With HappyFox Workflows, automating your business processes within your help desk has never been easier!
With an intuitive user interface, you can build your own complex workflows with absolutely no code to automate your support process. Be it IT services, E-commerce, Healthcare, or the Education industry, HappyFox Workflows can help you automate repetitive and key customer support workflows with ease.
You can also build multi-step workflow automation with different actions to be executed in a sequential manner.
What is a Help Desk Workflow?
A help desk workflow is a series of steps that must be followed to execute a process when certain conditions are met. Help desk workflows can be used to automate the recurring processes in your organization and improve end-user productivity.
Are you looking for inspirations on which processes you can automate with HappyFox Workflow management software? We have listed down 8 workflow examples below for you:
Help Desk Workflow Examples
1. Assign Tasks for New Employee Onboarding Process
“If the subject line of a ticket contains the phrase ‘New Hire’, Trigger a workflow to automatically set hiring tasks on the ticket.”
- A new employee onboarding workflow can be achieved by creating a Smart Rule to trigger a webhook from HappyFox when the subject line contains the phrase “New Hire”.
- Trigger workflow using the unique Webhook URL associated with each workflow.
- 1st Action (in workflows): Create tasks using the task template “Employee Onboarding”.
- 2nd Action: Create a related support ticket in the IT category to intimate on the new hire.
- 3rd Action: Create Onboarding IT Tasks under the newly created ticket in the IT category.
2. Read Incoming Emails and Capture Fields
“Parse Incoming Email/Ticket message to extract text from the body of the Email and automatically update custom fields.”
- For tickets that have a templated message body, you can teach workflows to read and extract text from the email.
- You can assign these extracted strings to variables and assign them to custom fields on the ticket. This helps you report on these fields, create queues, use in notification templates, or for further automation using these auto-populated custom fields in the ticketing system.
3. Automatically Create Related Tickets
“Automatically create related tickets in Accounting, Human Resources, IT Service Management (ITSM), and Program Managers categories, when a ‘Project Initiation’ ticket is created.”
- Trigger a webhook to the workflow management system using Smart Rules. The SmartRule should trigger when a ticket containing ‘Project Initiation: ‘ in the subject line is created by the Project Manager.
- Set up a workflow to automatically create related tickets like ‘Map Resources to the Project’, ‘Associate Assets to the Project’, ‘Prepare Budget’, ‘Intimate Stakeholders’, ‘Draft a business plan’ in the relevant categories, and assign them to various team members.
Create similar workflows for all Business Process Management requirements like initiating expense claims, managing content marketing projects, etc.
4. Automatically Merge Duplicate Tickets
“When multiple server alert email notifications are triggered for the same server, identify the existing open tickets and merge them into one ticket”.
Let’s say you have associated your Server Alert notifications to create tickets in HappyFox help desk software, and you have a custom field called ‘Server Name’ to capture the name of the server. Now, if you receive a second ‘Server Down’ notification while you are already working on an open ticket for the same server, set up a new workflow that can identify that there is an existing ticket for the same server and auto-merge the new ticket to the existing ticket.
5. Automatically Relate Tickets based on External Triggers
“Automatically relate multiple server alerts sent from your monitoring system, using message body or ticket fields.”
- For all tickets created in the Server Alerts category, trigger a webhook upon ticket creation.
- Set up a workflow to catch this hook and identify the server name based on the info provided in the body of the email or using ticket fields.
- Filter for open tickets with the same server name using workflows, and automatically relate the tickets.
Auto-relating tickets make it easy for IT teams to mass update and close all tickets at once.
6. Automatically Decrement Available Support Time for Contact Group
“Each time a ticket is moved to Closed status, decrement the ‘Available Support Time‘ value automatically from the associated Contact Group.”
- Set up a webhook to the workflow system, to be triggered upon moving the ticket to ‘Closed’ status.
- Set up a workflow that automatically identifies the contact group linked to the ticket’s contact and subtracts the available time by the total time spent on that ticket.
7. Automatically Reply and Close Repetitive How-To Questions
“If the ‘Request Type’ field is set to ‘Forgot Password’, auto-respond to the ticket using Canned Action ‘Forgot Password’ and close the ticket.”
- Set Up a Canned Action with steps to recover password, and also set the status in Canned Action to Closed.
- Now, create a smart rule to trigger workflow if the Request Type is Forgot Password.
- Set up an automated workflow to Add a reply to the ticket using the canned action “Forgot Password”.
- You can also directly compose the message in Workflow, without using Canned Action.
8. Create a Parent-Child Relationship between Tickets
“If parent ticket is closed while related children tickets are still open, re-open parent ticket and add private note ‘Cannot close parent ticket until all related tickets are closed.'”
Use two workflows to achieve this:
- For the same IT project management example above (#3), you can also have a text custom field called ‘Relationship’. You can automatically set the custom fields as ‘Parent’ for the ticket manually created and as ‘Child-<parent ticket id>’ for the automatically created children tickets.
- Now, if the parent ticket (Ticket ID: 100) is moved to “Closed” status, check if related tickets of Child type (filter pending tickets with Relationship field value Child-100) are still open.
- If yes, workflows can reopen the parent service request and add a private note to intimate why the ticket was reopened.
Benefits of Help Desk Workflow Automation
But, why should you automate the help desk workflows? There are the obvious advantages of reduced ticket volume and improved process optimization. Find more benefits of help desk automation below:
- Reduced cost:
With lesser staff requirements and shorter ticket processing times, help desk automation reduces the overall cost per ticket.
- Faster operations:
Automation reduces the turnaround time and downtime of end-to-end business operations.
- Less support volume:
Powered by artificial intelligence, automation uses intelligent routing algorithms for ticket deflection. With tickets deflected to knowledge bases and self-service portals, IT support teams will have fewer tickets to handle and hence fewer escalations and service level agreement breaches.
- Error-free processes:
As you streamline and orchestrate all repetitive tasks like password reset, there is no room for human error.
- Improved customer satisfaction:
Speedy and timely resolutions lead to lesser wait times and improved response times for the customers. They need not wait around for trivial issues to get resolved, resulting in a satisfying user experience.
- Higher user productivity:
Fewer repetitive issues lead to fewer queues for end-users. Support agents can spend less time on ticket resolution and more time enhancing service delivery and customer experience.
- Compliant processes:
With all rules set and followed by an automation tool, processes don’t deviate from the expected course and guidelines. This leads to an effective process and SLA compliance.
Achieve More with Help Desk Workflows
We hope these workflow examples will help you build your own workflows and manage help desk operations efficiently. We have written a more elaborate article on how to create approval request flows for simple BPM like vacation requests to more complex business rules like asset management and change management using Approval Workflows with actual workflow steps.
Do you want to know more? Book a demo today to see HappyFox Workflows in action!
