Resources Library Phone ITSM Integration

Location: A well lit meeting room of a tall corporate glass building. Incident number: 1378940. A tense environment. 12 attendees, 3 from the top management, and that well deserved sigh of relief on finally managing to bring all of them into a room to discuss and agree upon the product roadmap for the next quarter.

And because it’s the end of the quarter, most of them in the room are pressed for time to check off their last minute targets. In addition to these constraints, the organiser of the meeting steps in, connects the HDMI cable to the laptop, and nothing happens. A blue screen with a pixelated ‘No Signal’ comes up. The most dreaded beginning to any meeting in the history of time. Relatable?

An ITIL engagement survey by SDI revealed that, “Even today 98% of service desks are still contacted by phone.”

Freshservice-Freshdesk Contact Center Integration

In instances like these, where timeliness of a company’s IT department comes before any long procedure (such as raising a ticket, waiting for 2 business days, etc.), employees instinctively rely on the good old phone call. But does this mean, phone calls are all that’s needed to manage employees’ internal IT needs? Probably not. The phone channel, when used in tandem with an ITSM, gives the IT team an opportunity to deliver a good experience for their company’s employees.

You, an IT support agent, need an ITSM software to take care of some quintessential aspects like keeping a proper record of the service requests, software purchases, the licenses up for renewal, the plugins and addons requested by specific employees and virus sanity, etc. This way, with a proper process and streamlined way of approaching the employee requests and concerns, there is more clarity and an inherent smartness to handling the IT needs of your employees. And not just that, since both Freshdesk Contact Center and Freshservice are hosted on the cloud, the additional burden of operational costs, spending on physical phones and their maintenance can be eliminated. These observations and insights made us ideate a solution that brings you the best of both worlds—integrating our ITSM solution, Freshservice, with the in-house cloud call center software, Freshdesk Contact Center.

Freshdesk Contact Center inside Freshservice

For those of you who’ve been using Freshservice to power all internal communications between your employees and the IT helpdesk at present, with this integration you can start managing your requests with the support of a cloud call center software—Freshdesk Contact Center.

How does this integration help your business?

Stay more accessible to your employees in case of urgency

Employees dealing with technical emergencies often prefer making calls to raising tickets. Even though an ITSM system can be used to streamline requests better, some situations need more than just that. You can’t expect an employee who has a sales call in the next 15 mins and a computer blank-out ask a fellow colleague to raise a request on their behalf and wait for you (the IT agent) to get back. Rather, having a call center solution integrated to your ITSM can

  • help you set an IVR menu that’ll let you have a pre-recorded message play every time an employee calls regarding a temporary emergency.For example, we had a ITSM user who had an unforeseen Office 365 downtime. They wanted a solution to inform every employee who called their IT helpdesk regarding this without wanting to waste an agent’s time in repeatedly answering the same issue. Something on the lines of, “Hi. The Office 365 application for our company is down. We are looking into it. It should be fixed in the next 30 minutes. To get help on any other issue, please press #.” There, that’ll easily save your team an hour of productive time.

  • help you get a quick download of their issue without having to read through emails.

  • help you understand the urgency with the tone and voice of the employee on the call.

  • ensure that the really critical issues don’t get lost with the increasing number of tickets as your company scales in size.

 

This way you can decide if the issue requires you to walk up to the employee’s desk and help them fix it or just guide them through a screen sharing session on the same. Irrespective of how you proceed with the issue, a phone call can serve as a channel of communication that best conveys the urgency and seriousness of an issue the best.

Understand complex issues better with a single phone call

While using an ITSM solves for issues that are common in software space and can be easily communicated over an email, there are instances where the thread continues indefinitely without a closure. The reason for too many back and forths could be the nature of the issue by itself. Perhaps the employee is unable to communicate the issue over email clearly or it’s too complex for the you, the agent, to understand. Either way, this can be sorted over a single phone call, where both the employee and you can converse with more detail and in lesser time. This lets you understand that that particular issue needs a different source of expertise to solve it.

  • He can just share the call recording and notes of the call to another agent and quickly get him onboard.
  • The new agent can also understand if the employee had raised some previous requests that might help him understand the intensity of the current issue from the ‘Recent Tickets’ option.
 

Using Freshservice and Freshdesk Contact Center in tandem is not just a point of convenience but also a solution to tackling complex issues in less time.

Prioritize responses by understanding the gravity of an employee’s problem

On any given day, the biggest dilemma for a support agent is what to prioritize and which query to attend to later. This being said, support agents can make a smart decision by looking at the content of the ticket by itself. But this is not a scalable approach when you have hundreds of queries coming in back to back. Unless the IT support staff opens a ticket, reads it and then decides, they might risk deprioritizing the most critical ones. This is where a call clearly conveys an employee’s desperation in terms of tone and reinforces the priority of an issue. If they have taken the effort to call you, up you can be sure that

  • they are in desperate need for a solution.
  • there is a possibility that there could be unresolved tickets from the employee.
  • they have an important call or meeting and need their system or tool fixed before that.
 

And in of most these cases, timely help is what’s needed more than going by a first come first serve basis. Also, you can look up the previous tickets from the Recent activities option from the widget, check for unresolved ones from the employee or past incidents to resolve their problem over a single call and be happy that you saved the day for them.

A few years ago, a survey by Genesys asked more than 9,000 employees about what mattered to them most when it came to interacting with their IT helpdesk. 40% of them said “better human service.”

These are some of the top of the mind scenarios that we’ve seen our own IT team face and were able to solve for timeliness and quick turn around by using a phone system in tandem with their ITSM software. If you would like a personal demo to understand how this integration can benefit you, drop us an email at hello@freshcaller.com.