The Power of a Help Desk Combined with a Workflow

How You Can Surpass User Expectations by Unleashing Workflows in Your Help Desk

We have a philosophical question for you: if a help desk app in Slack collects a request but no one ever sees it, was the ticket even submitted?

Help desk apps perform admirably for the tasks they were created for: collecting tickets for various jobs within a company. The user fills out a service request ticket, which is taken by a member of another team who completes that task. There’s a lot that happens between those two steps, though. 

Who organizes the tickets? Who assigns them to the appropriate member of the team? And is anyone responsible for communicating with the original user as to how much longer their project will take?

Users need help desks, but they also need an efficient workflow to help them manage and complete the tickets they’ll receive. Wrangle is the ideal Slack app to meet that need.

Why People Need Help Desks

In our experience, users are looking for some of the following benefits when they download help desk apps within Slack:

• Teams need an efficient way of collecting requests. Some organizations may have previously relied on a Slack channel to collect requests. That’s a good first step, but those messages can easily get overlooked–especially if the channel gets bombarded with requests.
• Teams want to more efficiently respond to requests. By having one method for submitting requests for help, those teams know exactly how many requests they have in the queue. It’s much harder to do that when people submit their problems through Slack, email, a separate ticketing system, or even written notes.
• Teams don’t want to learn another system. By downloading a help desk within Slack, teams don’t have to learn more processes, switch between platforms, or remember their various passwords. 

Those are all legitimate reasons for downloading a help desk app. So why do we think users are looking for more functionality than most apps provide?

• Tickets can still be hard to track. If enough people submit tickets, then the teams responsible for responding to those requests can easily look track of some of them.
• Tickets aren’t immediately assigned to someone. At least one user has to manually assign those requests to a particular member of their team. That’s time that could be better used on other assignments.
• Ticketing systems don’t keep the original user up to speed. Well-meaning colleagues who feel out of the loop will continue to send personal messages to get a status update. The team members working on their projects will still have to pause their assignments to respond to those inquiries.

If you’ve ever used or run a help desk system, then you’re probably aware of these disadvantages. But let’s review a couple of examples in which these problems become apparent to everyone involved.

Example #1: IT Help Desks

An IT department downloaded a Slack help desk app to better organize the volume of requests it received for technological help and repairs. It didn’t take long before the department received more tickets than it could manually organize. Eventually, the person responsible for assigning each ticket lost track of some of them.

As a result, colleagues became frustrated when they couldn’t get their devices repaired or receive the help they needed. While the help desk made it easier to collect tickets in one place, it still couldn’t prevent some requests from being missed entirely.

Example #2: HR Requests

Human Resources downloaded a Slack help desk because it wanted a more efficient means of collecting requests for offer letters, salary increases, and other employee-related matters. Almost immediately, managers from other departments used the help desk to submit requests. 

After they finished the ticket, those managers never received an update from HR, so they reached out to the director or another supervisor for more information. Those individuals manually responded to each message, cutting into the time they could devote to other matters–especially the projects requested through the help desk system.

How Wrangle Could Help

We believe users are looking for the benefits of a workflow combined with the advantages of a help desk system. We built Wrangle specifically with this audience in mind.

Wrangle operates entirely within Slack to keep projects organized and your team members in the loop at all times. Even better: your team won’t have to learn another system!

Here’s how it works:

• You’ll build a form other users within your company can fill out with their requests.
• By submitting the form, users will trigger a workflow within Wrangle. This workflow was also built in advance, including each step of the project and which team member will be assigned to the project.
• As each task is completed, Wrangle will notify the user who triggered the workflow on the status of their project, cutting down on personal communications and “just following up” emails.
• When your team completes the project, Wrangle will notify the user that their request has been finished.

Here’s how this system could have helped during one of the above scenarios.

How Wrangle Can Help with Offer Letters

A company downloaded Wrangle, and its Human Resources department set up a workflow for various requests from managers, such as an offer letter for a prospective hire. Time is of the essence, as this would-be employee is also entertaining an offer from another company.

The manager opens Wrangle, selects “Get an Offer Letter” from the drop-down menu of options, and fills out a form with the prospective hire’s information. Wrangle triggers a workflow and automatically assigns this manager’s request to someone in the HR team. 

That team member uses the information submitted in the form to write the offer letter and sends it to their supervisor for review. That same team member also checks off each step in the workflow, and Wrangle notifies the manager on the status of the letter. 

The HR supervisor approves the request, so the team member uploads a PDF copy of the offer letter to Wrangle and checks off the final task. The manager is notified their letter is ready and receives a copy of it through Slack. The manager promptly sends the letter to the prospective hire, who formally accepts the offer.

Because of Wrangle, the manager’s request was immediately submitted to an HR specialist and quickly completed. The manager received regular updates on their project throughout its duration. And no ticket was lost in the process.

Wrangle did everything a company wanted a help desk to do–and much more.

Download Wrangle Now

Wrangle is the help desk and workflow app you’ve been looking for. Download Wrangle now to transform how your company receives and completes service requests.

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