To improve efficiency, performance, and accountability to our clients, BitBlock has implemented a new support / ticket system using Zendesk. There are several benefits to the new system including independence from our hosting platform (disaster resiliency), integration with Twitter (@bitblocksystems), and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/bitblocksystems), and more.
While there are many benefits of using the new ticket system, there are likely to be some growing pains as we all adjust to the new platform. To ease the transition from the earlier (now legacy) ticket systems we used, we have published this outline intended to cover the basics of operation and some of the processes.
We always encourage and appreciate clients who use and contribute feedback on our Knowledge Base - commonly asked questions are there with complete answers organized by product and service (like telephone model!)
For anyone who needs to submit a ticket right away, there is an online form available here.
Easy ways to start a ticket!
Our new system supports ticket submission through many channels:
- Our website - through a form located here or our contact form displayed on most of our web pages!
- Email - through various departmental email addresses (support, sales, etc.)
- Twitter (https://twitter.com/bitblocksystems) - by messaging us or mentioning us on Twitter
- Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/bitblocksystems/) - by messaging us through Facebook
- Telephone - voicemail left for various departments automatically starts a ticket
The intention behind having many ways to submit tickets is to help people reach us as easily as possible!
Tickets are more efficient than direct emails in many cases as your issue could be handled by one of our team even if your regular contact is temporarily unavailable or assisting another person.
Ticket System (Zendesk) Benefits
Managing support enquiries offer many benefits:
- Searchable with a long-term archive of events
- Support federation - if your organization uses Zendesk, tickets can be worked on collaboratively by your own support team and ours without re-submitting or someone having to create a ticket to handle a ticket *eyeroll*
- Extensible access - if your organization does not have a ticket system, we can help your team use ours
- Simple Automation for convenience and efficiency
- Scheduled follow ups
- Automated wrap up on idle issues
- Independent monitoring and status (https://status.zendesk.com/ we are on Pod 23)
Ticket Workflow - what happens after you press send?
Pressing Send on that email, or Submit on that form - that's just the start of the process - what next?
First, your ticket is "spam filtered" - submissions from invalid emails, or system addresses rejecting our confirmation might be Suspended for manual review. Manual review happens daily, but if you don't see a response to your submission, it was not lost! Give us a few minutes to ensure it had time to be delivered. If the issue is time sensitive / urgent, you can call as little as 15 minutes after you raise an issue. Submitting the issue through the ticket system helps us validate your request and ensure we have accurate information to proceed.
Initially your ticket will be New - in this state, all members of the department will be notified of the ticket so the first available person can triage your issue. At that point your issue is changed to be Open. In the event our staff do not attend to your issue, it will be automatically escalated with approximately one hour of submission.
From there, one of our team might respond with further questions - for this reason it's important to consider sending us complete information when possible - if you are new to the process, consider the form to help you think of information we might need. Most of it isn't "required" on the form, to make things easy, but often we will need the specifics in order to help you promptly. If we follow up with you, we might set the ticket to Pending your response. In that state, you have 4 days to reply with the information we need otherwise the system will move your ticket to the Solved state as you may no longer have the issue or may consider our response to have resolved the issue to your satisfaction. Tickets with specific due dates are possible and those might also be set to help us help you coordinate changes.
When you reply, the Pending issue automatically reverts to Open, and our team is notified of your update.
A Solved ticket remains that way for 4 days, and eventually reverts to Closed.
During this cycle, our team is looking at tickets, following up, and waiting for your feedback.
In the event a ticket is closed while waiting for response there is no reason to worry! A simple reply to the ticket will start a follow up ticket - providing both your organization and ours access to the history as required.
We look forward to improving our efficiency and service to you, our clients!
Thank you for your continued business!