Kayako in a service/workshop environment

[DCC Supplies]

Hi,
I apologise if this has been covered elsewhere, I did find answers to elements of my question, and have figured out a couple of implementation methods but I'm also very interested in other peoples opinions and solutions.

We're in the final stages of evaluation of Kayako, and haven't seen anything else that approaches it for flexability Vs affordability!
We operate a sales, service and repair facility, and take multiple enquiries by phone, email etc. from customers, and potential customers.

These enquiries range from How do I?, Is it broken? etc, through to physical goods being shipped to us for repair/modification. Tickets can progress from initial questions through to goods appearing (magically!), or be simple information requests.

I'm interested in how others have implemented Kayako in this type of environment? Particulary in differntiation of ticket 'types' within the workshop. For instance; do you have seperate 'departments' to segregate installations, warrenty repairs etc, or simply use Sales, Technical and shipping departments, and assign lables and/or flags to each ticket to differentiate installations from warranty repairs?

I can see pros & cons in each approach, has anyone experienced any gotcha's in practice?

[craigbrass]

I am looking into implementing Kayako into a workshop enviroment too. The way we are thinking it will work is staff @ the company create a manual ticket for each job as it comes in, keep replying to it until the job is finished (and so the girls in the office can tell customers what the status is without having to bother the engineers) and then mark it as To Bill once finished so the girls in the office can work out the price, do an invoice and then close the ticket / job all together. I haven't found any downside to doing it this way yet.

[DCC Supplies]

Hi Craig,
This is very similar to my approach. As we have, at any one time hundreds of tickets that are assigned to our workshop department, I'm looking at ways of catagorising the job type, so there is warranty, repairs, installations, development etc. We only have the one workshop, so as all these job categories flow through, each has a 'service level' associated with it. e.g. Warranty will have a higher priority than development tasks.
It would be good to have the system take care of the priority, rather than doing this manually.

Obviously, we can prioritise each ticket easily, but the category is the tricky question. I'm experimenting with using departments at the moment (Workshop-warrenty, Workshop-repairs. etc.), but theres also the posibility to use flags or labels - however reporting seems to be restricted with these?

I need to look at the SLA function, since if this will re-prioritise based on flag or label, then I can dump all workshop tickets in one department, and let the SLA elves sort out the tickets - Hmm, I may have answered my own question

[craigbrass]

The tickets section has Priorities which can be used for putting more important jobs first.

I was only testing it for the service / workshop department so just created departments for them (Regular Servicing, Repair, etc). I see you are using it for other departments so the only thing you can do is like Workshop - Repair, etc departments. V4 will allow sub-departments I am told so that will make it easier.