Basic CRMdesk Elements

Purpose

To provide maximum efficiency, your CRMdesk includes the following logically related entities:

• Customer

• Category

• Role

• User

• Question

• Question Status

• Knowledge Base Record

• Knowledge Base Access Level

Definitions and uses

Customer – a private person or an organization representative willing to learn about your products and/or services and their specific aspects for the purpose of making operating or purchasing decisions. Every customer has a corresponding record in the CRMdesk customer database. Customer records are used:

• To identify question submitters: each question always relates to the customer who initiated it;

• To e-mail notifications and newsletters;

• For analytical purposes - to generate CRMdesk reports;

• To control each customer’s level of access to the Knowledge Base.

CRMdesk supports an unlimited amount of customers and questions (tickets).

Category – a physical product or a service marketed and/or supported by your company. Categories are identified by their titles. Every question in the system must refer to a category record. A category system record may be used to refer to a particular product, service or family of products. Categories are also used in reporting as grouping attributes. There is no limit for the number of categories you wish to maintain in the system.

Each category may be subdivided into an unlimited number of subcategories to enhance question search and classification. Linking a question to a subcategory is optional.

Role – a set of system permissions to perform certain actions on questions (e.g. open, move, delete, reassign etc.). Primarily, roles are a convenient tool for user management. A single role can be assigned to a group of users, so you only need to specify all necessary permissions for the role without having to specify permissions individually for each user. The only system privilege that cannot be defined by roles is the system administration permission. In addition, each CRMdesk role defines a layout of questions quick-access page.

User – a member of your customer support team registered in CRMdesk. Users are identified by their alphanumeric IDs. Each user record also contains user’s encrypted password, name, and e-mail address. User’s permissions are defined in the User Role, except for the system administration permission that is defined directly in the user record. Thus, user records are used:

• For user identification while logging into the Support Desk;

• For user identification and logging in question handling (e.g. replying to a question or moving it);

• To control question assignment;

• To define user’s permissions by means of role assignment;

• As e-mail address references for automatic e-mail notification;

• As an analytical attribute in reports.

Question – one of the following:

• A request for information about a product submitted to your support team by a customer;

• A detailed record of the communication between a customer and support team members with respect to a request submitted by the customer.

Each question acquires a unique numeric ID and has a header and a full discussion thread, which contains the complete history of communication between the customer and your support staff. A question can be accessed only by the customer who created it and Support Desk users.

Question Status – a field in a question record used to identify the current processing stage of the record. The question status is used for sorting question lists and for defining whether the customer or the support representative is expected to update the record.

Knowledge Base Record – a frequently asked question/answer (FAQ) (or any other published document), discussion topic or an idea. Unlike questions, Knowledge Base records can be made available to all registered customers or restricted groups of customers by means of access level permissions. Customers can rate each Knowledge Base record’s usefulness, which is then reflected in the Knowledge base statistics and helps you evaluate the quality of your FAQs and answers, popularity of ideas or discussion topics.

Knowledge Base Access Level – a means for grouping Knowledge Base records by their accessibility for customers. In this way, a record may be accessible either for all of your support site visitors, for all registered customers, or for a specific group of customers only. You can also define custom access levels to achieve a higher level of flexibility.

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