May 23, 2022
We, as humans, are creatures of habit. We set schedules and stick to them. We drive the same route to the store and order food from the same restaurants. And we use the same tools and systems to manage our workday.
Not all of these habits are good ones, though. In some cases, they can make us less productive and more unhappy.
But as you know, the first step to solving any problem (or fixing any bad habit) is admitting there is one. So in this post, we’re going to be brutally honest. Here are 5 signs that indicate your web design agency needs a new helpdesk ticketing system ASAP.
We all need email to function. But when you try to balance marketing, sales, and your customers’ support tickets all in the same place, it starts to get messy. Folders begin to pile up on the left sidebar. Label usage becomes less and less clear, as emails toe the line between multiple categories. And important pieces of information get lost in multi-topic email threads.
As a result, important change requests, after-hours emergencies, and important customer issues get lost in the shuffle as all sorts of emails pour in.
Hold up, though. Most businesses (including web design agencies) use a separate inbox for all support tickets. And it’s shared across the organization - so everyone has the ability to respond to and tackle client service requests as they come in. Problem solved, right?
Actually, no. While you may only have a single type of email to deal with, you still have a loose organizational structure for your client service requests. With a shared inbox, you also introduce a new problem, as multiple users can respond to the same email and simultaneously take different actions to resolve the support ticket without knowing it.
No tool is the jack-of-all-trades. But if you find yourself constantly toggling between time tracking software, spreadsheets, live chat, and your inbox to handle your client change requests, you need a more efficient system.
Why? Because it doesn’t just make managing your ongoing design work and website maintenance projects a pain. It also bogs you down to the point where you’re unable to get all of your important work done. Most importantly, this system also increases the likelihood that important client information, support tickets, and retainer hours are accidentally forgotten, misplaced, or mismanaged.
As you’ve likely told your clients hundreds of times, branding extends far beyond logos and websites. Everything from your social media profiles to the FAQs contained in your customer knowledge base plays a role in how your customers perceive you.
The same can be said of your “helpdesk system” too. If your team manages all your client support tickets from an inbox - leaving a messy trail of email threads behind for your clients and other design team members to dig through - your clients’ opinion of your agency may begin to decline.
Even if you’re already using help desk software, you may not be reaping the rewards of having it. The reason being: most helpdesks - even those like Zoho Desk and Jira Service Desk – are missing critical features that make web agency workflows seamless.
In the first place, the organizational system makes it difficult to manage ongoing projects and keep feedback loops tight, as incoming tickets are tracked chronologically or tagged automatically by topic rather than being categorized by web page or client. (This approach also makes customer relationship management difficult, as critical pieces of project information are tucked away in random corners of the helpdesk dashboard and hidden in customer profiles).
In the second place, few helpdesks offer retainer contract management as a feature. As a result, your team has to manually subtract hours spent on client change requests and input that data into a separate tool or platform. In most cases, that means spreadsheets and calculators.
The unfortunate reality is, many web design agencies and small businesses are currently stuck using “helpdesk ticketing systems” that don’t fit their business model or client relationships. They’re either messy or incomplete or both.
Sitechange solves this problem for web designers by offering all the core features of a helpdesk ticketing system, plus some important extras. With Sitechange, you can go beyond standard helpdesk time tracking to automatically deduct hours from your clients’ monthly retainer contracts as you work on various change requests, bug fixes, and customer issues. And all of your incoming tickets can be organized by client and web page, so nothing falls through the cracks.
