Service Desk needs better time tracking functionality
(This is more feedback than anything else.)
We are an IT consulting firm servicing small, medium, and large customers. I've been evaluating a number of service desk platforms over the past few weeks to replace our existing system and I keep coming back to GoToAssist. We already use GTA Remote Support so it would be a great fit for us from that standpoint. We've already signed up for the service and are on our 30-day trial period (we already used up the free trial and needed more time to evaluate). The users I've assigned to test Service Desk really like how it works. Out of all of the platforms we've tried, SD visually looks the best and is easy for people to understand and use. We've got one major sticking point right now that will likely be the reason we have to continue our search for a new platform elsewhere: very limited time tracking options.
Based on other threads in this forum, it's clear that other users have had similar issues with SD. It really comes down to the fact that we service many different customers and good time tracking is what stands between us getting paid or not. Here are our main problems:
1. No ability to add custom fields to time entries. Asking engineers to remember various codes entered in the time entry comment field is unrealistic and prone to mistakes. Due to some 'creative' tax laws in our state, some of the time logged for a single incident may be taxable, some of it may not. Our current solution has a drop-down with a number of pre-defined activity types which are mapped to either taxable or non. There is currently no way to do this in Service Desk.
2. Time entries are not at all tied to any specific comment / message / update made by an engineer. We need the ability to attach a time entry to ALL updates. If an engineer logs a comment in an incident, we need the ability to enter time specifically for that work, not just track it globally for the entire ticket. This includes tracking the custom field mentioned above.
3. No built-in timer. Ideally, we want to make time entry less of a hassle for engineers. They should be able to click a timer when they start working on an incident, type in what they did in an associated comment, and hit pause/stop when finished. This also ties into the previous two items.
As I mentioned before, I see that other people have asked about these sorts of things and the replies from Citrix are generally "it's on the list, but not a priority." I can't think of any priority higher than making sure the people using your service are able to properly bill their own customers.
Thanks
Brent
We are an IT consulting firm servicing small, medium, and large customers. I've been evaluating a number of service desk platforms over the past few weeks to replace our existing system and I keep coming back to GoToAssist. We already use GTA Remote Support so it would be a great fit for us from that standpoint. We've already signed up for the service and are on our 30-day trial period (we already used up the free trial and needed more time to evaluate). The users I've assigned to test Service Desk really like how it works. Out of all of the platforms we've tried, SD visually looks the best and is easy for people to understand and use. We've got one major sticking point right now that will likely be the reason we have to continue our search for a new platform elsewhere: very limited time tracking options.
Based on other threads in this forum, it's clear that other users have had similar issues with SD. It really comes down to the fact that we service many different customers and good time tracking is what stands between us getting paid or not. Here are our main problems:
1. No ability to add custom fields to time entries. Asking engineers to remember various codes entered in the time entry comment field is unrealistic and prone to mistakes. Due to some 'creative' tax laws in our state, some of the time logged for a single incident may be taxable, some of it may not. Our current solution has a drop-down with a number of pre-defined activity types which are mapped to either taxable or non. There is currently no way to do this in Service Desk.
2. Time entries are not at all tied to any specific comment / message / update made by an engineer. We need the ability to attach a time entry to ALL updates. If an engineer logs a comment in an incident, we need the ability to enter time specifically for that work, not just track it globally for the entire ticket. This includes tracking the custom field mentioned above.
3. No built-in timer. Ideally, we want to make time entry less of a hassle for engineers. They should be able to click a timer when they start working on an incident, type in what they did in an associated comment, and hit pause/stop when finished. This also ties into the previous two items.
As I mentioned before, I see that other people have asked about these sorts of things and the replies from Citrix are generally "it's on the list, but not a priority." I can't think of any priority higher than making sure the people using your service are able to properly bill their own customers.
Thanks
Brent
