How to use Targetprocess for customer support

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Targetprocess is a tool that offers a wide range of features beyond traditional project management. While it is commonly used for moving cards on a Kanban Board, planning and tracking work, and checking reports, it can also be leveraged to enhance customer support.

Targetprocess support process is basically email based and can turn incoming emails into requests in your Targetprocess account. You can also activate a dedicated Service Desk to make it easy for users to submit requests, view their status, and vote for ideas.

Set up process and workflow

To enable the Requests practice for your process, navigate to:

Process Setup → Your Process → Practices
Alternatively, go to: Settings → Processes → Edit your process

Once enabled, review and customize the default request workflow to align with your team's process. For example, you may want to:

Add an Active state to represent requests currently being worked on
Introduce a Waiting for Fix state to indicate confirmed issues pending resolution by the development team

The workflow supports both Issues and Ideas. Feel free to use our process as a foundation, but make sure you customize it to fit your particular company.

Set up email communication

Receive emails

Most of our customer requests are created from incoming emails. Sending an email to support@yourcompany.com is a fast and intuitive way for customers to reach you.

Create a Mail Integration profile at Settings → Integrations to start receiving emails:

You can apply your own custom rules for turning emails into work items. For example: you can make questions about licensing go straight to your sales team.

Keep customers up-to-date with email notifications

The easiest way to notify a customer about the progress of their request is an email notification. The notification goes to the customer as soon as a comment is added to the request:

By the way, you can change the default email templates. Additional information on email notifications is available here in our user guide.

Use Service Desk

Targetprocess provides a free, standalone Service Desk application that enables customers and external users to submit and track issues and ideas. It offers a user-friendly interface for external collaboration with your internal team. To access the Service Desk, you can create a login and password—making it a convenient alternative or complement to the email integration described above. You can choose to use either option based on your workflow requirements, or enable both for greater flexibility.

service desk

Configure email notifications for Service Desk users

Find detailed information in the dedicated article Configure email notifications for Service Desk users

Using Targetprocess views to manage requests

Targetprocess offers a highly flexible environment for configuring views tailored to your support team's workflow. To get started, select one of the pre-configured support solutions. You can then customize and extend it to suit your team's specific requirements. As your support processes evolve, continue refining your views using advanced capabilities such as:

Custom filters
Mashups
Visual encoding
Card customization
Automation rules

These features allow you to build a dynamic and efficient workspace. For example, our support team uses a board that shows requests per person and per state:

In this case, the system uses color-coded indicators to visually track Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance for requests. It helps prioritize responses based on how long a request has remained unanswered:

Green: The request was submitted less than 1 hour ago, offering an opportunity to respond promptly and deliver a strong customer experience.
Yellow: The request has been pending for over 20 hours without a response, indicating that immediate attention is recommended.
Red: The request has been pending for more than 24 hours and requires urgent action to meet SLA expectations.

This color-coding is implemented through a custom mashup, which you can use and adapt to your specific needs.

Regardless of your specific support process, you can create views that highlight the information most critical to your team. For instance, you may choose to categorize requests by Business Value and display them in List View for streamlined organization and prioritization.

A list of requests, categorized by business value

You can add your own custom fields, like SLA, Type of Request and Department. You can separate work by Projects, Teams, tags or individual requesters. It’s hard to list all the possibilities here, but if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. We’ll help you explore all the different possibilities for your team.

Related items

In Targetprocess, requests are not isolated entities. They can be related to other items, such as user stories, bugs, or projects, to provide context and facilitate collaboration. Relations help to establish connections between different items, enabling teams to work more efficiently and effectively. You can add a relation to any item (including another request) at the request details page. New backlog items can be created from incoming requests as well.

A view that’s based on relations will look something like this:

Merge requests

Merging duplicate requests is an essential feature in Targetprocess, particularly for managing ideas or handling a high volume of requests.

To merge duplicate requests, follow these steps:

Identify the duplicates in either the Relations tab or the Request Duplicate section.
Mark the requests as duplicates.
Choose the main request that you want to keep.
Click Merge to merge the duplicate requests.

After merging, the duplicate requests will be closed, and their content will be added as comments to the main request.

Reports

Your support team can also benefit from the Reporting functionality of Targetprocess. For example, you can see trends for newly received requests. This allows you to take a proactive action towards solving future problems -- such as hiring new support agents before an overload happens.

There are some helpful templates that are tagged as Help Desk that will allow you to build reports like Issue resolution time or Issues Lead Time vs Business Value. You can also build your own custom reports.

Dashboards

Dashboards in Targetprocess provide valuable insights into your support activities. As a Support Manager, you can quickly assess the state of support, monitor key metrics, and make informed decisions. You can view everything at a glance and easily add comments, widgets, or other lists and reports as needed