Your service desk plays a crucial role in ensuring that your organization runs smoothly. However, it’s not enough to simply cater to your employees’ needs — you also need to provide much-needed assistance to your guests, whether they’re public citizens, patients, or students.
That’s why we’ve recently released our new public forms feature. This allows you to publish forms outside of your self-service portal (for example, on your intranet or your public website), which then helps grant non-employees access to your services.
This blog post outlines our vision behind the public forms feature, as well as explaining how they will make your service desk more accessible and more useful.
Towards a frictionless employee experience
Customer expectations have never been higher. As Forrester states, we are in the age of the customer, representing “a transition in power from institutions and organizations toward customers”. This means we have to make sure that our customers benefit from the same convenience and personalization at work as they do in their personal lives. One major way to do this is by making it as easy as possible for your customers to communicate with you on their own terms: where, how, and when it’s right for them.
Our goal is to bring your customers a broader set of seamlessly connected channels, with the ability to continue the conversation across every channel. For example, we’ve recently developed TOPdesk Chat and have also introduced a WhatsApp integration. TOPdesk ensures that all customer interactions end up in one place — meaning your operators can work efficiently without losing focus and having to flick back and forth between different communications channels.
Supporting students, patients, citizens, and visitors
We want to make communicating with your team as easy as possible – not just for your regular, registered customers, but for everyone. Many organizations support people who aren’t employees or customers, but who need help anyway. Think of educational institutes supporting students, hospitals supporting patients, municipalities supporting citizens, or any guests who are visiting your office.
To help you support these groups, we’ve been focusing on ways to open up TOPdesk. We’ve recently been adding different ways to offer immediate help to unregistered users, without them having to request log-in details or create their own account. For example, our Public Knowledge items and our partner solutions enable your customers to create a new call simply by using a QR code.
Introducing public forms
So what’s the next step in opening up TOPdesk? Public Forms. Unlike regular forms in TOPdesk, these can be published outside of your self-service portal, such as on your intranet or your public websites. This means that customers can submit a form in TOPdesk without requiring a log-in to the self-service portal. Once submitted, the form will work as any form in TOPdesk — it will trigger a workflow of your choice.
The public form designer allows you make forms that include the following fields:
- Name and email field that will be filled into your incident card
- Text input
- Checkbox
- RadioGroups
- Dropdown lists
- Date picker
- Attachments
- Multiple forms
2020
As you might’ve read in our earlier blogpost on our 2020 strategy, our main two focuses this year are on investing in faster delivery and improving the customer experience. This means that we won’t actively further develop the Public Forms and Knowledge Base solution in 2020 — though we do believe that opening up TOPdesk in the future is the right way forward.
We will continue to prioritize efforts that help us do this — for instance, by investing in Identity & Access Management and partner solutions in the marketplace. Keep an eye on our public roadmap to follow all our developments in closer detail.
Comments