We built our TOPdesk products with one simple goal in mind: to help you provide excellent service delivery at all times, for all your people.

But while we’re proud of our achievements to date, we are always on the lookout for ways to further improve our platform. That’s why we made a number of key improvements over the past year based on the valuable feedback that you, our customers, have provided us with.

As a passionate believer in the power of peer-to-peer collaboration, this feedback is not merely helpful to improving TOPdesk — it’s absolutely essential.

This article will cover a quick recap of our overarching product vision and strategy, the changes that we made over the past year, and what we have in store for the upcoming year. Oh, and if you want to check in more regularly then make sure to sign up for our quarterly product updates.

But for now, sit back, strap in, and let's take a whirlwind tour of our plans for the future.

The TOPdesk product vision

As a quick reminder, there are 5 key principles that act as the cornerstones of our platform: 

• Strong foundations: All knowledge, assets, people, requests and tasks must be streamlined in a centralized, easy-to-use platform.
• Customer-centricity: Our goal is to provide you with the tools you need to put your customers at the heart of your service delivery. 
• Collaboration: Cross-party collaboration is at the heart of excellent service delivery. We aim to support multi-disciplinary teams, bringing them closer together and helping them provide a seamless set of services at all times. 
• Self-reliance: TOPdesk is intuitive, meaning you can start using it straight away without needing to sit through training sessions or consult an expert.
• Ecosystem: TOPdesk is a customizable, flexible platform that gives you the freedom to sculpt its offerings according to organization’s needs.
  
  

Our ‘Foundations-First’ approach 

We have embraced a foundations-first approach. This means that we prioritize the foundations of our platform — the aspects that you need to work properly in order to orchestrate your organization's workflow. These include key functionalities like assets, knowledge and dashboarding, as well as more underlying (but just as important) elements like automation, privacy, and ease-of-use. 

If our foundations aren’t working as intended, your user experience will suffer. Hence, our foundations-first approach. 

But why are we telling you this?

Well, it provides some context to explain our recent work around concept reduction — in other words, removing the technical and functional differences between modules. To date, all modules on TOPdesk have been separate from each other on a technical level. This means that if you want to make a change to any one module then you’ll have to manually change all other modules as well to maintain consistency. This is why it took us months to introduce Rich Text functionality to Change Management, even though it was already available in Call Management, and why there are certain inconsistencies throughout the modules.

We are therefore introducing Tasks and Workflows to solve this problem. Tasks — what agents work with on a daily basis — will be developed to be API-driven and flexible. Workflows, on the other hand, will follow a BPMN approach that links tasks together to facilitate complex processes. 

As a result, we will be able to more quickly roll out new updates, our cost of production will decrease (meaning we can be even more innovative going forward), and our products will also become more reliable. 

Thanks to our foundations-first approach, we’re redesigning the TOPdesk architecture to ensure all your people, assets, locations and tasks are streamlined in an easy-to-use centralized space — giving you the information you require in the palm of your hand. 

What did we do in 2020?

We have spent the last year strengthening and enhancing our mobile offering, asset management capabilities, accessibility features, and the overall ecosystem. These improvements were all based on feedback that we received from our customers, so we cannot thank you enough.

Okay, let’s briefly dive into the specific changes that we made throughout 2020.

Mobile 

Our ultimate goal is to offer a fully functional on-the-go mobile workspace at your fingertips. Improving overall usability has therefore been a huge priority over the past year or so. For example, we recently rolled out a new feature that allows operators to access change activities on-the-go using their mobile.

This has the potential to reinvent facility managers and IT staff’s lives at work. Instead of having to troubleshoot one problem, head all the way back to their desk, log in, see what the next change activity they need to work on is, scribble down any relevant notes, and then go tackle the problem, they can instead just go from one activity to the next — safe in the knowledge that must-know information is on their phone at all times. 

We’ve also responded to the pressures of the pandemic by enabling TOPdesk users to reserve flexible workspace reservations remotely from their phones. And that’s not all. We’ve bolstered our usability by including a ‘Search’ option for all drop-down lists, enabling callers to more quickly find whatever they’re looking for. 

Asset Management

Our team has spent a significant amount of time and energy over the past year towards improving our asset management functionality. For example, we have added triggers and actions to the asset management tool, allowing you to set up automated reminders triggered by changes. This also makes it easier for you to audit your assets. Our new overview further improves filtering possibilities and sorting columns, while the asset type report now gives you the option to list all assets within a given year (as well as displaying metrics such as the total cost of assets listed).

Accessibility

We want to make the TOPdesk self-service portal accessible to all, regardless of users’ physical capabilities. Over the past year, we have introduced a range of features to improve our platform’s accessibility — let’s take a look at three of the most prominent changes that we’ve introduced.

We have made significant improvements to our screen reading support, navigation, and efficacy. We’ve added in new text options that allow for richer and more varied text options to make the text more readable for all users. And, we’ve also introduced dark mode, giving users the ability to change their text’s contrast according to their specific needs or personal preferences. 

These are just three examples of our recent efforts to make TOPdesk more accessible. To find out more about our approach towards accessibility, check out this blog.

Ecosystem

We have focused heavily on improving our ecosystem’s capabilities, working to both improve our existing APIs as well as adding a host of new options. 

Our brand new Zapier Integration allows users to connect to over 3,000 apps without needing to know how to code. Meanwhile, thanks to our Social Media Integration, you can integrate all customer service messages from Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter, and more into one place. 

And if you’re yearning to hear more from your customers then our Five Star Review solutions allow them to offer up feedback with just one click. 

What you can expect throughout 2021/2022

We have ambitious plans for the future.

However, we also recognize that we need to further hone our existing capabilities when it comes to TOPdesk mobile, asset management, and the overall ecosystem. By perfecting these areas, we can more fully dedicate ourselves to exciting new developments going forward — and ultimately, to finding new, better ways of serving our clients. 

Mobile 

We’re currently working on a number of developments to facilitate a great operator experience on mobile, ensuring that operators who are away from their desk can still do their jobs as seamlessly as possible. This is why we’ve now made it possible for operators to create, search, document, and edit calls, changes, and maintenance tasks while out and on-the-go — wherever they are. 

But wait — there’s more.

While the TOPdesk app is currently a progressive web application (PWA) that you can use by entering the URL into your browser, we will also be releasing a ‘proper’ app that will be available to download from most marketplaces. This app, which we will be working on this year, will further enhance the operators’ experience on mobile going forward. 

Asset management

Our goal is to ensure that all customers can satisfactorily use our Asset Management functionality, affording them greater control over their organization’s assets. We firmly believe that our upcoming projects — as well as our ongoing commitment to making usability improvements — will help us continually improve our Asset Management offering. 

Stock management will allow you to keep track of essentials and resupply as efficiently as possible. There will also be more self-reliant migration options towards the new asset management from the old software, making it easier to transition, and you will be able to easily find and select multiple assets before linking them to other assets.

Licence management is another big area. This will provide you with details regarding who has access to what license, if you need to scale your licenses up or down, and will help you manage all licence-related costs. 

We’re also currently working on the TOPdesk location inheritance functionality. This means that when you move one asset, all parent/child links will move too. 

Ecosystem

Reporting incidents within TOPdesk is one thing — but you likely want to use TOPdesk data for external analysis when reporting in other tools, too. While our recent work on OData Feeds allows you to integrate TOPdesk data into your Business Intelligence (BI) tool of choice, we want to expand on this type of functionality. 

Throughout this year, we’ll be working on a number of ecosystem-related developments. For instance, we will help you use Google Analytics for your TOPdesk self-service portal, exploring the impact of any changes made to your service portal and identifying areas where it can be further optimized. We also want users to be able to integrate their preferred chatbot solution of choice to their SSP, while we’re planning on making improvements to our 5-star review system. 

As already mentioned in previous examples, we will continue to expand our Marketplace solutions going forward — providing you with valuable integrations to enhance your TOPdesk experience and to make your organization more productive.

Let’s build a better TOPdesk together

We’re always looking for ways to improve our platform. That’s why we rely so heavily on user feedback — you know our product inside and out, work with it every day, and probably have a ton of ideas on how it could be improved.

So please, get in touch with us and share your feedback! The best developments all come from user feedback, so we don’t just welcome your feedback — we’re actively seeking it out. 

If you have any ideas then don’t hesitate to speak to one of our experts.