Manage your support with a ticketing system on Slack

Traditional ticket systems provide a structured a trackable process on incoming cases, who have done what, current status and finally a resolution on the case. 

These systems are exposing an interface where users login to reply and respond on tickets. 

But what if you are already having conversations about the cases but do not want to require your users to move into yet another system? Or that you just need a lightweight ticketing system integrated closely to your teams? 

Modern Ticketing System for Today’s Conversations

Conversations have changed rapidly in the last year’s, from being email-first to moving into messaging platforms like Slack. Teams and colleagues are now messaging each other with instant replies, keeping the conversations focused with messages in different channels. 

There is a great value of having a corporate platform like this; instant communication, close collaboration with different teams and easy to share information.

A platform like Slack is truly empowering cooperation within a company, as everyone knows what channels to keep discussions in and anyone can reach out to have a chat intra-team or cross-team. 

The same goes for a modern ticketing system built for today’s conversations on Slack. 

Suptask was built from the ground up to empower a structured ticketing process closely aligned with your day-to-day conversations and messages. 

It is a true ticketing system on Slack that fits well with your organization and your current team structure. Unlike traditional ticketing systems, Suptask does not force you to move your users outside of Slack in order to manage tickets.   

Internal and External Support 

With a modern ticketing system closely aligned with you and your teams comes the question: How do you provide support today and for who? 

An organization often has an external support that helps their customers or partners. While an internal support often happens between different teams within the organization. 

Examples of such internal support processes:

• IT helpdesk - Supports teams and employees with internal IT help.
• SalesOps - Provides specific support to cases that are belonging to the sales process.
• Marketing - Support related to marketing activities and content.
  

Technical or product related support processes can involve: 

• IT Operations - Supports other teams regarding production IT operation.
• Engineering - Provides support on the product delivery such as remediation of bugs.
• DevOps - Supporting the journey of the product to production such as the CI/CD process.
  

Implementing a Ticketing System on Slack 

One of the most common scenarios that come up when implementing a ticketing system on Slack is how to apply a structure that supports the different requirements from the teams. 

We recommend that you start reviewing what teams that will be involved in the ticketing process. Categorize the teams that will be involved in to the following categories:

• Requesters - What team(s) will request help and submit tickets. 
• Responders - What team(s) will respond and solve submitted tickets. This channel allows the team to have private conversations and help each other remediate tickets that are sent in by reducing the noise in channels for others. 
  

From these you can map how the channel structure can look like to support your flows. 

You can either use an open public Requester channel if you want everyone on Slack to be able to submit tickets, which is perfect for common support functions like IT Helpdesk. 

The other option, which is the more common, is to set up a closed private Requester channel and invite the teams who should be there. 

Defining Forms and Fields for a Successful Process

Next up is to review what information that will be sent in using ticket forms and fields. Planning is everything here so make sure you align closely with the teams and listen in what everybody requires before you proceed setting up the structure in Slack. 

You can have several forms available in each Requester channel which allows you to get exactly the ticket flow you want. Here are a few examples:

• #it-helpdesk - Temporary access request
• #it-helpdesk - Lost my password 
• Engineering - Bug report
• IT Operations - Production disturbance 
  

Each of these forms can have different destinations on the submitted ticket, making them appear in separate or shared Responder channels. 

You can define what fields are exposed on each form to make sure you retrieve the minimum amount of information in order to remediate the ticket. Fields can either be required or optional, ingest multi or single values together with multi-line text or just single-line text. 

With this method you get complete power of your ticketing process and do not miss out on any critical functionality compared to traditional ticketing systems. 

Overview and Tracking of Tickets 

Last but not least you can find a single place to track and overview all tickets from different angles depending on who you are. 

By visiting the Suptask App (CTRL + K / CMD + K) on the left menu side in Slack, you can find several features to help you get a single pane of glass over your tickets. 

You will have different views depending on if you are a user with a Requester or Responder role. Responders will be able to manage their tickets while Requesters will not have any editing capabilities.

From this you can filter and find tickets based on ticket status, if they are Open, In progress or Closed. When the ticket was opened in time and from what Form it was submitted. 

You can easily find unassigned tickets as well as what tickets that relates to you, either if you submitted them or if you are the assignee on them. 

Suptask with it’s app on Slack is what empowers the next-generation of modern ticketing systems.