A couple weeks ago, I was working with author and entrepreneur Lisa at Call That Girl. Lisa owns three successful PC Repair Shops spanning multiple cities. At the time, each office was getting swamped with calls. The side-effect was that her staff was spending an average of 10 minutes per call simply booking the appointment. All of which was NOT BILLABLE. Combined, they were losing both time and money.
I suggested that we setup an Online Service Request form that would allow her clients to submit their own tickets. By doing so, we could reduce the number of calls and increase her company’s efficiency. The idea was to let clients submit tickets straight to her job queue. Most clients preferred “online” versus “offline” anyways. Obviously, we weren’t going to eliminate calls 100%, and that wasn’t the intention. The goal was to provide relief.
The solution: Online Service Requests
Again, the goal wasn’t to eliminate the phone. It was simply to add another option to save time and increase billable hours. To make it work, Lisa had to make it easy to get help online. She started by placing links strategically on her Home Page. Here are some simple rules to follow:
Rules to offering Online Service Requests
The Trick: Making it seamless
Keeping her company’s brand was extremely important to Lisa. Any online form she used needed to look like it was coming from her own website. She was relieved to learn that the mHelpdesk Online Request Form would integrate with her existing website seamlessly. Here is what it looks like:
Seamless Online Service Request Form
The benefits
If you read Lisa’s book on remote support, you already know she loves to eliminate time-wasters. Remote support helped her expand her reach across three towns 150 miles apart in seconds. Using an online ticket submission form has had the same positive effect. Now, when a ticket is opened for the first time, it’s already got the details pre-filled in.
Immediately after going live with this, she estimated that she saved an average of four hours per week in just booking appointments. The four hours she claimed back are now focused on providing billable services during the work day. Combined, her online Service Request Form and Remote Support tools reduced her overhead instantly by a 15%. She expects to see even more savings as more consumers start moving towards “online” vs “offline”.
Implementing Your Own
Getting one setup on your own website is easy. To learn more visit our tutorial page below:
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The benefits of having a self service type ticket system for our website clients is that since we have multiple ways of supporting our clients, we know exactly what store or remote team gets assigned the tickets as well their information pre-populated in the ticket saving us time when booking the appointment. The instant we had the “Submit a request” form on our website, we started to see our tickets come in right away and the entire team was excited to know that a job was coming their way. With so many people using the internet to find their technicial support, having an easy button to click gives your company that professional edge over your competition.
This is one of my favorite features of mHelpdesk, and I have already integrated it into my website. To my surprise, people are already using it, and it hasn’t been up that long!
There has been a little lag on load time, though. The only other changes I would add is just a couple more fields of info that would help me go through them faster. It would be great if there was some way they could tell me what city they are in (so I can schedule better) and what kind of computer we are talking about (desktop or laptop).
The load time will have a 1-2 second delay. There is a way to add a loading spinner to make the user experience better. If you guys are interested I could probably post instructions.
For the location, why don’t you just add a custom field for location and make it public?
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