Back when I ran the help desk, I was terrible about keeping notes for various tickets. I was an excellent technician, and all I really wanted to do was fix people's problems. I didn't want to write out detailed notes about everything I was doing and the time it was taking me to fix the various problems. I was the worst at tracking my day, and I got in trouble for it on more than one occasion.
While reading this article about ServOps vs. PSA software I found myself agreeing with more than one point. Coming from the trenches of the service side of this equation I totally agreed that when users are taking a huge chunk of their time filling in time sheets and completing pre-built tasks, they are unable to use the skills they are being paid to have, like solving problems! According to the blog post, "PSA products expect the people doing service work to be disciplined and make keeping the PSA database up to date a priority. "
The one point that really resonated with me was that standard PSA software can steal time from many people and gives it to a few people. When I spend an hour at the end of the day filling out a time sheet, it saves time for the finance department when they go to bill clients for your work. A tracking system should take into account the day to day workflows and productivity of the people who are doing the work of the business.
ServOps claims to be different, better, and smarter than PSAs by embracing the creative, chaotic reality, working to serve the user automatically, and trying to be helpful for everyone (even clients). I was curious how ServOps claims hold up, so I dug a little deeper into how their application works.
- Email Syncing - ServOps will intelligently index email conversations so they can be associated with appropriate tickets, instead of copying and pasting various conversations into the ticket manually.
- Service Request Tracking - Automated timers can help with timesheet creation and billing to benefit both departments
- Project Planning - Drag-and-Drop Gantt charts can help project managers organize various projects and tracks budgets in real-time.
- Billing - The system can also sync with the most popular finance apps for business like Quickbooks, Xero and Sassu
- Client Portal - For customers to enter tickets directly into the system.
While some of these features are available in other PSA programs, it is interesting to see the more automated tasks like email syncing. As a person who hates the "paperwork" part of being a service technician, it's great to see companies starting to think about how to make that process easier. I'll be curious to see if this shift continues.
