Our last couple of posts have dealt with the topic of complaint management. We’ve talked about what constitutes complaint management; business areas where complaint management is critical; and four different benefits you get by using actual software as opposed to email and spreadsheets to manage complaints. This time, we’ll discuss how Issuetrak’s features can be used to track complaint management issues and manage your processes.
Why Issuetrak? What’s special about it?
Issuetrak is a powerful and flexible tracking tool that can be used to keep all communication about any kind of business issue in one place. Issuetrak customers capture customer and product support issues, emails to and from their customers, internal team items, help desk tickets, and workflow processes. The ultimate goal is to make sure everything runs smoothly. For complaint management, Issuetrak can capture all back and forth communication, making sure everyone stays informed, and nothing gets lost.
In a nutshell, Issuetrak provides the following:
- All email communication captured on the issue record
- Accountability into who owns and is resolving the issue
- Access control for issue visibility
- Full reporting on every field on every issue
If your goal is to track, resolve, and report on every complaint your company receives, Issuetrak might be the tool for you!
What Features set Issuetrak apart?
Issuetrak has an extensive feature set, but certain features lend themselves well to any complaint management process.
Email Communication
Issuetrak has both incoming and outgoing email processing. That means that if complaints are submitted by email or through a webform, it's automatically turned into an issue. If attachments are included, those process into attachments on the issue. Automatic acknowledgements are sent out whenever an issue is created, regardless of whether it was entered by a support rep or created by email. Throughout the resolution process, any updates to the complaint are emailed to those involved. This allows back and forth correspondence with the customer via email, with everything added to the issue history. Then when the issue is closed, a final update goes out to the customer, letting them know the final solution.
Automatic Issue Assignment & Workflow
It’s important for you to know which team member “owns” which complaints. You may also have a specific multiple-step process that you need to enforce. Issuetrak’s automatic assignments let you set up rules that will automatically send an issue to any agent or group of agents based on type, priority, submission date or time, submitting company, or any combination of these. You can also use Issuetrak tasks to set up workflows with each step set up to go to a different individual or group. With branching workflows, you can follow a process that changes, depending on the answer to a yes or no question. Submission templates can be utilized to submit common items that are pre-assigned, and to kick off workflows.
Customizable Values and Dropdowns
Every dropdown field in Issuetrak can be modified to put in data relevant to your business requirements. Additionally, an unlimited number of User Defined fields are available to configure as needed. This includes a field called Substatus, which lets you define every step in your issue lifecycle. With Dashboard reporting, substatuses allow you to see at a glance where every open issue is in the process towards resolution. Causes let you define a series of reasons why an issue occurred to help with root cause analysis and trend reporting. When closing issues, using pre-defined solutions makes sure that all resolution responses are uniform.
Access Control
Sometimes you’ll want to limit what complaints are seen by what users. Issuetrak offers different options for visibility control. For example, you might allow users to only see complaints or requests they have a specific role in, or you might set limits based on what department owns the issues. You can even control certain dropdowns like type or Issue Templates (formerly called Quick Picks), making sure that only certain groups of users can select them.
You can also restrict knowledge base articles, making sure information is only shared with the appropriate groups. Outside of standard visibility options, email subscribers (formerly called distribution lists) can be granted view-only access. This works well for managers who may not need to input issues, and instead only need to view and report on issues.
Detailed Reporting
Once you have a mechanism in place, it becomes critical to be able to get useful information back. Issuetrak offers multiple methods of reporting. The Dashboard gives you a snapshot of all open complaints, sliced and diced by type, priority, substatus, submitting customer, assigned department, and more. A search can be run on any issue, with common searches saved for frequent use by multiple users. The most granular option is the built-in Report Writer that allows you to create your own queries and detailed reports. Report Writer Reports and Saved Searches can even be scheduled to be automatically delivered by email, making it even easier to stay on top of all your complaints.
Issuetrak sounds awesome. What’s the catch?
There is no catch! Issuetrak has been around for over 25 years, producing solid issue tracking and process management software. With a deep feature set and extremely flexible nature, we have customers using Issuetrak from all over the world in almost every industry imaginable.
If you’ve never taken a test drive of Issuetrak, now is the time! Speak to one of our knowledgeable Product Experts who can show you exactly how Issuetrak can handle your complaint management process.
Topics from this blog: Complaint Management
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