How to enjoy a stress-free holiday using Service desk Automation

Christmas is a festival that brings joy and happiness. But if you’re an IT agent, it also brings added responsibility. 

It’s that time of the year! – Your IT team is understaffed, with most being away on holiday, spending some quality time with their families.  But it is important to ensure optimal support performance and uninterrupted support even with a small team and limited resources. Freshservice has several automation features that help you get through this challenge. 

Here are a few simple tips that will allow you to enjoy a stress-free holiday.

Have a gameplan

If you want to efficiently handle the requests that come in during the holiday season, you’ll have to plan beforehand. Get a list of agents who are going to be away, so you can allocate responsibilities to those present. This way, every agent will know exactly what they’re supposed to do. 

Route Tickets to the right agents

If you’re working with a small IT team for this holiday season, you can use the workflow automator to create a workflow that will route tickets only to the specified agents and not to the ones on vacation. This way, tickets will be assigned to the right agents and the SLA won’t be affected. 

Another thing you can do with the workflow automator is automate out of office replies to those who raise tickets during the holiday season. Whenever a ticket is raised, you can set up an action to send an email to the requester. 

Pro Tip: If your entire team is going to be away for the holiday season (which is not always the case), keep a couple of test laptops on the floor for your employees to access in case they run into some trouble with their machines. You can mention this in the out of office email, and ask them to email the serial number of the machine as a reply to the ticket raised. 

Let the Supervisor become your sidekick

You can use Supervisor to automate a variety of tasks. This runs on all tickets once every hour and works based on time and event-based triggers. You can use Supervisor for a variety of scenarios.  

For example, you can create a rule to send a reminder email to your available agents, with information about their unresolved tickets. Alternatively, you can also schedule a supervisor rule to automatically send an update email to the requester every 24 or 48 hours. This way, you can continue to effectively communicate necessary updates to your requesters. 

Bulk Scenario Automation

If you’re someone who uses Scenario Automation to complete a set of tasks or perform a set of actions while working on a ticket, you can now do it for multiple tickets. Instead of executing a scenario from the ticket details page, you can select multiple tickets and execute a scenario right from the tickets list page. You can also use scenarios created by other agents in their absence. This saves you a lot of time and makes you more efficient, especially during the holiday season where you and your team are juggling between many things.

We hope that these tips will help you provide uninterrupted support with a minimal team, and will also give you enough time to enjoy a stress-free holiday this season. 

Blog cover by Sharmila