Help Desk employee looking for application suggestion

Darth Nixon

Hey guys!

I am currently a help desk employee at a high volume call center. As you would imagine, throughout the day I key in 10s of tickets, many of which contain repetitive data and information.

I'm looking for a program that allows users to set macros to be accessed through the right click menus. I know a fellow employee has one, but I'm alone of this shift right now and it'd really help

skeldare

First question would be if such a program would be allowed to be installed, since a lot of companys block certain applications from being installed.

kaliyama

Yes, but his question wasn't "does my company allow me to install productivity software.". Try looking for macro recording programs. I'm not current on actual applications.

Giggles_Funsworth

Are these forms in a web browser or a dedicated application like HelpStar or Remedy?

azith28

Just dropping a little unasked for advice. Feel free to ignore it if you want.

One of my jobs is second level support for a help desk. What you are trying to do is something that i would probably view negatively. I understand that you might be doing this for productivities sake, but if i started seeing tons of cut and pasted reports It would drive me crazy. Granted your subject matter may be something which that works for. Even when we have several calls from different locations reporting the same bug/problem we dont want all the reports to look virtually identical unless we already know what the problem is, we need different viewpoints because one report will say it happens every time they do this, another will be 'only after we do this, or if we select this option does it do this' and if you get into the habit of making all the reports look the same, you leave out the details that make troubleshooting go smoothly.

The simple truth is that many times we cannot trust the reports supplied to us, and have to take a larger sample size to look for overlapping evidence to make sure the bug can be properly reproduced and identified. Making all the reports look the same, makes that harder.

Again, if all your doing is say reporting flat facts and numbers, what your looking for may be fine. I just know in my case that would probably be cut off at the root as soon as i saw it because it would make my job harder.

Darth Nixon

Thanks for your reply azith.

What I need the software for is in house tickets that do not get sent elsewhere. For example, a caller needs to have a password changed, the correct version of java installed, or an error in Office I can resolve easily, I could use said macros to quickly key in the same information, over and over, that nobody else would ever see because the issue would be resolved.

It is also not like I cannot go in and add/delete information as it was needed after cutting and pasting (essentially) some text walls to a ticket.

Darth Nixon

Giggles_Funsworth wrote: »

Are these forms in a web browser or a dedicated application like HelpStar or Remedy?

These are dedicated applications and in no way are web-based.

pricer

PhraseExpress (http://www.phraseexpress.com/) is a text-replacer which has come in useful before now, usually for sign offs (yours sincerly etc), but you can really get a lot of mileage out of it.

see317

Does your ticketing system have any kind of "common problem" functionality in it? The ticketing system I used at my last job (sounds similar to yours) had a drop down full of common problems that would automatically fill out the form so all that was left was to mark the ticket closed.

Tofystedeth

At my work we use LANDesk which lets you set up templates for quick tickets like password changes, or account unlocks or what-have-you. So all you have to is click the template on the left bar and then put in the user's ID number, and if there's any other info it needs (like when we float a nurse to another unit) for record keeping put that in and close it. Whatever you use probably already supports something like what you want inherently.

edit:Actually you might even be able to make a business case to your boss for such a thing. One of the reasons our manager set up the templates was so he could run queries on the summary lines to generate reports on how many of what type of calls we get.

Darth Nixon

see317 wrote: »

Does your ticketing system have any kind of "common problem" functionality in it? The ticketing system I used at my last job (sounds similar to yours) had a drop down full of common problems that would automatically fill out the form so all that was left was to mark the ticket closed.

It does, but the functionality that would let us add in our own. It covers some bases, but not nearly enough for me to get any added productivity done at work.

Sir Carcass

I personally would just use Excel to create a spreadsheet full of the different canned responses I would use, then just cut and paste from it.

Ganluan

At work I use AutoHotkey. It's based on typing strings which, to me, is faster than right-click menus.

For example, you can type "passchangetemplate" and it will detect and replace that string with whatever values you previously defined.