Dear LTS community,
What do you think its the best app/tool online or not, to be able to handle clients support requests/ticketing?
Your opinions are much appreciated!
Best Regards,
Peter
That’s a really broad question without more details about your setup. What RMM are you using? What size is your operation? What are you doing now and what problems are you trying to solve?
A lot of pros will tell you that ConnectWise Manage is the one to beat. I only have a team of 5, so I’m using all the power of it, but it has more features than most everything else. It’s certainly not the least expensive thing out there, and for a small shop, the learning curve and time/money spent to set it up might not be worth it. If you’re planning on growing and don’t want to have to switch, it might be right for you.
Tom doesn’t even use a ticketing system. He uses straight up email. I’m not sure how he tracks client profitability and other things like that, but it works for him.
Thanks kind sir.
I also have a small shop. I am having too much support requests via email, and its getting hard to control and control the life cycle from the birth of a support ticket, to its finality in closing the ticket.
I need a better way to manage this and to supervise the client support needs and also calculate the time it took my support team to fix the issue.
Dear @LTS_Tom do you mind sharing whats your strategy?
Thanks to all for your feedback! This is a great community!
LTS uses email and invoice ninja to handle support call, i believe that’s it…simple
In one of Tom’s videos he says they just use a common mailbox or something like that and there are no “tickets” just email and his team works off email. I could see how that could work for quick fix stuff, but I’m not sure how that works for projects where different people have to enter time, parts have to be ordered, etc. Also how do you account for a guy putting a couple hours on something that should only taken 1 hour? You want to record the 2 hours it cost you for that employee working on it, but only charge the client 1.
ConnectWise Manage handles the life cycle really well. When the email comes in the ticket has the status new. Then when someone grabs it, it goes to assigned. From there, it can go to scheduled or if a tech grabs it and starts work immediately, it goes to in progress. From there, it can go to “on hold”, “waiting for parts/repair”, “waiting for client response” etc. Then you can just close it, or kick out a survey. There are also work flows so that you can do stuff to tickets automatically based on rules you set up.
Spiceworks has about 10% of the functionality. You could start there (or go with another free one) to figure out what features you really need. Then when you have an idea of how you want things to work, you can lay it out for the onboarding team of Manage. If you go in blind, they will have you watch a bunch of videos about how it can work, and then the implementation is kind of up to you. It’s pretty complicated, so you can plan on spending some time/money getting it working right for you.
In regards to his e-mail usage for project management I believe he routinely cleans out his inbox of anything that does not need to be addressed and files it away into it’s appropriate folder. I’m currently trying to apply this as well, but cleaning out thousands of e-mails is taking some time. But it is kind of freeing.
At work we use AutoTask, however, it’s a bit slow and not my favorite tool. It can be pretty darn powerful but you really have to sit down and learn it.