The boon to business that comes with increased consumer spending during the holiday season means a greater burden on customer support staff. Bringing on temporary staff helps keep employees from becoming overwhelmed and ensures service doesn’t slow during the busy period.  

Utilize Mojo Helpdesk to Keep Up with the High Volume of Requests
Your staff is only human and when an individual’s responsibilities increase, making sure nothing slips through the cracks is especially challenging. Mojo Helpdesk makes sure every customer request is neatly organized, through custom filters and automations, as well as being able to assign to a particular representative and stays on the radar until it’s resolved.

Be Prepared for High Stress and Emotional Customers
The holidays are an especially stressful time for many and this can serve to make customer service interactions more difficult. When faced with an angry or emotional customer, keep in mind those feelings aren’t personal. Always remain calm when working through the customer’s issue and keep a levelheaded tone.

Use Mojo Helpdesk to Set Goals and Incentives for Staff Members
People work better when given a clear incentive. With Mojo Helpdesk’s ratings system and SLA targets,  it is easy to implement an incentives program to reward the representatives that receive the highest Mojo scores from customers or achieve the quickest resolution times. This can help raise spirits and encourage harder work, without making staff feel overburdened.

Keep Customers Well Informed
Make sure customers know upfront the estimated shipping times for each order, if your company ships/sells goods, and post clearly on your website and in all e-mail and helpdesk correspondence any days staff won’t be available.  If possible, direct tickets to an available staff member during days someone is out.

Be Prepared for Post-Holiday Returns
While the holiday gift giving tradition usually means an increase in sales, it also comes coupled with a period of high volume returns and follow-up calls for support. Have a system in place to handle returns that makes the experience simple for the consumer. Use Mojo Helpdesk to organize return requests.  Adding custom fields to the ticket form, and requiring customers to enter all necessary information can help ensure returns are more easily handled by staff.  For frequent requests, automations may be set up to respond more quickly to several customers/tickets at once. 

Reward your Staff
As the holidays mean harder work and higher stress for staff, it’s important to make them feel valued. Whether bringing sweets into the office for everyone, throwing a holiday party, or implementing a gift exchange program, bringing some levity and fun into the office setting will help keep spirits up. The holiday season is such an important period for businesses; some basic preparation is well worth the positive results it yields for customers and staff. Encourage staff to take note of any unforeseen issues they encounter so the team can take stock at the end of the season and better prepare for next year.  Ensuring you have a stream-lined, friendly, fast and efficient customer service system in place, even during the busiest time of the year can lead to happier holidays for everyone.

Would you like to try our free, hosted ticket tracking/helpdesk application? No long-term contracts, signup fees, or termination fees. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel anytime. We offer a wide variety of plans to fit any budget.

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Tip of the Week: Closed vs Solved Tickets

Mojo Helpdesk helps you handle your customer interactions in an organized way as support agents work towards resolving customer issues. What is nice about the ticket system is it allows you to document every step of the process and ensures both you and the customer are satisfied before closing the ticket.
The key step in this process is for the agent to solve the ticket and leave it to the customer to close.  There are a couple of good reasons why helpdesk staff should not mark a ticket as “closed”.  The first, and main one is that once a ticket is in closed status, the ticket creator can no longer add a comment to the ticket (neither by email nor the web interface).  More importantly, the customer will not be able to give a rating to the ticket.  If it is important for your organization to track the performance of support staff, you are losing this piece of reporting functionality when an agent closes a ticket.  
Also, let’s say the agent marks the ticket as closed and the customer finds the problem is still occurring. Once closed, the customer would have to create a new ticket to continue the process of fixing an issue from the previously closed ticket. This can quickly become confusing for the customer, and duplicate tickets can make it very difficult to track a single issue from start to finish. This is why we advise all technicians to use the “solved” status when noting a ticket’s issue has been fixed.  This will allow customers to respond with feedback or at least rate the performance of the support agent before closing the ticket.
Conversely, there are times when a customer will forget to close a ticket. If the help desk is set up so customers only respond to tickets via email, there is no way for them to close tickets.  For these cases, it is best to create an automation that will close “solved” tickets that have not been updated by the customer within a specified period of time you select. While solving tickets helps ensure customers are satisfied with the solutions to their issues, creating an automation to handle zombies (unanswered tickets) provides the added bonus of clearing out any lingering, solved tickets.

Would you like to try our free, hosted ticket tracking/helpdesk application? No long-term contracts, signup fees, or termination fees. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel anytime. We offer a wide variety of plans to fit any budget.

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Mojo Helpdesk Updates - Improved Communications Controls

We just released an update to Mojo Helpdesk with a few features to make the help desk more customizable. We know everyone uses their help desk a little differently from one another, and we wanted to embrace this by making it easier to control communications to the customer.

The first update allows users to set whether or not an email is sent to the ticket submitter when new tickets are created. Help desks can now ensure the only time a customer receives an email is when an agent chooses to send one.

To control this feature, go to “Manage” at the top of your help desk and select “All settings”. Under the “Helpdesk Owner/Admins” menu, click “Configure Mojo Helpdesk”. Once on the helpdesk settings page, click the “Change” button and scroll down to the ‘Miscellaneous Settings’ section. Select ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ for the setting: ‘Send new ticket email notification to submitter?’.

We have also added the ability to customize the “Closed Ticket” email template that is sent to users when they try to respond to a closed ticket. For those who don’t want to utilize the customer portal and prefer to keep all contact with customers via email, the customization of this template is useful as it allows removal of all portal URLs. This way a helpdesk owner or admin can decide what instructions they want to leave their customers with for following up on a closed ticket. Now you can add a phone number or email address and remove the Help Desk URL, if desired.

To edit this template, go to “Manage” and select “All Settings”. Under the “Helpdesk Owner/Admins” menu, click “Configure Emails”. Scroll to the bottom of the email handling page until you reach the ‘Email Templates’ section. The new email template falls under “Tickets to Submitter” and is called “Ticket Closed Message”.

And finally, we cleaned up the messaging system for all tickets. We saw a few issues with the formatting whenever users must click “more” to view the full content of the ticket. Now, all messages will look just as they were entered.

Would you like to try our free, hosted ticket tracking/helpdesk application? No long-term contracts, signup fees, or termination fees. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel anytime. We offer a wide variety of plans to fit any budget.

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The Trials of Providing International Customer Service

The rise of the internet has created an international marketplace unlike anything the world has experienced before. As technology progresses, geography is an increasingly minor concern in how companies do business and professional communities interact. There are many benefits to this: an expanded marketplace for products, greater opportunities for innovative collaboration between different countries and the rise of the virtual business model, just to name a few. With the territory many businesses serve expanding globally, the ability to effectively provide international customer service is a growing concern.

Positive word of mouth is one of the best marketing tools available to any company and repeat business is a crucial component to staying competitive. Social networks and online review sites have further heightened the power that a customer service experience has on future sales and branding efforts. Having a committed staff, well trained in the techniques of keeping customers happy is one of the most crucial resources any business can have.

How does a company equip staff with the proper knowledge to handle the distinct set of issues that arise with international customers? There are several primary challenges one is likely to encounter; listed below are some suggestions to improve customer service and avoid many common issues.

Language Barriers and Cultural Differences
This is probably the most conspicuous of the distinct issues a customer service representative will have to address with international customers. While it’s surprisingly common for individuals in much of the world to have some grasp of English, a company can’t depend on this and even many who have a conversational ability may have a hard time successfully communicating the problems they experience.

Utilize Bilingual Employees
Assign international customers to the appropriate bilingual employee and seek out people with a grasp of the most common languages you encounter in future hiring efforts. With Mojo Helpdesk it is possible to filter all tickets from international customers into specific queues prepared to handle the language barrier or directly to support staff that speak the language.

Use E-mail Correspondence and Mojo Helpdesk
Phone conversations are especially difficult when a language barrier is in play, but utilizing written options such as e-mail and Mojo Helpdesk affords both parties the opportunity to consult dictionaries and translating services to improve clarity.

Be Aware of Different Customs

Amongst other differences, international employees will have different holidays, different ways of addressing one another and different topics that are considered appropriate for discussion. Make sure customer service representatives are trained in the basics of the cultures of customers they’ll be working with.


Different Time Zones
International time differences are often considerable. Most customers will recognize a company’s inability to provide an immediate response to inquiries that arise, but it’s possible to take steps to ensure quick response times.

Use E-mail or Mojo Helpdesk to Communicate
Both options allow the customer and representative to send and receive messages during their respective business hours. It is important to try to respond to these customers within 24 hours to ensure their issues are handled in a timely manner.

Set Up Phone Calls in Advance
When a phone call does become necessary to work out a customer service issue, both parties can ensure availability by setting up a time in advance.

Expand Business Hours
It can be beneficial to employ a customer service representative to be available during the hours the business is traditionally closed. If the need for this is relatively light, assigning representatives particular days to be on call to respond to customer service inquiries that come in during off hours, whether from home or in the office, is an option.

Additional Costs of Doing Business
Most companies are aware that providing international customer service is going to increase their support budget. However, with technology and good planning, it is possible to lessen these costs while still providing quality customer service.

Long Distance Calling
If the company’s phone plan doesn’t allow for affordable long distance calls, Skype, or other online calling services, can offer a more cost conscious alternative and even make it easier to determine the correct country calling code.

After Hours Customer Support
Having employees work longer will increase labor costs, but it is possible to implement a system in which employees can trade out the extra hours worked for time off at another period to save the company money.  Also, hiring a night shift may be the best solution to ensure you have staff on hand for international customers.

Additional Offices
If you have enough international business to merit it, you may find it necessary to open up new offices in the countries you work with the most, requiring additional costs such as new staff, equipment, real estate costs, maintenance and office supplies. Depending on the company's needs, it may be possible to avoid many of these costs by hiring contractors who work from home.

The greater accessibility to global communication in today’s age of technology offers countless benefits in commerce, but it can also complicate the process of providing consistently exceptional customer service. A devoted team can offer positive international customer service experiences with just a little bit of extra effort and awareness of the unique trials involved in working well with customers across the globe.

Would you like to try our free, hosted ticket tracking/helpdesk application? No long-term contracts, signup fees, or termination fees. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel anytime. We offer a wide variety of plans to fit any budget.

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Tip of the Week: Tracking the Time Spent on Tickets

If you have the Enterprise or Enterprise Plus plan, you are able to track the amount of time spent working on tickets or any portion of a ticket. Click show timer in the messaging section of a ticket, and  it will display a timer that can be set to auto-start anytime the ticket is opened. This will allow staff to enter the time they spend working on each section of the ticket which is then calculated automatically for the entire ticket. Time can be tracked in minute or hourly units and can also be subtracted from the ticket if needed. A staff member is also able to pause, reset and restart the timer as needed.

Adding time spent to a ticket is simple, just click the arrows to the left of the timer and time will be automatically added or manually add time by directly entering it into the blank to the left of the timer. To subtract time simply use a minus sign in front of the number when entering it into the blank field.

The beauty of time tracking is Mojo Helpdesk's ability to provide reports on time spent per queue, tech, and customer. To view these reports, go to the time spent section of the Reports menu on the left side of the screen. You can set the date period for the report, what report type you need, and whether or not you want to view data from closed tickets only. This can be helpful in determining where your staff is spending most of their time, or if you need to re-evaluate a customer's support plan based upon the amount of time they are utilizing.

Would you like to try our free, hosted ticket tracking/helpdesk application? No long-term contracts, signup fees, or termination fees. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel anytime. We offer a wide variety of plans to fit any budget.

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