Software tools are available in plenty to manage your help desk. However, very few of them have the flexibility to interact with other tools that you already use in your internal workflow management. The interaction between your help desk software and project management is especially important for the following reasons:
To avoid information loss
Bugs and feature requests from customers are not usually resolved at the help desk level by support agents. These have to be taken care of by a different team using an entirely different software system for managing those customer requests. If customer emails are manually forwarded to individual members of the development team who then have to update the content of that email in their project management software, there is a high likelihood of emails getting lost in the process. But if you have a system where project management is tightly coupled with your help desk software, there is absolutely no room for such losses.
To close the loop between developers and customers
Developers do not typically interact with customers even though most of the development roadmap is guided by customer feedback on the product. By integrating your project management tool with the help desk software, developers have the opportunity to understand customer mindset and requirements without having to interact with them personally.
Developers are regularly given a list of features to work on or bugs to resolve. This integration helps them derive more meaning for their work by giving them an opportunity to understand why those features and solutions matter.
To speed up action on bug reports
In the absence of an integration between the tools, it will be tough to efficiently manage the lifecycle of feature requests and bug reports. This inefficiency will lead to unnecessary time loss. Any delay in resolving customer issues will only reflect badly on the product. The best way to mitigate this is by adopting a workflow that will avoid unnecessary delays.
To create better accountability
If software systems are unable to interact with each other, then people using those systems have to necessarily interact outside the system. Since mail or face to face communication cannot be reliably documented, there is no accountability. Team members should be able to communicate within the system to be made accountable for their actions or the lack thereof.
If we truly believe that customer service is the new marketing, we need to adopt help desk tools and processes that will hold team members accountable for their actions. In the absence of documented communication, it is easy to blame somebody else for letting information slip through the cracks.
