You were recently introduced to the first version of the Kanban Board in TOPdesk. With the Kanban Board, you tackle your service management in an agile way. With a recent update, the board is now more user-friendly, as moving a call to another column updates the status of a call. You don'thave to open a call each time to change the status. Furthermore, your calls appear in the correct column of the Kanban board without you dragging and dropping them there. Want to find out how the Kanban Board works with statuses and what the best practice is for setting up your statuses? Read on!

Get more out of your statuses

A common challenge when using statuses is knowing how many you need. Sometimes you'll see environments with more than 20 statuses for Call Management. Too many statuses will make it too difficult for you to use and will bog down the module. With so many statuses, there are usually a few that are hardly used, or even statuses that could be replaced with a different solution. Want to get the most out of your statuses in Call Management? Use the following best practices:

• Registered: Use this status for all new calls which have been logged via the mail import, Self-Service Portal or by an operator when the operator hasn’t performed any work on the call yet. When a call has this status, an operator can pick it up or it can be distributed via a dispatcher.
• Prioritized (optional): Use this status when a call is prioritized by an operator and possibly assigned to an operator. This status is most effective when you work with the Kanban board or when calls are dispatched by a dispatcher, otherwise omit this status.
• In progress: This status is for calls currently being worked on, or when an already worked on call has been transferred to a different operator group and needs to be picked up by a different operator.
• Waiting for customer: When a call needs more information from the customer, use this status to indicate that further work isn't possible.
• Waiting for supplier: Use this for calls that need to be picked up by a supplier. Calls stay on this status until the supplier has completed the necessary work.
• Completed (optional): Use this status to indicate that a call is solved, but you haven't let the customer know yet. The process with this status can be as follows: the back office completes the calls and then transfers the call to the servicedesk to communicate the solution to the customer. I wouldn’t recommend using this way of working since it adds unnecessary time to resolve a call. Instead, set up TOPdesk to send an  email to the customer containing all the information when the call is closed.
• Closed: Use this status for calls that are solved.
• Response received: This status if for when a response is received from either the customer or from the supplier. Optionally you can split this status into: Updated by customer and Updated by supplier.

Linking statuses to the Kanban board

After you've set up your statuses, you need to link them to the Kanban Board:

1. Open the Kanban Board for an operator group of your choosing
2. Click Edit in the top right corner of the screen
3. Enable Integrate the Kanban board in your Incident Management process by mapping the lanes to the corresponding statuses.
4. Assign names to the columns.
5. Drag and drop all your statuses to the appropriate column.
6. Click save and off you go!

You'll need to map the statuses to the right columns for each operator group separately.

This feature is avialable as a standard TOPdesk feature from the 8.04.013 SaaS release and Q2 On-Premises release.

A few more tips for getting more out of statuses

• Set up TOPdesk so the status field determines if the call is completed, closed (and on hold when you use Contract Management and SLM).
• Make status a mandatory field for both first line and second line calls.
• Set up TOPdesk so that calls logged via e-mail or the Self-Service Portal are assigned the Registered status.
• Link the events and actions for status field changes. For example: when the status is changed to Waiting for customer, an email is sent to the caller with the request field and latest action field containing the question the operator has for the caller.

Not using the new Kanban Board?

The Kanban Board helps you easily tackle calls via Agile. Want to find out more about the benefits of Agile Service Management? Check out this previous blog by Geoffrey, product manager of the Kanban Board.

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