Hello Crown Computers Clients! We’re excited to announce a new tool that will help us provide more convenience alongside our expert business technology solutions and support. The technology behind it is called TimeZest, and you can think of it like Calendly for our support engineers. With it, we’ll be empowering end users to schedule an appointment with our engineers at the most convenient time for them! In this blog post, we’ll show you what to expect as we go live with it over the next couple of weeks. I’ll describe the process and context in detail here, but also give a summary of the workflow at the bottom of this post.
Official Communications for IT Issues and Schedule IT Support Requests
Overall, this is a small change to our service workflows. The way that you reach out for support will be the same: if you have an issue or request, just give our Support Line a call or email our support desk as usual. Going forward, these will continue to be the official channels for letting us know about an issues-a network connectivity problem, a problem with your work-from-home networking, help with an authentication app, etc.-and we’ll get to work on a solution.
There may be some other ways that you might reach out to our engineers, but they’re not official channels at this time. When service requests go directly to engineers, it slows down the prioritization and scheduling processes at the Service Desk. To avoid this, it’s recommended to always reach out to the Dispatcher via phone or email.
Whatever Can Be Scheduled Should Be Scheduled
We know that IT incidents and requests don’t always happen at a good time. Any time that something goes wrong, or you need assistance with licenses or onboarding a new team member, reach out to our support desk. When we have the details of the issue, we do a quick analysis of when we can reach out and how urgent the situation is. We then reach out to provide assistance when we can. On the other hand, an urgent issue with cloud services or hardware failure, for example, won’t get put on hold waiting for the schedule; we’ll still address issues based on their business impact and urgency.
But a lot of issues are what is called a service request: these are issues that aren’t exactly time sensitive. They’re usually requests about making a change to how we manage your email, software, etc. When we receive these requests, we like to put them on the schedule at an appropriate time. On the other hand, if something is broken and needs to be fixed, that’s an incident. We respond to these issues in a way that gets you up and running quickly.
Introducing TimeZest for Crown Computers Clients
Now, when we have a service request that comes in to the service desk, we’ll judge the request for how appropriate it is to let the user schedule an appointment with one of our engineers. If there’s a request that checks a few boxes (service can be scheduled and isn’t urgent) then we’ll send a link to the user on the ticket to allow them to choose a time to talk to one of our engineers. That email will look like this:
When you click the “Choose a time” button, you’ll be taken to a calendar page:
You’ll then be able to choose a time when our engineer is available for an appointment to fulfill your service request:
Once the appointment is set, you’ll get a confirmation email that lets you know what to put in your calendar. At the time of the appointment, our engineers will reach out by phone.
Workflow for Organizations With a Single Ticket Approval
Some of our clients prefer to have a single point of contact (POC) for every ticket, regardless of which user(s) have the issue. In this case, we’ll supply the link for the calendar page in a slightly different fashion.
Since clients with this approval structure have the same POC on all tickets, we’ll send an email with a URL that links to our engineer’s calendar page and ask that it be sent to the end user. We’ll do this as our usual update inside of a ticket. Once the end user has the link, they will schedule with us by following the link and supply their preferred phone number for us to reach out on.
Summary of Workflow
- When you have an issue or request, call or email for us to open a ticket
- If it’s appropriate for the issue or request, we’ll send an email giving you the opportunity to schedule the service
- Schedule an appointment with our engineer using the link in the email
- We’ll reach out via phone at the time of the appointment
For single ticket approvers:
- When you have an issue or request, call or email for us to open a ticket
- We’ll update the ticket with a link to the appointment calendar
- Send this link along to the end user
- The end user will schedule a time that works for them
- We’ll reach out to the end user, via phone, at the time of the appointment
We’re always looking forward to getting your business’ technology back to work when there’s a problem. As your partner in business technology and support, we’re always looking for ways to make getting help smoother and more seamless.
-Written by Derek Jeppsen on Behalf of Sean Goss and Crown Computers Team