Finding Enlightenment - Zendesk and What it means to MSIS and our Customers

Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.

After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.

- Buddha

Zendesk has provided us with capabilities that have helped us measure and improve our service delivery. Sustaining Zendesk for the foreseeable future is untenable. This is a report on the project work we're doing to find a new tool to replace Zendesk.

I recently asked MSIS and some of our key stakeholders and customers to participate in a survey to help us continue improving the way we deliver customer service. This was to help us better understand the capabilities that we’re using in Zendesk today, and what we need for the future, should we decide to leave the tool. Here is the result of what you and our customers provided. The survey has helped me capture a few things I would have missed otherwise, and I am grateful to you for taking the time out of your day to help in this effort.

Survey Results

Question 1: Where do you work?

Question 2: Describe your Role
 

Capabilities Ranking


The open ended questions
What do you want to keep? What do you want to change? Anything Else?

There were a lot of you who put some thought into this, and it was a pleasure to read through your responses. I have summated similar requests and ranked them below. As I found collections of more than one feature or capability, I added it to the list. I’ve scaled the responses to match the scale of the results above for comparison.



Weighting and Analysis

I applied some weighting to the two results above to best reflect what a successful product for us would look like.  In order of most weight to least weight: customers, key stakeholders, MSIS.  With that weighting I get a capabilities list that looks like this:

Survey Ranking	Weight
Customer Satisfaction Feedback	415
Measuring and Reporting Performance	317
Seeing Tickets I am Copied On	273
Having a User-Friendly Interface	267
Clean Email Formatting	261
Customizable Views	245
Manually update contact information	215
Escalations for Pending and On Hold	205
Merging Tickets and Customers	180
Knowledge Base Integration	177
Macros	171
Integrating with other Systems	167
Searching Previous Tickets	153
Tracking Orders	145
Mobile Access	132
Auto-Completion	99
Scheduling	54
IT Asset Management	18

Additional Bits of Flotsam

There were a lot of requests for training on the tooling, but also on the process by which we manage tickets. There were also requests for things which aren’t in keeping with our service delivery model.

Multiple Assignees: It is important to understand that as soon as more than one person is assigned to a ticket, accountability for that work utterly breaks down. It’s not in keeping with how we manage performance, and look to ticket information to help us improve our products and services.

Additional Status and Ticket Types: In Footprints we had 20 different statuses and ticket types. Some which were statuses which seemed like ticket types and ticket types that looked like statuses. For example, it was possible to have a service request pending in active status.

Next Up: Evaluating solutions against the capabilities you provided in the survey.