Trouble Ticketing for Cloud and Communications in Salesforce — Implementation Options

Trouble tickets play a central role in cloud and communications services support.

They help tracking customer issues, technician assignments, comments, communication with customers, SLA compliance, etc.

Service provider tickets are usually more complex than traditional IT helpdesk ones:

They are often associated with a service such as an Internet connection, a hosted server, etc.
Have root-cause dependencies on other tickets
Can be auto-generated from the network or infrastructure status
Serve various business purposes such as outage, maintenance, service request and others
Have different resolution workflows based on multi-dimensional criteria (origination, business purpose, etc.)

Implementing ticketing within CRM:

Enables unified account database (no need to synchronize or maintain accounts in the ticketing system)
Provides account managers with access to customer support history
Eliminates need for at least one systems integration

The benefits are greater when the CRM is also used for service inventory, i.e., keeping track of all services sold, their terms and contracts.

Active support cases timeline on a CRM account

Service provider-grade trouble ticketing can be implemented in Salesforce in several ways described below.

Salesforce cases

Salesforce provides a built-in case object for customer support.

For Sales Cloud (the traditional CRM without customer support), cases are very rudimentary. However, they can be customized with additional fields, Lightning components, action buttons, workflows, etc. to provide more robust support functionality.

Using CRM case may be a good choice for implementing a simple support/ticketing system.

Salesforce Service Cloud

Service Cloud adds a lot of new functionality to cases including SLAs, Entitlements, Chatter, etc. It also enables multi-channel customer support with email-to-case and web-to-case (via Salesforce Communities).

Nextian Customer Portal dashboard with new case option and case statistics

However, Service Cloud is a generic product for customer support, and customizing it as cloud and communications services ticketing will require some additional effort.

Service Cloud is a good option if it meets business requirements out of the box.

Building custom ticketing

Salesforce offers extensive customization and development options: database objects, page layouts and components, APEX code for processing, etc. These features can be used to develop a fully custom ticketing solution. While this is probably not the most cost-effective route, it may be justified when the support process is unusual, very complicated or requires a lot of integrations with underlying infrastructure systems.

Using third-party ticketing

Salesforce AppExchange offers a wide range of third-party ticketing apps as well as connectors to industry-leading ticketing systems.

Nextian service management and ticketing

Nextian service management is compatible with both Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.

It adds an association of case to service such as Internet access or a virtual machine, enabling:

Creating cases against services both in the CRM and the Customer Portal
Case statistics and timelines reports for accounts, products, service addresses and individual services
Triage and prioritization with financial information available directly on cases (e.g., how much is the customer paying per month)
Visibility into product and account cases for product and account management teams

A case with service, product, account, location and financial information

Conclusions

Implementing ticketing within CRM has the following benefits:

Enables unified account database (no need to synchronize or maintain accounts in the ticketing system)
Provides account managers with access to customer support history
Provides support teams with additional account information
Eliminates need for at least one systems integration

Salesforce is a highly customizable CRM platform and can be successfully used for implementation of provider-grade trouble ticketing.

Nextian is a vendor of Quote-to-Cash (QTC) software for cloud and communications helping providers accelerate growth and increase customer lifetime value.

Contact us today to find out how we can help you!