Table of Contents
DeskDirector Features Overview
Updated
by Niamh Ferns
DeskDirector Features Overview
DeskDirector provides a variety of useful features to make working on tickets and providing support for your clients easier. You can find a list of these below.
Service Catalogue Overview
Types, Groups, & Forms
The combination of Service Types, Service Groups, and Forms you configure in DeskDirector constitute a Service Catalogue. In order to assign out forms for users to fill in when submitting requests, you would assign a Form to a Service Type, a selection of Service Types to a Service Group, and then a Service Group to a company, contact, or User Group.
With DeskDirector forms, you can have beautiful native forms which allow you to ask the right questions to your clients the first time round.
User Groups
User Groups provide a convenient way to assign a Service Catalogue to a specific subset of users at a company and provide additional features for approvals and visibility into end users tickets for managers at your clients' companies. This can be useful in situations when you want to direct approvals to specific people (e.g. on-boarding approvals being redirected to an HR User Group) or when need some people at you company who only use the Client portal to have visibility into all tickets submitted for their department.
Inline Forms & Form Requests
Lastly, forms can also be added as an inline form in the tech portal. This allows you to send forms to Portal users to fill out after a ticket has been created when you need to request more information from an end user. This is perfect if a ticket has come through the email connector or if the user has submitted the wrong Service Type to create their ticket and they haven't provided your technicians with the correct information.
Further Reading
- Service Types and Service Groups
- Read more on Forms
- Read more on User Groups
Custom Branding
With DeskDirector, you can brand your portal with your logos and choose different colors from a theming palette. Not only is custom branding available globally for your main DeskDirector instance, you can customize and personalize the branding further for each company under your instance. Different brands for each companies you handle is possible (if you have the time and patience to set it all up, of course).
You can easily define branding for your DeskDirector portal (web and desktop). Check out these two articles to help you get started:
Personalization of the DeskDirector experience is further tuned using avatars for each contacts and each tech members under your DeskDirector instance.
Lastly, you can further personalize the your DeskDirector portal with custom domains! Some customers may feel more comfortable using a Portal that runs under your domain. So with custom domains, you can use your own domain/subdomain and not use the default deskdirector.com subdomain assigned to you.
Custom Email Templates
You can bring the DeskDirector experience right into the mailbox with stunning email notifications. You can create personalized, fully responsive and custom-branded email templates using our powerful email template engine. These emails can be tied up to events in your DeskDirector instance -- from the basic system event like password reset and login token request, to global ticket events like approvals and form requests and lastly, to ticket life cycle events (e.g. ticket created, closed, status changed and others).
These emails can be also be deeplinked back to any part of the Portal with ease. Lastly, with the Tech Portal v1.32 update, we added the possibility of also using these custom email templates and tie them with the broadcast system in DeskDirector.
Further Reading
- Email Notifications Overview
- Creating Custom Email Template
- Setting Email Templates for Notification Events
- Template language for DeskDirector Email Template
Surveys
Customer satisfaction is at the core of support experience, and surveying for your customers' experience helps you measure their satisfaction and how you can improve the services and products you offer.
High levels of customer satisfaction are strong indicators for client loyalty and retention and a great tool to lure in new customers. Additional information of why a customer liked their experience helps businesses plan how they can recreate that experience moving forward.
So, as a support portal, DeskDirector had to integrate a way to measure customer support satisfaction. True to being an ever-evolving platform, DeskDirector introduces "Surveys".
Surveys in DeskDirector are used to understand your customer’s satisfaction levels with the service your techs have provided to your clients. This is a simple built-in feature that either be integrated into the Ticket Life Cycle, asking about a customer's overall satisfaction with his service interaction once a ticket is closed, or can be initiated via an email broadcast
Further Reading
Notifications
Notifications and broadcasts are a great way to keep track of activities in your DeskDirector instance. These two features work in tandem to delivery information to your end users about the activity going on surrounding their tickets and to alert them of any big news (like emergencies, new features, or big changes).
As a first step, you'll want to take a look at our document on notifications. This will guide you through setup, how notifications work in the client/tech portals, and how you configure notifications to fit your needs.
Broadcasts
As mentioned above, notifications go hand-in-hand with our Broadcasts feature. Broadcasts provide a convenient way for service agents to sent out vital information to end users that should not be missed. Broadcasts are notification that will stick around on a user's machine and cannot be dismissed.
We also have some helpful documentation on broadcasts that will help you get up and running. It will show you how to create, send, and manage broadcasts and explain a bit on how they tie into DeskDirector's email features.
Custom Menus
Custom Menus allow you to show company-specific options, and can be fine tuned further for specific contacts. Having the ability to use and create custom menu and menu items enables your to to shape your Portal with a menu that's relevant for your company.
This means a staff from the billing department of a company can have menus tailored for her role which is different from the menu the IT associate may see.
We have a pair of articles that dive into Menus and Menu Items in DeskDirector. There you'll find out how to set them up, how they work, and how you may best used them.
Overview
The menu system will allow you to customize the client Portal menu and assign them to specific contacts/companies. When assigning menus to Companies or Contacts, we use a "Cascading override" approach. Menu items are created independently from menus and a given menu item can be shared between multiple menus.
We provide a "Default" Menu comprised of the standard Portal menu items. This is the menu all users will see by default, unless there is another menu configured for their company or specifically for them at the contact level.
Getting Started
Here are some things you can do to get started:
- Create menu items for all the content you wish to expose in the Portal. You don't have to worry about who can see what at this stage.
- Add or rearrange items in the "Default" menu.
- Create some new menus
- Assign a menu to a company or contact
- Migrate your top level, auto-navigate learning center links to menu items and add them to a menu
Menu Group
Menus are ordered lists of references to Menu Items, which can be freely rearranged.
The top menu item inside a menu will become the Landing Page for the Portal. The Landing Page is the first screen that a user will see when they open the Portal.
Read more about Menus.
Menu Items
Menu items describe the content you wish to place into the menu. They can be shared between multiple Menus and changes made to them will be visible across all menus which reference the item.
Read more about Menu Items.
Learning Center
The Learning Center is a great way to educate your clients and share documents with them. You can also link to videos and files hosted online.
Check out our article on the Learning Center to learn more!
BiggerBrains
BiggerBrains produces eLearning content and courses that can help your customers skill up in a huge range of products including Office 365, QuickBooks, G Suite, and a lot more. Our tight integration with BiggerBrains allows all of this content to be embedded right inside Portal so your customers never have to leave the app to start learning.
DeskDirector provides a BiggerBrains integration so users can access BiggerBrains directly in the Client portal!
