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Darren_Gardner's avatar
Darren_Gardner
New Contributor
14 years ago

Support Manager: How best to use

I'm in the process of setting up support manager and would like to know best practice for within software planner, especially how SmartBear itself use the product.



When a support ticket is created, do you have it generate something of type defect or do you generate something else that is linked to a defect?



Creating a support ticket within defects results in additional filters, etc required to seprate the support tickets and actual defects, rembering a support ticket may be a change request (new requirement request) a defect, user error, etc.



Regards, Darren
  • smiller257_1's avatar
    smiller257_1
    Contributor
    14 years ago
    Hi Darren,



    Yes, all Support Tickets flow into our Defects section of ALMComplete.  And yes, we did create a folder underneath Defects called Support Tickets and we have all those tickets flow into that folder.  Here are some other best practices we use:



    1. We have some specialized filters we created to analyze our support tickets.

    2. We use the Escalation Rules feature to trigger an email to us when support tickets need attention.  For example, we have these escalation rules:


    • Support Ticket - Active and Unassigned No Response for 90 Minutes - This is to guard against a ticket coming in and not getting assigned or responded to within 90 minutes.

    • Support Ticket - Active and Assigned Untouched for 2 Days - This is to guard against a ticket coming in, getting assigned, but falling through the cracks by not having any activity for 2 days.



    3. We have created a number of custom dashboards that show us how our tickets are trending and how fast we respond to the incoming tickets.  See those dashboards here: http://screencast.com/t/VqwHGS9Ma 
  • Darren_Gardner's avatar
    Darren_Gardner
    New Contributor
    14 years ago
    Thanks Steve,

    That is very helpful.

    Are those custom dashboards available to SaaS customers?

    Regards, Darren
  • smiller257_1's avatar
    smiller257_1
    Contributor
    14 years ago
    Those dashboards are Enterprise only right now, but we could create some custom dashboards (similar to those) via Professional Services, if you are interested in that.