How to turn Microsoft 365 Group into a service desk

Probably, you passed through the adoption stage and find out that Microsoft Groups connect you to the main communication tools like SharePoint, Yammer, Teams, OneDrive, Skype, and Outlook. It’s all about how to configure communication within your organization.

But what’s about communication with your customers or issue tracking? With Microsoft 365 Groups you can create a separate team site for any project you are working on and then you can empower team site with Plumsail HelpDesk for Microsoft 365. It’s quite easy — just install it there. Here you can find instructions on how to do that. During the installation, you need to provide URL of Microsoft 365 Group site and that’s it, in five minutes you’ve got a ticketing system.

With HelpDesk, you can configure assigning tickets to any Microsoft 365 Groups you have. Members of that Group will be notified about the new ticket and team members will be able to see pertinent information about the ticket and help solve customer concerns more efficiently.

Service desk integrated into Microsoft 365 sounds pretty cool as you get all power of apps like Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Planner, OneDrive etc. Below I will take a deeper look at this but now I’d like to show off a little bit.

In Plumsail HelpDesk, you have everything for providing a great support. Like widget for end-users where you can provide a UI for internal or external users without giving them access to all tickets.

Or with HelpDesk you will have the scheduler, so you can set up different actions on unsolved tickets.

Also, with help of customer satisfaction survey, you can let your customers rate every solved ticket. With one click on the icon, End-Users can express how they feel about your customer service.

Guess, that’s enough about HelpDesk, let’s get back to the main point, what’s the profit of merging Microsoft 365 Groups and HelpDesk?

Planner

You can configure a proper project management with Microsoft Planner. Here you can create a card for every task where you can add comments, attachments, date, status and so on. Every member of the Group has access to plans and will get notifications arrive as an email. Use Planner for assigning tasks for team members or control working on some project. For example, you can create a task related to a ticket from HelpDesk and monitor how things are going. In task’s card, you can specify due date and assignee with whom you can have a chat below.

Plans can be public or private: if the Group is public the Plan is public.

OneNote

Don’t keep it to yourself! Share ideas between your colleagues. Especially when it is easier integrated into your group activities.

The knowledge base in HelpDesk will complement this one. Use it to store answers to the most common questions. It is possible that somebody already answered the similar question earlier. You can check knowledge base before answering the question.

OneDrive

Using OneDrive is a great way for sharing docs outside your organization. OneDrive will be your personal content repository that allows you to share information such as documents and files with people you invite. In HelpDesk, you can add attachments to your ticket to provide more context for clients on the current case but OneDrive optimized for storing your business content. So, you can go bigger.

Outlook

You can maintain your clients from your mailbox. For example, by configuring simple triggers in HelpDesk, you can configure ticket’s properties like status, priority or category. Check this quick tip to find out how to do that. It goes without saying that Outlook gives you more mobility as you can provide support on-the-go.

Microsoft Teams

Teams is a great tool for a real-time conversation. Imagine that your Tier 1 supporters can easily reach Tier 2 guys while having a conversation with someone from Sales. And at the same time, each of them has a separate conversation with their team. Real booster for the productivity.

And some quick wins

When you install HelpDesk, you got all tools to measure how your clients feel about support process and how it works in general — use reports to learn everything. And it is just handy to keep detailed records of all customer’s issues in one place (especially when we talk about some end-of-year review :))