Share your Ideas

Round Robin for Logged in Users

DaveF — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:24:39 GMT

Hello everyone,

One of the features we are thinking about doing in a future release is to provide a round robin feature that recognizes the on-line status of agents working round robin queues as part of its assignment policy - currently round robin will assign to agents regardless of whether they are currently logged in or not. In order to polish the requirements for that feature, we'd love to get your input on what you feel would be important requirements. I'm particularly interested in feedback from customers who use round-robin today.

1. Round Robin (as currently implemented) does not take into account the Max Inbox size of a agent - that functionality only takes account of pull requests from the agent. Should the Max Inbox size also be considered for logged in agents?

2. We don't currently support the concept of a queue - any unassigned incidents are auto-assigned as they come to the next agent (regardless of availability). For Round Robin that has been configured for logged-in users, what would you like to happen if an agent isn't available - should the incidents be queued until agents are available?

3. If the answer to question 1 is 'no' - what would you like to happen when your first agent logs in at the start of your daily support hours? Should they get all the incidents that are queued up?

Custom Mail Templates for Service

MikeP — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:56:09 GMT

We have a variety of admin and end user personae that may get notified when an incident is created or updated. It is important that we be able to vary the email content sent based on these personas. One option would be to allow a business rule to choose a report who's content would be sent as the email. Reports can be configured to look like incidents or spreadsheets.

Scenario:

Jon (user at MegaCorp with a Platinum SLA) updates a priority one incident for a new software product. The user receives an auto response email based on their SLA.

Different messages go out to different personas:

Lou (the 'on-call' CSR) gets two email notifications.

Full detail with a screenpop URL for quick loading of the incident

Tiny (iPhone friendly) email notification with the latest thread(s) at the very top of the message. It contains a URL to the admin WAP interface.

Jill and Bob (coworkers of Jon at MegaCorp) who are on the contacts list for this incident receive an email similar to the current email response but starts with "You are receiving this email because you are listed on incident that was updated by your colleague. If you don't want to receive any more updates on this incident click here to unsubscribe from this incident." (This scenario assumes functionality that does not exist today.)

Kevin (account manager handling the MegaCorp account) receives an email similar to the Admin Notification email including Notes. It starts "You are receiving this email because one of your Platinum customers has updated a Priority 1 incident." This email would include a list of contacts on this incident along with their phone numbers. It would also contain a list of all Open incidents, and all P1 incident in the last month for this client.

Elizabeth and Steve (Engineering Project Managers) would receive an email similar to the Admin Notification email including Notes. It starts "You are receiving this email because a customer has updated an incident on one of your new software releases.

...and so on. The list of possible variations is endless.

I would settle for template files as long as they were easy to edit and you could select the template you wanted for each business rule.

I encourage others to add their own scenarios here.

You did what? Notify co-workers when a contact updates an incident the are 'on'

MikeP — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:04:12 GMT

When you have an email discussion everybody (but you) gets an email when you reply-all to the message. It should be the same with Incidents.

Scenario:

Jon (user at MegaCorp) has an incident open to work on a software problem. Jill (MegaCorp DBA) and Sue (MegaCorp System Administrator) are listed on the Contacts tab for this incident as well.

When Jill updates the incident an email goes to Jon and Sue saying "Your co-worker has updated this incident ..."

I would settle for reducing the logic and send the message to Jon AND Jill and Sue and say "You or your co-worker has updated this incident ...)

Nobody ever tells me anything! Let contacts add/remove contacts on an incident.

MikeP — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:15:41 GMT

In email today if you think someone else needs be included in a discussion you just add them to the CC on the email thread. We need that functionality in Service.

Scenario:

Jon (contact at MegaCorp) has an incident open in Support. Jon wants to include Jill (MegaCorp System Administrator). Jon searches through contacts in RNT Support and adds Jill to the incident. Of course Jon can only add contacts with MegaCorp and then only if Jon can "See incidents for My Org".

Kevin (the Account Manager with Software-R-Us) opens the ticket and adds himself as a BCC recipient to the incident. Of course Kevin (who has only a contact account not a CSR login) can only do this because his org, Software-R-Us, is a hierarchical parent to MegaCorp and is set to "See My Subsidiary Orgs Incidents."

Later Jill has done what she can and goes in and removes herself from this incident.

I would settle for no BCC just CC.

Out-of-Office

MikeP — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:25:28 GMT

When incidents typically last more than a few days and can last weeks or even months it is important to be able to reroute updated incidents for CSRs who are out of the office.

One possible solution would be to have an out of the office checkbox that a CSR could set in their profile. Incident business rules could check to see if the Assigned CSRs out of office flag was set and take an action based on that condition.

The danger I see here is the possibility of a circular rule set. If Lou is out of office assign to Pete. If Pete is out of office assign to Lou.

Admin interface to subscribe contacts to Answer or Answer Category notifications

MikeP — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:58:07 GMT

We would like to be able to manually subscribe contacts to certain Answers and Answer Categories

Scenario:

A new version of IE is released and it breaks certain functionality with one of our module. (I know, what are the odds of that happening :) ) We need to proactively notify contacts that use that module not to upgrade and to stand by for further announcements and we want to do that through Answers.

Admin user Mike (the valiant) queries up all of the contacts for all of the orgs that use our unique Twit module and does a multi-update on the contact records and adds the Twit Module category (or product if we used that ) to the notification. He then Adds and Answer with the news.

Why is my alarm goin off at midnight? Ah, becasue I have to update 50 Answers. (Answer Versioning)

MikeP — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:51:54 GMT

In a word "Versioning'. That is 'Answer Versioning'.

I know a CMS would be nice but we just need to be able to stage updates to Answers and be able to release them into production on a certain day.

We too have software releases. In addition to a slew of new Answers we need to be able to stage updates to existing answers with new information and have those changes reviewed.

Scenario:

Anna from (Technical Publications) has a set of updates to existing answers that are effected by a software release next week. She opens the Staging version of a current Answer and edits it. She sets the 'Replace" date appropriately but knows that it still has to go through the approval cycle so she sets it to "Review".

Mary Lee in QA reviews the doc and approves it.

Lou in Support reviews the doc and approves it.

It is set to 'Ready" and on the appropriate date it the Answer text is swapped with the production text and I get to sleep in.

Keep your nose out of other peoples business! (restrict interface access by org or contact)

MikeP — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:02:33 GMT

We need to be able to restrict interface access by Org or Contact. We have 3 (and soon possibly 5) interfaces. There is no way to keep someone with a log on to one interface from accessing another interface.

Scenario:

Jon (contact at MegaCorp) can log into interface 1, ask questions and view Answers. He can also log into the Consulting only interface 2 and see things he should not like a custom menu on the Ask A Question page with a list of all of our customer orgs. He can also log in to the HelpDesk, Interface 3, which is for Employees to communicate with IT. They could Ask a Question of our Internal IT department which is totally inappropriate.

Just want to keep the keep the foxes out of the hen houses and the hens out of the garden.

Re: Out-of-Office

DaveF — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:55:39 GMT

Mike,

Thanks for submitting the idea. That is an interesting one. I know of other customers that use rule escalations to handle this scenario - based on the age of the incident and them having an unmodified status - push them into a round-robin queue etc.

Do you have any ideas for avoiding the circular rule set?

Re: Out-of-Office

MikeP — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:22:14 GMT

Dave,

We can't wait for incidents to age. If a Platinum Customer updates a P1 incident that was previously closed and the CSR assigned to it is on vacation it needs be dealt with immediately.

On second thought the circular reference exists today so there would be no difference.

How we handle vacations today is to create a rule for every CSR that is enabled when they go on vacation that reroutes updated incidents assigned to that CSR. You could just as easily create a circular 'reassign' reference there.

Does the system even check for circular reassign references?

Are we there yet, are we there yet, are we there yet. Separate Theads from Responses/Notes

MikeP — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:52:05 GMT

This idea think in addictive.

What I want to see is a separation of the New Response/Note field an the thread display in the Incident Workspace by making the thread display into a standard report. Why? Because then I can refresh the thread display to my hearts content without closing and opening the Incident.

Scenario 1:

I get a notification that an Important incident has been updated so I click on open and the Incident opens in my console only nothing has changed. Oh, wait. The incident was already open in the console so clicking open just brought it to the front. So I click close and wait for the incident to close and then I click open and wait for the incident to open and see that someone said 'k'.

Scenario 2: I am taking a long time research and edit a response but I want to check for updates before I send so I have to save my uncommitted response and close the incident and reopen the incident to find out there are no changes before sending.

Scenario 3: I am waiting for a critical update so I have to keep opening and closing the incident to check.

Re: Out-of-Office

chris77 — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:03:14 GMT

It's like stoking up a fire that almost went out... all of these ideas are great and have often been discussed in the forums, great to see them being bounced about again.

In the various implementations I've had the pleasure of working with, we've had various rules to get around this such as:

- on update, set assigned to No Value

- on assign, set assigned to No Value after x minutes if not closed

Still, I agree that there must be a better way around this and it doesn't even need to be on the profile (which agents would inevitably forget). How about a little pop up when any user logs out of RightNow asking them a maximum of 2/3 questions before they can continue e.g.:

- send your reopened cases back to a queue for others? (Y/N)

- you currently have 3 incidents, unassign them? (Y/N)

I added that second question as we often have agents leaving but keeping incidents assigned to them!!

In fact, this raises another question, why do SO many users remain logged in for hours on end? System auto kick out already, perhaps my first idea...

Chris

Hey, we got mountains too!

MikeP — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:15:11 GMT

How about holding 2011 Summit on the East Coast?

If you moved the conference around more you might get attendees that would not normally make the commitment to attend if they had to travel half way across the country. Once they attend they will see just how valuable it is and then be willing to travel across the whole country to attend. Even if they just made it once every 3-5 years as the conference came back to their region it would help to keep them connected to the Community.

And New England is gorgeous in October.

Re: Why is my alarm goin off at midnight? Ah, becasue I have to update 50 Answers.

chris77 — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:15:18 GMT

Also, can we have the time added to the standard publish/review on date fields? I'd like to retire some answers at 6pm/9pm or any other time for that matter. If an event finishes at 6pm, we need the answer to change status at that time, not 6 hours later.

Re: Round Robin for Logged in Users

chris77 — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:20:57 GMT

This change makes complete sense, i'm all for bringing Round Robin into the 21st century and considering whether someone is actually at work or not! :)

1. Yes, it should consider the max limit (otherwise your SLAs around 'assigned to response' etc go through the roof).

2. Some integration with incident rules needs to take place. Something along the lines of 'try round robin delivery first, if no advisor/inbox is available then assign to queue x'.

3. The answer to 1 was yes anyway, but again, if too many incidents are assigned to staff simultaneously (without consideration of FILL limits), some reporting measurements will suffer - assign to response, assign to close etc).

Fixing CC and BCC for agents by giving them address book functionality

Kyle — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:33:39 GMT

We get frequent comments from our agents that the CC and BCC feature within the Incident Console isn't very useful and/or user-friendly. All this does is provide a universal list of agents and distribution lists but you can't search the list, sort (except by the default of first name), add/remove people. More times than not the person being cc'd/bcc'd isn't an agent so then you have to go into your email program and grab their address if you don't know it from memory. And then if you type it in manually then you run the risk of creating a typo.

It would be great if agents could creat their own directory/address book and have this available when they click on the CC and BCC directory buttons. Management could also add a universal directory available to all agents but it's also important for agents to add their own and be able to search/sort when needed.

HTML formatting within agent responses

Kyle — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:42:13 GMT

Does anyone see the benefit for giving the agent the ability to send a reply back to the contact with HTML formatting instead of plain text? Personally I'd like to use bold, italics, bulleted/numbered lists, and other types of formatting commonly found in an email client. I would even go one step further and allow for inline images to be dropped in, much like the functionality here within the Lithium forum.

Smiley functionality

Kyle — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:48:44 GMT

If we ever get the ability for agents to include HTML formatting and images within their responses, then it would be great to have "smiley functionality", something along the line of a dropdown menu/directory for agents to use.

Okay let's be honest, you just knew I'd be throwing this out there.

Creating "Parent-Child" relationships with incidents

Kyle — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:55:44 GMT

For many of our help desk sites we receive repeated requests for a parent-child incident relationship feature. Here's a scenario: an incident comes and the problem is identified, assigned, etc. Ten minutes later another incident comes in from a different contact reporting the same problem. This continues over the span of a few hours and you end up with 15 incidents submitted by different contacts but relates to the same issue. The idea is to identify one of these incidents as the "parent" and then file the others as "children" so that they're grouped together (assuming via a report on the incident workspace). When the incident is closed on the parent it closes the child incidents as well. Ideally it would be nice to have it set up where if the agent response is sent from the parent it also sends it from the children and the statuses change accordingly. Other config settings could also be tied into the relationship, e.g. status, disposition, etc.

I know this is possible because we currently pay Pro Services to set it up for us but from what I understand it's a pretty straightforward customization and therefore it would be great to have it available in general release.

Re: HTML formatting within agent responses

MikeP — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:01:22 GMT

Kyle,

I definitely see the advantage of being able to format a respose and drop in a screen shot.