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), or depending on ACLs they may see their team's tickets or their organisations tickets. From the customer perspective, one or more specialists provide answers and support until resolution. However, the system behind the scenes is far more comprehensive.

TRIAGE

When a ticket is raised, our automated systems immediately analyse the request and link any applicable information; attached files, content, past tickets, knowledge base articles, site records, or system configurations. This gives our specialists a comprehensive view before they even begin working on your issue.

QUEUE OR PINNING

How a ticket is handled depends on its urgency and the type of support involved.

Queued tickets are handled in rotation. If you raise a ticket because your printer isn't working, or for services such as hosted email, O365, or telephony, first line picks it up in turn. Each response puts the ticket back into the queue, so different specialists may handle successive replies. On lower service levels (for example SLA4, 9–5 Monday–Friday) this is perfectly appropriate, and responses can take a little longer without impacting the service you've agreed and costed appropriately.

Pinned tickets work differently. If a system or server is down, or the work falls under a higher service level such as SLA8 or SLA9 (24/7, with 1-hour and 30-minute response respectively), or an emergency team like Infrastructure, Virtualisation or Cloud;  the ticket is pinned to a single team specialist. That specialist stays with you until the issue is resolved, until you ask them to park it, or until they hand over to a colleague at the end of their shift. Your responses are actioned immediately, with the specialist effectively waiting on them, to keep the time to fix (TTF) as short as humanly possible.

This is where SLACK matters. We dynamically measure SLACK — the latency between responses, both ours and yours, because on a pinned ticket every minute of delay directly extends the TTF. It's less critical on queued tickets, but on pinned work it's the key metric that keeps a resolution moving at pace.

TASKS AND DELEGATION

Behind the scenes, and never visible to you;  tasks and internal tickets let us bring multi-disciplinary expertise to bear on a single issue.

Take an email delivery problem with a bounce-back message. Our system detects this and automatically compiles the technical detail, such as email headers, along with information about your email services,  and assigns it to a messaging specialist, who runs further diagnostics.

From there, one of two things happens. If they know the cause lies elsewhere,  say it's clearly a DNS problem,  they reassign the ticket to the DNS team directly. If they only suspect DNS, or aren't yet certain, they raise an internal ticket posing that question, adjoined to your original ticket, so the DNS team can weigh in without losing the thread. The same applies for a suspected SPF issue routed to infrastructure. Any of these can ultimately produce an internal task to implement a required change where needed. 

Throughout, everything is tracked across all teams in real time.

PIR AND RESOLUTION

Once the issue is resolved, the managing specialist reviews the actions and transcripts and writes a detailed synopsis in a Post Incident Report (PIR). This is stored with the ticket and a copy is provided to you.

For SLA8+ tickets, a manager then assesses how the ticket was handled and adds their own review.

Finally, our in-house LLMs combine the PIR, reviews, ticket overviews, and metrics into two outputs:

• Technical Analysis — a technical review drawing together the key points and excerpts from the PIR and review.
• Executive Analysis — a non-technical, board-level summary of the issue and its resolution.

Remote Access

When we require access to a system or services, which is required for some 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 a reputable Remote Access tool like Splashtop or Anydesk, which supports Linux, Mac and Windows as well as some mobile devices. 

Billing

We understand that every customer has different support needs and financial preferences, so we offer flexible billing for our HelpDesk services. You can choose from pre-pay or pay-as-you-go arrangements, with either fixed or variable rates. Support work can also be billed at a fixed price agreed in advance, or included as part of a maintenance agreement at no additional charge.

Where time and materials apply, our HelpDesk tracks and records every minute spent on your ticket, its sub-tickets, and any associated tasks. Responses under 5 minutes are not charged; all other work is rounded to the nearest 15 minutes. Rates are calculated according to the type of support provided (for example, first line, second line, infrastructure or virtualisation), your service level agreement, and the time of day the support was delivered, unless a fixed price has been agreed. Our rates are published transparently on our website at all times, or confirmed with you in advance.

This fair and transparent approach means you only ever pay for the support you actually need, while we continue to deliver the high-quality service 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.