Two New Features: Reply All and Group Access Permissions

We're happy to announce two new features have been added to Mojo today - reply all and group access permissions. Learn more below.

Reply All

Available when recipients have already been CC'd on a ticket, you can click the 'reply all' link to instantly add those same recipients back in the CC field so they get notified when you add a comment. 

Group Access Permissions

Available from the 'manage' >> users view, you can now add a user to a 'Group' and then determine whether you want to give them 'Full' group access with permission to open, close, comment and rate tickets for that group or 'Comment only' access where users may only comment on tickets opened by others in the group. 

As a reminder, the 'Group Access' feature is intended to give group managers a view of all tickets created by users in their group. 

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How a Church Uses our Help Desk Ticket System

One of the things we're most proud of is the versatility of Mojo Helpdesk. Businesses can use it to track internal employee requests or customer support requests. Schools can use it to receive and reply to requests from students and faculty. Mojo can also be used to requests in government agencies, non-profits, and churches.

Today we're sharing a story about a church that was kind enough to let us get a closer look into their operations.

We recently caught up with Matt, the IT Director for First Baptist Church Naples to learn more about how his organization uses Mojo Helpdesk.

Here is what Matt had to say.

ENTER MATT

Why does First Baptist Church Naples use Mojo? What kind of requests do you receive through Mojo each day?

First Baptist Church Naples uses Mojo Helpdesk for an internal ticket system for our church and academy. The system allows for issues to be submitted from all of our users via email or the Helpdesk Portal that plugs into our Google Apps domain.

Describe the results of using Mojo. 

Our Tickets can be set up to different Queues (Departments) automatically. So we have three areas that use this system (IT, AVL, and Operations). The initial ability for the ticket creator to assign the ticket to a queue saves us sorting the ticket upfront.

The layout of the Mojo dashboard screens are a more minimalist approach that saves us time on what we are looking at.

Having customizable reports that can be easily retrieved also saves time in viewing open tickets and statuses per department.

What advice do you have for others who might want to use Mojo for their church's requests? Any workflow or setup suggestions? Where do most of your requests come in from?

We use the tool internally. We are a church of about 4,500 on weekly attendance and we have a Pre-K-12 Academy.

Since a lot of teacher issues can be simultaneous outages, we recommend that our teachers submit emails to their primary offices and then the office assistants submit the ticket so we reduce duplicate tickets.

 All of our issues are either submitted to our support email address, which filters nicely to the system, or through the Mojo Helpdesk Google App Portal.

What's your favorite thing about Mojo?

Most of all, I like the clean layout, the Google Apps integration, and the Saved Searches.

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Why Help Desk Tickets Should Be Assigned to ONLY One Person

Occasionally, our customers ask us to add a feature to our help desk software that allows multiple people to be assigned a help desk ticket. We always politely refuse.

It's not because we're stubborn or because we ignore user feedback. Quite the contrary, our development calendar is typically full of new features originally suggested by customers.

So why do we take such a firm stance here? Why does our software mandate that ONLY ONE PERSON be assigned a help desk ticket?

The answer is two-fold and is based partly on social psychology experiments and partly on our own workplace experience.

Let's first talk about the science.

Three *Scientific* Reasons Why Help Desk Tickets Should be Assigned to Only One Person

There are three interrelated social phenomenon that support our stance that help desk tickets should be assigned to only one person.

Bystander effect refers to instances when the presence of others (i.e. a group of bystanders) lessens the possibility that any individual in the group offers assistance. Research into bystander effect was prompted by news reports on the attack of Kitty Genovese in 1964.

Ms. Genovese was walking to the door of her NYC apartment when a man attacked her. News reports suggested that as many as 38 witnesses heard her cries but did nothing to help or call the authorities. These news reports prompted research by John Darley, Bibb Latané, and Judith Rodin who found scientific proof for bystander effect.

In one experiment, Latane and Rodin found that 70 percent of people offered assistance when they were the ONLY person asked to help, but when multiple people were asked to help, only 40 percent offered assistance.

• Possible explanations for bystander effect:
• ambiguity - people in group are unsure if their help is really needed.
• competency concerns - people in group are unsure if they have the best skills to help when compared to others in group.
• consequences - people in group are concerned about the risks associated with offering assistance poorly or inadequately.
• How it relates to help desk tickets - if you assign multiple people to a ticket, it can lead to ambiguity (who is supposed to do what?) and competency concerns (should I let the other assignees handle this task because they have more expertise?).

Diffusion of responsibility is a concept that evolved from bystander effect and is based on research that suggests a person is less likely to take responsibility for a task when others are present. Diffusion of responsibility typically occurs because an individual assumes that others are responsible for completing the task or have already completed it.

• Possible explanations for diffusion of responsibility:
• See all explanations under bystander effect, plus...
• anonymity - individuals do not feel individually accountable for the task when it is not assigned solely to them.
• How it relates to help desk tickets - if you assign a ticket to multiple people, each individual's feeling of responsibility diminishes. They also feel that they won't be held individually accountable for completing the ticket since blame and/or praise will be dispersed among the group.

Social loafing is a social phenomena where individuals working on a group task exert less effort than if they were working alone. The causes of social loafing are mostly tied to the feeling that an individual's effort will not matter to the group and will not be noticed. Social loafing is one of the main reasons why group work is often counter-productive.

Social loafing was first discovered in 1913 by Max Ringelmann who conducted rope pulling experiments (tug-of-war contests), and found that individuals tended to exert less effort when pulling a rope as part of a group than did individuals pulling a rope alone. His results have been reproduced in more modern studies as well. 

• Possible explanations for social loafing:
• Sucker effect - no one wants to be the "sucker" who puts in all the effort while others in the group slack off, so everyone waits to see how much effort the others will put forth.
• Contribution concerns - when there are multiple group members working on a project, individual group members may believe that they're contribution is insignificant to the outcome. 
• How it relates to help desk tickets - if a complicated and time consuming ticket is assigned to a group, the assignees may all wait to see who is going take charge thus delaying progress on the ticket. Similarly if the group is large enough, the assignees may all assume that they can loaf on the ticket because so many people are assigned to the ticket that it HAS to get done because SOME OTHER "SUCKER" will surely work hard on it.  

Beyond these psychological factors, we also considered our own workplace experiences both as managers and as customers / end users.

The Manager Perspective

Based on our own workplace experience, several problems can arise when a manager or supervisor assigns a ticket to multiple technicians.

1. No single point-of-contact - If you assign a ticket to multiple people, then who do you call when there's a problem or you need a quick update? 
2. Hurt feelings - Sometimes employees are offended when managers suggest they are not solely capable of completing a tacking. Other times managers can hurt someone's feelings if they assign a ticket to multiple people but then only communicate with a single point-of-contact.  Those who work on the ticket but do not communicate with the manager end up feeling overlooked and often accuse the manager of playing favorites or indulging in office politics.
3. No direct accountability - Will the assignees try to blame each other if the ticket is managed poorly? Will they jostle to claim credit if the ticket is solved wonderfully?

The End User / Customer Perspective 

Customer's also suffer when tickets are assigned to multiple people. 

While in theory, they may like the idea of an army of people working to solve their problems, in actuality, the quality of service they receive is likely to suffer (due to the social psychological factors discussed above) if their ticket isn't assigned to one person who's held ultimately responsible. 

Beyond the quality of service they receive, they'll also experience similar frustrations as managers with regards to not knowing who their single point of contact is and who to hold accountable for solving their issue. 

But what about team work and collaboration...?

There's a misconception that assigning a ticket to one person prevents teamwork or collaboration. We believe in the power of team work and have built features into our software to enable collaboration.

For example, when a manager assigns a ticket, he can CC any topic area experts who might be able to help the ticket owner. 

The help desk technician who is assigned can then use private comments on the ticket to request help from other help desk employees if needed.

Further, we have a built-in queue system that can automatically send notifications to subject matter experts when a ticket arrives.

Inherent in all of these features is that one person holds ultimate responsibility for the ticket and is empowered to reach out to topic area experts and request assistance as needed. 

Wrap Up

Our inclination as a software development company is to add every feature our users request because we want them to be the happiest customers on earth. We want them to have every option and every customization possible to make their lives easier. 

But we must draw the occasional line in the sand and take a stance, lest our software become spineless, unwieldy, and undifferentiated. I hope this blog post has been helpful in showing one example of how me make decisions about some features in our app. 

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How Businesses ACCIDENTALLY Demotivate their Help Desk Technicians and other IT Professionals

Now that's a helpdesk portal.

As Community Manager and Level 1 Support for a help desk software company I regularly visit online forums for sysadmins, help desk technicians, and other IT professionals.

One thing I've observed in these forums is that many IT professionals are frustrated by how businesses treat them.

Frustration is common in all professions, but I'd say the ubiquity and intensity of frustration is unique to IT. In fact, there are online forums designed solely for the purpose of letting IT professionals vent their frustrations (one of the most popular forums has 100,000+ subscribers).

Having spent the last two months in Level 1 tech support, I can speculate as to why this frustration occurs. But rather than speculate, I wanted to gather some data so I surveyed  70+ IT professionals to try and figure out what businesses are doing to frustrate them and demotivate them.

If you'd like to see all the survey responses, the data is available for free here. You can also read the summary of the results below.

I don't think businesses treat IT professionals poorly on purpose, but I do believe they are ACCIDENTALLY doing some things that frustrate and demotivate them, for example:

1. Surround them with lazy co-workers

Problems: Lazy help desk employees are not held accountable nor coached to improve. Proactive and efficient help desk technicians are not rewarded for their efforts. Businesses create a perception performance doesn't REALLY matter. All that really matters is attendance.

Many help desk techs and sysadmins start their careers as proactive and ambitious employees. They set high standards for themselves and want to be top performers in the organization. They start as "A+" performers. But, these A+ performers often get surrounded by "C-" employees who are just looking for a paycheck and do nothing but look for shortcuts and complain about end users. When A+ performers see that these "C-" employees are not coached to improve nor held accountable for their performance, they start to lose their motivation.

Solutions: Set SLA targets for each help desk team member. Establish weekly check-ins so that performance can be regularly monitored. Hold quarterly reviews so employees are not surprised by their year-end performance evaluations. Coach under-performing employees on how to improve their performance or let them go if they can't meet expectations. Give top performers challenging bonus projects with a focus on problem solving. Make it clear with actions (bonuses, raises, promotions, etc) that performance is measured and that top performers are compensated commensurate with their value to the organization.

2. Give them a non-technical boss

Problems: Non-technical managers lack the knowledge to fairly appraise workload which leads to errors in scheduling and staffing which ultimately leads to job stress for the employee.

Non-technical supervisors have difficulty assessing job performance of help desk staff, and similarly, have a tough time understanding the magnitude of certain achievements. This leads to help desk staff feeling that their jobs are not well understood and that their job performance is not accurately measured nor fully appreciated. 

Solutions: Promote help desk managers and supervisors from within IT team. Acknowledge the information gap that exists between non-technical managers and they're technical staff. Give more autonomy to IT professionals who are managed by a non-technical person. Hold non-technical managers accountable for increasing their technical knowledge. 

3. Make their IT training sessions optional

Problems: Sends a signal that the business doesn't value the time and effort of the IT professional(s) who prepared the training. Indicates that it's OK for employees' tech know-how to stagnate. Suggests that employees are not accountable for understanding the basics about the computers, applications, phones, etc that are critical to performing their jobs. Lack of IT training results in more support tickets for help desk team.

Solutions: Make IT training sessions mandatory. Keep track of attendance. Withhold new technology from employees who do not complete the necessary training. Make employees who frequently submit help desk tickets attend a "back-to-basics" courses with training on the tools where they experience the most issues.

4. Don't give them opportunities to advance

Problems: IT professionals feel that the only way to advance in their career is to hop around to different companies.

Very few marketers and sales people would be fulfilled in a role where there's no room for career advancement. IT professionals are no different. They want the opportunity to be rewarded for their achievements and loyalty with increased scope, managerial responsibilities, new challenges and the commensurate compensation that comes with advancement.

Solutions: Define a set of stretch objectives and goals for each help desk employee and track progress against their objectives. If they hit the goals, increase their scope, give them more input into the business, give them new challenges, promote them, and increase their compensation when they contribute considerable value to the business.

5. Don't listen to their advice

Problems: Many help desk professionals feel that they are overlooked when management makes important decisions related to IT capital expenditures and IT staffing. Often times, IT decisions are made and enforced without consulting the IT team. Help desk staff often feel they have no voice in decision making and they are looked at solely as a cost center.

Solutions: Communication. Managers should set up weekly touch base meetings with help desk staff. Keep them informed of company progress and reach out to see what the IT department needs to be successful. If money is being invested in infrastructure or technology, then consult the help desk staff for their recommendations.

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If you're an IT professional who has experienced one of these frustrations, please help spread the word by sharing this post.

thanks,
Ryan

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Mojo Helpdesk to Release New Support Portal and Knowledge Base

Preview of the new Mojo Helpdesk support portal.

Updates: 

1. Added search filters to 'My group tickets' view in the support portal 
2. CC field has been added to the ticket form in the portal.
3. 'Reorder topics' feature has been added to knowledge base management. 

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Mojo Helpdesk is excited to announce our new support portal and knowledge base. 

Our design team has given the portal a makeover and added customization options that make it easy to match the look of the portal with the look of your site. 

With the searchable knowledge base you can publish articles & FAQs to the portal directly from the Mojo dashboard. Users can search the knowledge base to see if existing documentation answers their question before they submit a ticket.

You can see a full size screenshot of the new support portal here.

Key Features

• Modern and intuitive user interface makes portal visitors happy.
• Custom background & color options allow organizations to match the portal with the design of their website.
• Searchable knowledge base lets agents publish FAQs directly from Mojo dashboard so that customers can self-help.
• Mobile friendly design make it easy to view & submit tickets from cell phones & tablets.

What You Should Know

• The customer portal and knowledge base release is scheduled for the week of August 5th. We are working diligently to avoid service interruption, but some intermittent slowness and downtime may occur. Follow our Twitter page for updates. 
• All your existing portal text and ticket data will be migrated over to the new interface. No action is required. 
• Knowledge base is turned OFF by default for existing customers. Here is how you can turn it on and start creating articles: 
• Click 'manage' >> 'Support Portal'
• Select 'Portal Settings'
• Show Knowledge Base? >> Yes >> Save
• To publish your first knowledge base article:
• Step 1: Create a topic
• Click 'manage' >> 'Knowledge Base'
• Select 'Knowledge Base Topics'
• Click '+new topic'
• Input a Title >> Save
• Step 2: Create an article within the topic
• Select  'Articles'
• Click '+new article'
• Add a Title
• Leave 'Publishing' status set to 'published'
• Select a topic
• Add keywords and article content
• Click 'Save article'
• 'My Company Tickets' label has changed to 'My Group Tickets'

Other Important Notes and FAQs

• Can I continue to use the old portal interface? No, the new portal and knowledge base are being rolled out as permanent, global changes. Suggestions and feedback can be sent to support@support.metadot.com
• Where is my logo? Logos will not be migrated over as part of the release. To add your company's logo to the new portal:
• click manage > support portal >> Portal Settings
• Add an image URL for your logo in the Portal Main Content text area or the News Column Content text area.
• To insert HTML image of logo use the image HTML tag as follows <img src="url" alt="some_text" width ="Ypx" height = "Zpx"> . Of note, you'll need to host your image online somewhere like http://postimage.org/
• How do I change the order of the knowledge base topics and articles? Version 1.0 of the knowledge base supports a numeric ordering system. If you want your articles to appear in order, number them 1, 2, 3, etc. Before populating the knowledge base with all of your documentation, we recommend drafting an outline of your knowledge base so that you enter your topics and article in the order you wish them to appear on the portal page. 

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If you have any questions, comments, or feedback please send them to support@support.metadot.com.

Thanks,
The Mojo Team

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