About a year ago when we were developing our Intranet, we purchased a product from Smarter Tools, Inc called "Smarter Track". This web-based ticket tool was originally supposed to be integrated with our Intranet so employees could login and submit IT-based tickets and search our growing knowledge base.
After our Intranet project's scope changed numerous times, we ultimately decided to drop the ticket system from within our Intranet and the Intranet became primarily a place to house documents, search the directory, and submit stories, gigs, etc.
We still had Smarter Track and all that was included with the online web software. So we decided to open it up and allow our employees to submit tickets. The interface is really easy to navigate and follow, but one special feature is the ability to submit tickets via email. This would allow our employees to have one central place to ask for help. What about other areas of the college? How could they benefit from this application? Does it only have to be IT?
After some research and discussion with our Campus Resource Director and our Maintenance Department, we decided to have IT monitor all tickets and "transfer" tickets to the appropriate agents. These agents would be: IT, Maintenance, Classroom Support, Campus Resources, Admin Support, and Printing Services. Each party involved decided to jump on board and fully support the system.
Since its launch about four months ago, we have received over 200 tickets with an average response rate of less than 24 hours. Our faculty and staff are very happy that all they need to do for support is send a quick email to one single address. Response has been amazing and we are very happy with the overall ease of use for this product.
Setting it up was fairly easy. We needed to establish one primary email account that receives all tickets and then that person needs to login to the web interface and transfer the ticket to the agent. That agent then gets an email notifying them of the ticket and then can work on it, respond to the original customer via email, and eventually close the ticket. The web interface has plenty of features we have not even dove in to yet, but someday will. We also have not officially announced this to our student population but we will not turn down a ticket from a student if they submit one. Installation on our web server was also fairly easy. The system runs with IIS and on a SQL database, pretty normal stuff.
The ideal situation for us is to have this web-based system work as an application on our iPhones. I have talked briefly with Smarter Tools about this and some other users have expressed an interest in the ability to respond and interact with tickets via an iPhone app.
Overall we are excited to begin to grow our support services over time with this product and look forward to improving and enhancing this web-based software solution. For more information about Smarter Track, checkout their
website.
