Can support persons check-in and check-out? How to make support more efficient?

[itomic]

Hi,

 

We've got approx 15 people in 3 locations (each in different time zones), and about 5-7 of these "could" help out with support tickets.

 

A challenge we've never managed to solve is how to have as few people as possible "distracted" by incoming support requests at any given time - but always having at least 1 person available to deal with support issues promptly. Sure, we have "standard" times when people are supposed to be on support - but let's say someone who is supposed to be on support is off sick?

 

One idea is that our support people check-in and check-out of the WHMCS so it's clear to everyone who's currently available to respond to new tickets. Of course there will be occasions when someone forgets to check-in and/or check-out...

 

Can the above be done with WHMCS - perhaps with an add-on or use of a 3rd party service?

 

And/or does anyone have any insights to offer into how they've managed the above conundrum?

 

Thanks,

 

Ross

[jclarke]

I'm not aware of a way to do this in WHMCS. What we do is we have private HipChat room called Staff, at the beginning of a shift employees sign into this room and leave when they are done. That way you always know who is working and you can communicate easily together as well.

[disgruntled]

This is indeed a good idea, it might be worth requesting is as a feature for a future update, it will certainly make things more manageable for multi location support.

 

One option you do have at the moment though, you can use action hooks, the documentation will tell you the specific hooks you need, they relate to the admin area,

 

The idea i am thinking here is when an admin logs in the action hook "signs them in" although staff online is already available in the admin home page you could make use of this information for doing what you need, even if its just to have a ticker on one side that regularly updates the support staff status,

 

Signed in, Busy with client, idle, on break, you get the idea. might be something worth while.

 

Then again, you could literally have a dedicated support team, 1 or 2 for each department and then your administration team can be freed up.

[itomic]

Thanks guys, some good food for thought here. Have signed up for a trial HipChat account... first impression is that it's different - but not massively different - from what we achieve currently with the ever-improving Google Chat service as part of Google Apps. Whether or not it can help solve the original issue I raised... hmmmm...