52. OTRS Interfaces Web Interface for Customers Web Interface for Agents Email Interface (auto responders) Ticket System
Editor's Notes
Kosovo is entering into the global market. When dealing with international customers and companies, it is important to understand what the customers expect and value. the Customers Viewpoint.
Delivering value to the customer is the key to success for Kosovo.
Dedication and Responsiveness are some of the key values : have someone working on their problems, dedicated to the task and not giving up, Delivering a Solution. Customers want dedicated staff to work on their problems. You need to make the Investment of time to learn the important skills for the future. One person can be working on many projects, one ticket at a time, this is possible because many times you have waiting periods for feedback from customers. In this waiting period you can be working on other tickets.
Provide services online for the international market. Provide Solutions to customers problems 1. Skills - Have better skills than others. 2. Cost – Have a lower cost 3. Faster – Deliver the results faster. 4. Less Resources – use less resources in delivering service 5. Reliability - How reliable is that solution. How often is it available, how often does it fail. What alternatives does a customer have when it fails.
Time and Money. Space. These are limited resources. Need to identify critical resources and plan their usage and allocation. This includes the critical resource of expert knowledge . Control of these resources is critical.The auditing of all changes to them. The locking of them to prevent acess to them at the same time. The security of those resources. Ownership and Responsiblity are key, so that you have one person who is personally responsible at each time for a given resource. Make sure that each person knows what they are resposible for and for this to be clear and visible.
Things take time to develop Plants take time to grow Employees take time to become productive Time in the day is limited Customers don't want to wait for long times Computers use Power even when not working You have to pay the rent every month. If you miss your plane or train, you will have a lot more costs.
You have to pay your employees Food only lasts for so long in your belly Waiting for people costs you money Making your customers wait costs you customers Global Financial Crisis is pushing down costs and that means also response times. Prices are rising, and Oil and Gas are becoming more expensive.
Protect your company against single points of Failure. entire company depends on one person. Transparency - can anyone know what has been done. Only one person knows what is going on Knowledge Management, how to manage what your employees know and make your expert knowledge usable. Auditing - how to capture information from the system from its log files and databases
Wiktionary : Answerable for an act performed or for its consequences; accountable; amenable, especially legally or politically. Also implies Able to respond. We need to also measure the Response time.
When you are new in the field, you are lacking skills, experience and experts, having a low cost can be a big factor in gaining customers. If you have a large amount of people, then you can dedicate them to tasks and slowly build up experience and knowledge. Kosovo is rich in young bright you people with lots time and energy. Via the internet you can compete on the international market. For this you will need to be quick to respond.
One of the biggest Problems that I have seen in Kosovo is the number of Unanswered Emails. In the world of internet, your main communication with the outside world is email. Unanswered emails are a huge problem. Late answers are a Big problem. Customers will measure you on your ability to answer emails on time.
Management of the Company needs to make the decision to fight against late and unanswered emails. One of the best solutions for this is to use a Ticketing system to measure and manage all email communcation with the customer. All new emails from a customer will be tracked and all problems of late responses will be automatically escalated
As soon as you have more than two people working on many small tasks you need a system like OTRS.
1. Time to first response to customer. - thank you for your email. Automatically Generated. 2. First Response time : Time of first response to customer. Some Human generated Meaningful result. 3. Update Time : Response to Updates from customer- how can you deal with changing requirements. 4. Solution Time : Time till customer is fully satisfied. How long until the full solution is delivered. When the ticket is closed and accepted.
“ We got your email, your business is important to us. Thank you for interest. We will process your request in the next 24 hours. If you need a faster response, please call our hotline“ Responsiveness is the key to Customer Service Problems will happen, how fast can you respond to them If you want to say NO, but dont want to answer, try “let me think about it”
Having a limit does not mean it has to be kept, but it needs to be respected. Often we can assign time limits to tickets based on experience and description of the problem. Sometimes these will need to be adjusted.
If a customers question is not clear, then you need to ask for more information and provide some documentation for them to read. The ticket is then set to waiting for feedback and does not count against your time any more. Documentation is important to reduce learning times. Problems that might occur at each step in the workflow need to have answers prepared for them. Documentation of problems is important for learning. The ticket system is a good first step for this. There is a FAQ plugin for OTRS. Many Companies also use Wikis for documentation. You can also attach documents directly into the OTRS ticket.
If the customers request is too big to handle then it should be broken up into smaller tickets and managed that way.
If you cannot respond immediatly, inform the customer of this and tell them when they can expect a full response.
Escalation : sending the issue to a higher instance. This can be done via a queue. Tickets in OTRS are automatically escalated when time limits are reached.
Delegation : assigning an issue to another queue, or to another person. Be careful when assigning work to a specific person,better to use a queue.
If you cannot answer the question immediately Then give the customer a response that you are working on the problem and will report back. That way, the customer knows the status, things that take time, they take time. Good Communication does not have to take up a lot of time.
Not answering is only one form of response. This is good for spammers, scammers and other things. For customers and partners it is bad. But you can make a Spam Queue to put things that look like spam in, just in case you need them you will find them. There are other reasons for not answering, but the main point is, if you want to have good business relationships, you need to communicate.
Important Steps in the processing of Problem. 1. Give feedback on a regular basis 2. Identify problems and communicate them 3. Provide working versions for review and comment 4. If you cannot respond immediately, tell the customer and give them regular status update until the job is done. 5. If the job takes too long, understand that the customer might cancel and find another solution
Having a limit does not mean it has to be kept, but it needs to be respected. Often we can assign time limits to tickets based on experience and description of the problem. Sometimes these will need to be adjusted.
The workflow are the steps inside the company to deliver a Solution. For each of these steps we need to be able to train new people. Employees will also provide feedback, ask questions and expect answers. The response time to our internal employees will also affect the companies performance. new people need questions answered.
As soon as you send a question or response back to someone, you have time to start working on the next step. Dont wait for feedback, but keep working. This way you make your day productive. Keep track of all your tasks in OTRS, but also in your version control system.
Attachments of documents are stored in otrs on the file system. They can be used for putting in detailed specification and documenting test cases. Also source code zip files could in theory be attached. Of course a source code repository is the better place for source code. A wiki might be a better place for putting documentation, But you might decide to use attachments as your means of communication of documents.
Giving things a priority is difficult. Customers will tend to give all things the highest priority. Changing the priority of a ticket should be done carefully and only by experienced people. We need to first understand the impact of the ticket, for example : is the customer blocked from being able to work because of it, we should treat it has high priority.
It is important to put time limits on responses and things. A deadline, or time limit helps focus the work on important things. Of course the priority has to be clear. If it is clear that a deadline cannot be reached, you need to communicate this immediately to your customer. Often you can renegotiate the limits.
Sometimes you will want to schedule a ticket to be active in the future. For example, you know that the delivery of something you need is planned for some date. The pending reminder function of otrs is good for that.
For issues with no impact on revenue or no legal implications and on customer satisfaction, we can put them as lower priority. It is important to track low prio tickets and issues as well, when we have not much to do, we can work on them. New people can also work on low prio tickets.
See what time is spent on what projects See what customers are using what resources See what people are working how fast See how often tickets are opened again and again.
Storing common knowledge in a wiki. When a ticket is closed it's data can be used to update a wiki so that others can find it.
When someone is working on a ticket it is locked The ticket is owned by a person. You can see what tickets are open and pick one to work on.
Make sure you work on customer requests in the same day, same hour, immediately. Dont Plan your resources for 100% usage. Keep some buffer for unexpected issues. You can always do small tasks when you have time free. People who come to you for help should be helped immediately. This improves the entire organization. Keep your work in small work packages. For tasks done outside the ticket system, it is hard to track them, you can create a ticket retroactively to track your time.
Creating Queues is the key to organizing work. Queues are best when they are almost empty, when someone is on each side of the queue and processing tickets immediately. But when working on some task you might find a problem that you cannot address immediately, then you can create a ticket to track that work and come back to it later.
Definition of a Queue : First In First Out : FIFO. Tickets have a Priority, so they high prio tasks are handled first. Some Group of people Submitting tasks. Some Group of people Receiving and processing them.. Key measurements : Average time in queue/Reoccuring Problems. Unlock timeout after no activity. Tuning : Escalation First, Update and Solution Time.
Expert to N00b ratio : the amount of noobs that an expert can support. This is increased when you have good communication tools. Having an expert supporting a group of people who are interacting with the customer is a good model. This reduces the customer interaction which can be time intensive for experts and frees them up to solve problems.
Monitoring - nagios / icinga Deployment - Puppet / Debian Packages / releases CRM - sugar crm / civicrm / openerp Wiki - wiki pages Document management - Twitter / Facebook Processing logfiles - Staging and testing Version control systems. Other Bug systems - other OTRS- Bugzilla, issue trackers etc. Get satisfaction. Stackoverflow. Github. IRC networks. Pastebin. Blogposts.
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