Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Many of the largest manufacturers have grown through acquisition, and this means bringing together so many different business processes, making the decision on what to consolidate, and what to keep separate, often challenging to say the least. Many manufacturing business processes– such as order to cash– weren’t originally intended to be joined up. That has often resulted in a lack of visibility around the pre-sales and post-sales experience.

Tracking a service department’s workflow and monitoring the progression of ticket-handling steps is essential to identifying potential customer service efficiencies. Disorganization within this process often leads to excessive response times. Company leaders that manage the ticket lifecycle effectively can maintain an accurate overview of resolved tickets, and identify the stages of the ticket lifecycle for those still in progress.

Gathering your team’s timesheets, compiling spreadsheets, and calculating the time for each client is a method that can take hours or even the whole day. A tool that combines time tracking and invoicing allows you to simplify the process.

When establishing a B2B support ticketing system, one of the most critical decisions facing team leaders is determining priority levels for support tickets. Without a standard for prioritization, systems would essentially dump all support tickets into one pool, leaving teams with no clear starting point or goal. This lack of direction often leaves urgent issues unattended, causing potential security risks, major downtime, and customer dissatisfaction.

Let’s face it: Zendesk is great. It’s one of the most popular helpdesk tools out there. But, it also has its shortcomings, and there are numerous competitors on the market. A portion of these Zendesk alternatives are open source solutions. The unique advantages of open source software play well into the customer service space, and they are here to stay. After all, open source solutions are no longer reserved for small businesses and teams.