The GEN HelpDesk: A Comprehensive Support System

Why the HelpDesk?

At GEN, our HelpDesk is the cornerstone of our support infrastructure, designed to deliver exceptional service through a unified system that connects experienced specialists who are best positioned to resolve customer issues swiftly and effectively.

The HelpDesk meticulously records and tracks everything; from communications and time spent to materials used and resolutions implemented. This comprehensive documentation ensures that nothing is forgotten or sidelined, even during the busiest and most chaotic periods. It's this systematic approach that allows our specialists to manage their workload effectively, ensuring that no individual or team is over or under-utilised.

For management, the HelpDesk provides invaluable oversight on performance metrics and service levels, allowing us to maintain our high standards of support. Perhaps most importantly, it facilitates the accumulation of experience and solutions directly related to customer issues and challenges, creating a knowledge base that grows more valuable with each resolved ticket.

All of these elements combine to ensure the fastest possible time to fix and the best possible service level for our customers, which is why we've invested so heavily in developing and refining our HelpDesk system.

Why We've Moved Beyond Phone Support

In the past, like most support organisations, we offered traditional phone support. However, we've strategically phased this out in favour of our fully featured ticketing system for several compelling reasons:

Our ticketing system avoids linguistic issues, which is particularly valuable when supporting customers across the globe. It ensures clear communication regardless of accents, language barriers, or connection quality. Our system can even translate replies into the users currently set language.

The ticketing approach saves our customers money because we only charge for the time spent resolving the issue, not for lengthy phone conversations that often include time spent trying to communicate the problem whilst engaging in unrelated chit-chat.

Every interaction is logged and recorded, providing both parties and management with a complete audit trail that ensures accountability and transparency in our service delivery.

The system allows us to build a comprehensive history for each customer and issue type, creating an invaluable knowledge base that enables even swifter resolutions for future support requests.

Overall, our ticketing system is more cost-effective for both GEN and our customers, allowing us to provide high-quality support at competitive rates.

How It Works

Most customers see only their own tickets on the HelpDesk, which they raise directly (or which may be raised by an automated system). From the customer perspective, one or more specialists provide answers and support until resolution. However, the system behind the scenes is far more comprehensive.

When a ticket is raised, our automated systems immediately analyse the request and link any applicable information, such as past tickets, knowledge base articles, site records, or system configurations. This provides our specialists with a comprehensive view of your environment before they even begin working on your issue.

The ticket is placed in a queue there it is triaged within a few minutes to asses the urgency and then it is allocated to the correct team (or in some cases teams). 

Internally, tasks are often created for specialists to undertake specific work, and internal tickets may be created between teams to leverage multi-disciplinary expertise. For example, if you report an email delivery problem with a bounce-back message, our system will detect this and automatically compile technical information from the email headers, along with details about your email services.

A specialist from our messaging team will be assigned to the ticket and perform additional diagnostics. They might determine that it could be a DNS issue and raise an internal ticket to the DNS team for their expertise. Alternatively, they might suspect an SPF issue and create an internal ticket with the infrastructure team to investigate. This could ultimately result in an internal task for one of these teams to implement a necessary change.

Throughout this process, everything is tracked, and the case specialist, team manager, and support managers can see all responses and actions taken by these teams in real-time. 

All shell interactions are logged and screens recorded especially for remote support work and this is stored with the ticket temporarily. 

Once the issue is resolved, the managing specialist will then review the actions and transcripts and provide a detailed synopsis of the issue, the cause and resolution. This information is then stored with the ticket and a copy is provided to the customer. 

This approach keeps customers isolated from the potentially complex technical aspects of case resolution while allowing many different teams to work cohesively towards a solution. While the customer only interacts with their case specialist(s), in many instances, a catalogue of people with various specialisations were involved in reaching the resolution.

Remote Access

When we require access to a system or services, which is required for most tickets, then our systems will establish a tunnel for that specialist using NetBird, TailScale, ZeroTier, or other dynamic secure connectivity. The session is only open for the duration of the ticket and is immediately closed afterwards. At no point are credentials exposed to anyone except where something unsupported in automation is required, such as FortiClient, etc. 

For Desktop Support (or where desktop support is required) then we use AnyDesk as the solution, which supports Linux, Mac and Windows as well as some mobile devices. 

Billing

We understand that different customers have different support needs and financial preferences, which is why we offer flexible billing options for our HelpDesk services. Customers can choose from pre-pay, pay-as-you-go, or inclusive billing arrangements for support work, and our HelpDesk ensures accurate billing of time and materials in line with your chosen arrangement.

Every interaction with your ticket, its sub-tickets, and associated tasks is meticulously tracked and recorded. Upon resolution, a comprehensive billing record is created. The rates charged are calculated based on the type of support provided, your service level agreement, and the time of day the support was delivered. These rates are transparently published on our website at all times.

The HelpDesk automatically determines the correct rate and applies it to each interaction and task. At the conclusion of each ticket, the case specialist assesses whether the issue is billable; and in many cases, it is not. For example, if you experience an email issue that is determined to be our fault or falls within the service level offered for a specific service, there would be no charge (or no deduction from your support quota).

Conversely, if the support provided is billable time, billing is processed either as an invoice or as a deduction from your pre-paid support quota, depending on your arrangement with us.

This transparent and fair billing system ensures that you only pay for the support you need, while we maintain the high-quality service that GEN is known for.

Other Configurations

Custom scenarios are supported where possible, feasible and safe providing that we are able to operate our systems, and ensure that all the monitoring and analysis is in place to provide the best in class service. 

We do expose our HelpDesk via API for larger clients to allow them to build custom interfaces for raising, defining and analysing tickets and there is no charge for this feature.