Running an internal helpdesk
Internal questions arrive everywhere. A message here, a corridor conversation there, an email to someone on leave. Nothing is tracked, so nothing can be improved.
A company past about twenty people generates a steady flow of admin questions. Attendance corrections, benefits, equipment, policy wording.
Answered privately they vanish. The same question gets asked again next quarter and answered slightly differently.
The support desk turns them into tickets: a category, a subject, details, attachments, an assignee and a status.
The number worth watching is per category rather than total. High volume in one category points at a missing policy or a broken process, and answering those tickets faster fixes nothing. Assignment matters too: an unassigned ticket is the one that ages, and the queue shows assignee and last update side by side.
Why one record instead of two
The helpdesk is where the two halves leak into each other. Attendance corrections, equipment, benefits and policy questions arrive from people doing delivery work, and each one is a few minutes taken from it. Tracking them turns invisible drag into something you can count.
What is switched on
- Support desk
- Ticket creation by category with details and attachments, and status the requester can follow.
- Support desk
- An admin queue with ticket number, requester, category, assignee, status and last update.
- Policies
- Most tickets are really policy questions, and a good policy prevents the next one.
- Roles and permissions
- Tickets are private to the people who handle support, which is a role decision.
- Devices
- Equipment tickets resolve against a real device record rather than a description.
- Notifications
- Slack is where a queue that nobody is watching gets noticed.
What the week looks like
Any time
An employee raises a ticket under a category. Attachments are allowed, within a size limit.
Daily
Whoever runs the desk works the queue, filtered by status, category or assignee.
Daily
Assign each ticket. An unassigned ticket is the one that ages.
Ongoing
Status moves as work happens, and the requester can see where it got to.
Weekly
Look at the categories with most volume. That is where a policy or a process is missing.
Per period
Queues are scoped to a season, which keeps an old backlog from swamping the current one.
Questions people ask
Who can raise a ticket?
Your own staff, from inside the product. Tickets are private to the requester and the people who handle support.
What is the payroll ticket category for?
Pay questions, routed to the person who handles them. Payroll itself is planned as a module of its own.
Can employees see each other's tickets?
No. Tickets are marked private to the people who handle support, and the requester follows their own. Who handles support is a role decision.