Help desk roles and responsibilities - User management

The user management section provides the creation, management, and provisioning of users' accounts across your SympoQ site, based on role-based access, and using the standard help desk roles and responsibilities.

Before starting with the implementation of the help desk software, there are several prerequisites needed to be considered, and most of them are related to the help desk roles and their responsibilities. These are also issues that mostly cause success or failure in the implementation of the help desk.

Knowing your requirements completely will be fundamental in setting up technical support in your organization and establishing a single point of contact for your customers. This applies to all organizations where a lot of interaction with customers is needed: IT support, HR department, general services, etc.

Identify who will serve the help desk

The first issue needed to be considered is to identify who will serve the help desk. There are several attributes that a person needs to have:

• The person who serves the help desk needs good interpersonal skills
• Does not need to be technical, but does need to be organized
• Should not be the person providing technical support (because they will be somewhere providing technical support!).

The last is related to the fact that the person providing technical support should concentrate on their work and not the details of how to log a support request, or a similar technical task.

Single point of contact

The following phase is to establish the single point of contact. There are also several guidelines in the process:

1. Agree on how calls should be recorded.
2. Decide how much extra work is involved in recording details of incidents and requests.
3. Decide which role in the organization provides access for staff and those providing technical support and can accommodate the additional work of maintaining the call log.
4. Ensure that the technical support providers know who is the single point of contact.

The role of a single point of contact could be an additional function for one of the staff within an organization: organization administration staff, ICT co-coordinator, or other nominated staff.

Role based access

The permissions to perform certain operations are assigned to specific roles. All users who access the application will have a defined role and therefore have a defined set of tasks to execute. Roles are primarily used to apply company-wide security policies in the system, e.g. to allocate a specific permission to agents on Queues.

Roles are also used for help desk automation, where agents are required to transition a ticket workflow, as well as in the Analytic reporting and access to knowledgebase categories.

There are six different SympoQ user roles, which are divided into two groups:

1. Support team roles
   • Queue manager
   • Agent
   • Administrator
2. Customer roles
   • Customer manager
   • Customer
   • Guest user.

Support team roles and responsibilities

Typically, a well-organized service or support organization has a person or team responsible for ticket management and is commonly referred to as a Queue manager or a Queue supervisor. There can also be several teams that have experience working on different topics. The Queue manager assigns a ticket to one of the specialized team members based on the type of request. The other responsibilities include:

• Responsible for Service level management (SLA) at Queue level
• Assigns tickets to the selected agent, either manually or by specifying the workflow rules for automatic sending
• Responsible for leading service and service communication with other queue managers, agents and customers
• Responsible for preparing and reviewing service reports, internally and with customer representatives
• Updates assigned tickets from the corresponding queue with all ticket actions: Reply, Close ticket, Comment, Move to queue, Merge, Tag, Assign, Delete
• Has access to the Analytics reporting section for all tickets that belong to assigned queues.

With the Agent role, team members can solve assigned customer problems and requests and communicate directly with customers. The detailed responsibilities are as follows:

• Identifies the main causes of a problem or request
• Provides information about the progress of the problem to the Customer and the Queue manager
• Provides solutions to problems
• Uses the Knowledgebase, known errors and provided diagnostics
• Updates assigned tickets with the following actions: Reply, Close ticket, Comment, Queue, Merge, Tag
• Has access to the Analytics area for the assigned queues and tickets.

Each named agent (team member) can be assigned the Administrator role, which allows access to the administrator's control panel and the ability to make system-wide configuration changes. The administrator also maintains the list of agents, customers, customer groups and approves the customer's self-registration.

According to the previous description, the Agent and Queue manager roles have certain permissions to perform actions on requests and tickets in each ticket Queue. With this approach, each named agent (a member of the support team) can have specific roles in different queues. For example, a named agent can have the following roles:

• Support: Queue manager
• Sales: Agent
• Development: Agent
• etc.

The following table shows the relationship between the agent and queue manager roles and their respective permissions:

Resource	Agent	Queue Manager
New request	Log a call and store to assigned queues only	Log a call and store to any queue
Ticket action	Performs on assigned tickets only	Performs on all tickets
- Reply, Close, Comment, Tag
- Move, Merge	Must have access to another Queue/Ticket
- Delete, Assign
Reporting	Reported only tickets that belongs to Queues with access permissions	Reported all tickets
Knowledgebase - Public, Customer and Internal

Customer roles and responsibilities

The customer roles are: Customer, Customer Manager and Guest user. For each role, the corresponding permissions and responsibilities are assigned.

Customer manager:

• Represents a particular user group or department
• Is aware of all services used by the group or department they represent
• Has an understanding of the application and importance of the services used in their area
• Receives service reports
• Has overview of all tickets that belong to their group and updates the tickets with the following actions: Reply, Close.

Customer:

• Updates submitted tickets with the following actions: Reply, Close
• Has overview of their own tickets.

Guest or anonymous user is a customer who is not registered on your SympoQ site, but has access to certain site resources depending on the site settings:

• Public Request submission form , public Knowledge base, and the Self-registration form, it they are enabled in the Settings section
• Updates their own tickets with the following actions: Reply, Close.

The following table represents customer roles with their respective permissions:

Resource	Guest	Customer	Customer manager
Customer portal
Request submission	Can be enabled/disabled
Ticket actions: - Reply, Close ticket	Performs on own tickets only	Performs on own tickets only	Performs on tickets that belong to their Customer group
Reporting		Reported only own tickets	Reported all tickets that belong to their Customer group
Public Knowledgebase	Can be enabled/disabled
Customer Knowledgebase