Addition to Snippets - by Organisation

[Guest gregmarcroftorc]

I have been on a call with Bob Dickinson yesterday talking about how Hornbill is set up for our instance. From talking to Bob, it sounds like we have a more unique/specific way of working with Hornbill Service Manager than the majority of your clients and when we first moved over to Service Manager from Supportworks, we came up with a bit of a workaround at the time for our general use. In addition, there wasn't the more advanced functionality on offer back then (approx 2 years ago).

Currently, we have hundreds of services set up for all our different clients, which was seen as the best option at the time we moved over,  due to the way we use Hornbill. Bob has recently mentioned the benefits of us potentially amending this to just having 2 services. By moving over to having just 2 services this would potentially give us a number of other benefits and reduce a lot of manual admin tasks that we currently have to do.

The main drawback we have both seen is related to the adverse effect it would have on our use of snippets. Currently the Snippets only allow us to categorise them as 'Myself', 'Teams' or 'Service'. The Service Snippets therefore allow our customercare team to quickly and easily link snippets that uniquely relate to a particular client/organisation, to the service that is set up for them. For example, if we run an online survey for Organisation X, we would have set up a Service with a Request Configuration for Organisation X and from the Snippets section, we would then be able to quickly select any snippet we want to be related to Organisation X. We do not want to see any snippets from any other Organisation at this point because we have such a large number.

If we reverted to having just 2 services (our idea was one for internal staff raising a request, and another for external clients), then we would lose this flexibility when selecting snippets as all of our external clients would be under the same service and then when we go to select a snippet we would potentially have hundreds of different snippets appear for all our clients that we would have to scroll through and select.

Therefore, if an option was added for Organisation, this would solve the issue for us. We could then select a snippet by Organisation instead of Service. This would consequently allow us to make the amendment to services and help us in a lot of other different ways, like considering autologging and things like that. Currently we cannot move forward with this change until we know if my suggestion would be an option.

Please can you advise? 

Thanks

Greg

[Gerry]

@gregmarcroftorc

Thanks for your post.  My initial reaction is that "snippets by organisation" does not make much sense in the context of the original design intent behind snippets.  I can understand fully what function you are asking for and your explanation does a good job at describing how you have arrived at that point.  To drill down further I am keen to better understand how you are using snippets in your context.  So you have one or more services per customer, your customers from what you describe are "external organisations"?  You explanation suggests that you have unique snippets for each customer?  How many snippets per customer do you have?  and how unique are these snippets between customers?

If we have a better understand of how this is working for you we might be able to come up with alternative solution/approach.   The reason why I ask these questions is that right now Snippets are a function of the Service Manager application, but at some point probably during the course of this year we will be pushing that functionality down the stack into the core so both collaboration and other applications can also implement snippets.  When this happens the design constraints around the functionality would get tighter and organising snippets by organisation is not currently in the thinking - so I am keen to understand how you use this and what business function/value it delivers. 

Thanks,

Gerry

[Steve Giller]

Would you be having a number of Catalog Items under each of the Services? If so, would having Snippets per Catalog Item achieve what you need?

[nasimg]

Hi Gerry

Definitely hoping snippets use can be expanded (other than when emailing).

I believe it should be available anywhere the analyst can enter text in the ticket (update, on hold, resolve, etc).

Having 'Myself', 'Teams' or 'Service' is good, but I can see why organisation would be useful too. We are supporting multiple organisation and it would be a way of categorising the snippet - which is how I would "organisation" if it was available.

Nasim

[Gerry]

Hi @nasimg

Thanks for your comment, yes I agree it should be uniformly everywhere, but like many features we tend to develop them higher up in the stack until there are mature use-cases and then if they can be brought down the stack into the platform thats what we would generally try to do. The challenge is though, once we bring functions down we also have to genericise (is that a real word! lol) them and that generally means understand *all* possible use cases and accommodate them, which can lead to some generalisation.  To me, a snippet is a template of sorts, and so it would seem odd, or at least I am trying to understand when specifically it would be useful to have a template thats only useful for one organisation as opposed to a dynamic template that is personalised by the data held agains a specific organisation (for example).  So from my view, the template would be "expanded/personalised" in the context of the organisation, rather than having a template thats specific to one organisation. 

Clearly thats not the only way to think about it though which is why I am trying to get some specific use case examples. 

Make sense?

Gerry

 

[nasimg]

Hi @Gerry

If I give my example of an organisation - with SSO I send the following info to staff having issues logging on, templated answer but specific to that org. As I said I would be using it more as a way of separating the snippets. What is much more important to me is getting availability of what we currently have across the platform - it really is something if used would be helpful wherever text is entered.

[Gerry]

@nasimg

Thanks for the info, I can see how you are using the snippets, are you able to show (would there be any confidentiality issues) us what is inside each of those three new starter snippets, how much difference is there in the content?  Could the differences be injected in based on the context (aka the organisation) within which they are being used? 

Gerry

[nasimg]

@gerry

Nothing confidential but the links to help file on the various intranets, and username: domain\ which are different for each org. They are not something we can inject - unless you know better

I'll send you the snippets direct to you so you can check them

Nasim

[Gerry]

@nasimg

Well possibly not now, but there is always the possibility that each organisation, user, customer, contact and other entities could not include something like "Extra Snippet Variables" or something similar so you could template and then inject what you need thats specific to each entity (organisation in this instance).   These are the thoughts I need to have when specifying functional requirements for something like Snippets before it makes it into the platform as generic capability.  Does that make sense?

Gerry

[nasimg]

@Gerry

Yes - not easy designing this, drip feeding is never good so getting a firm list of requirements is the best way.

Obviously as a customer I want what we have now on all the options a ticket has (as I said wherever an analyst can enter text).

To me the snippet is an advanced clipboard utility....

Nasim

[Gerry]

@nasimg

Quote

To me the snippet is an advanced clipboard utility....

Challenge accepted.... lets see if we can ultimately make it more than that

Gerry

[Guest gregmarcroftorc]

@Gerry @DeadMeatGF Thanks for your responses.

I will try and explain better how snippets work for the Company I work for - ORC International. We have hundreds of clients (I am also referring to these as Organisations on this topic) from over the years that we have created a 'service' for. For each of these Services we just have 1 Catalog Item with the Organisation Name as the Catalog Item.

E.g

Service name: "Customercare Support - Organisation A". Catalog Item: "Organisation A"

Service name ""Customercare Support - Organisation B". Catalog Item: "Organisation B"

The way our snippets work currently is that we can create unique snippets that we want to use for that Organisation. However, as explained, this doesn't actually work via an 'Organisation' option within Hornbill, it is purely because of the way we have set up our services (we opted for this approach 2 years ago) to reflect each Organisation that exists as one of our clients.

With a lot of our clients (Orgs), we provide an online survey for them repeatedly over several years, thus adding an extra element to how many snippets we have for that Organisation. We do not have a lot of set snippets that can be used across all of our clients because a lot of their circumstances will be different. So using Organisation A as an example, we may set up the following snippets for them and assign to the Service we have set up for them so that only that particular Service will bring up their unique/specific snippets. 

Organisation  A (2015) - Snippet 1

Organisation A (2015) - Snippet 2

Organisation A (2015) - Snippet 3

Organisation A (2016) - Snippet 1

Organisation A (2017) - Snippet 1

Sometimes our external client contact for a particular survey will actually give us set text they want us to send so again, this is very unique to each client/org of ours and we cannot use that snippet over multiple clients.

As in the example, you can see that we have several Snippets that we use that build up and this means that if they were all merged under one 'external' service it would take us a lot longer to locate a snippet for that Organisation each time and we would have to scroll down, whereas only the snippets for the Org we are dealing with in that ticket comes up usually.

Hope that makes sense, if not please let me know.

 

 

 

[Gerry]

@gregmarcroftorc

So I guess a similar question to what I posted above to @nasimg, what is the content in those snippets? if you had the ability to inject contextual information into the snippet when you use it would that allow you to use generic snippet templates that work generically but for all clients?

Gerry

[Guest gregmarcroftorc]

12 minutes ago, Gerry said:

@gregmarcroftorc

So I guess a similar question to what I posted above to @nasimg, what is the content in those snippets? if you had the ability to inject contextual information into the snippet when you use it would that allow you to use generic snippet templates that work generically but for all clients?

Gerry

I think what you are suggesting would work for a number of snippets but not all. For example:

Hi {{customerFirstName}},

If you joined Organisation A after DD/MM/YY you may not have received a link to complete the staff survey. Please contact the Organisation A Helpdesk. If they think you're eligible, the Organisation A team will work with you to ensure that we have all the relevant information we need to send you your link.

Please also contact Organisation A email address if you did join before DD/MM/YY but did not receive the survey link.

Thanks

This text was given to us by our client contact from 'Organisation A'. We wouldn't use it for any other client and 'Organisation B' may instruct us to use their own different text that they have provided to us, but I suppose similar types of emails would work in general across multiple clients of ours where our contact does not specify set text. But the snippet above is a more unique kind of snippet that we would use. We have some clients who also have even more unique than the above where we wouldn't have any similar emails needing to be sent to any other client. E..g:

Hi {{customerFirstName}},

In order for xxx to be changed, please send this request to your <manager name> and they will then log this with our survey team to make this change. Please find your <manager's/contact> email below:

<insert email address manually>

If you need any updates on the request, you should follow up with your <contact/manager name> in the first instance.

 

[Guest gregmarcroftorc]

@Gerry Any other thoughts on this?

Thanks

Greg

[Gerry]

Hi Greg,

We have discussed internally and we do have creating Snippets as a core feature on the agenda.  After discussions internally what we know is its a complex enough requirement that we need to write up detail around this. Your example is one of many that has to be considered in the overall design, as always making something generic without compromising functionality is always difficult.  The nature of any development we do around features that become part of the core is also relatively complicated business, it impacts all layers of the stack and needs to be built progressively, we of course also have to deal with migration of data that is already there and in use.  So, its on our agenda and we will have some requirements nailed down in the next 2-3 weeks at which point we will have a better sense of what effort is involved.  I will keep you posted, but so you have the right expectation, I would not expect anything to appear in the next 90 days or so.

 

Gerry