We are introducing a new helpdesk

system to improve our customer

support

IT announces new
“Technology Support
Center”

Which covers the Help Desk and

Customer Service portal to improve
our customer support

Information Technology is approaching to new milestone and excited to announce, “Technology

Support Center”.

The Technology Support Center will assist students with the services above for no charge.
Since student personal devices are not university property, UNCSA Information Technology will
NOT be responsible for damaged equipment or lost data.
Sky Software is delighted to announce the launch of its new Help Desk and Customer Service
portal software, SmarterTrack.

IT has implemented the powerful communications platform that acts as an online help desk for
initiating, tracking, managing and reporting on a number of different communication channels.
Whether it is a ticket submission via online portal, a community post, comments made on a
knowledge base article or more, SmarterTrack provides a centralized outlet for all
communication channels and is an ideal solution for building your online community.

As one of our steps to improve customer service, the IT Department is moving to a new ticketing
system to process your requests for IT assistance.

Starting tomorrow, Wednesday, April 16, we will be transitioning all new IT service requests to
Harvard University IT’s (HUIT) Service Now ticketing system. This will replace our current
Origin ticketing system.

The SmarterTrack helpdesk integrates multiple customer service solutions into a single
application. Features include:

 A support ticket system

 Online community

 Live chat software

 Knowledge base software

 A self-service helpdesk portal

 A fully integrated SIP-compliant softphone

 Call logging and VoIP

 Who's On visitor monitoring

 A task management system

 Time logging

 Multiple brand support

 Customer satisfaction surveys

  Helpdesk reporting and analytics

 Single Sign-On (SSO)

As one of our steps to improve customer service, the IT Department is moving to a new
ticketing system to process your requests for IT assistance.

Starting tomorrow, Wednesday, April 16, we will be transitioning all new IT service requests
to Harvard University IT’s (HUIT) Service Now ticketing system. This will replace our
current Origin ticketing system.

Some of the new features that will allow faster response time on tickets are:

 Integrated communication with a customer through built-in email, so all

questions or requests are easily captured in the ticket.

 Automated ticket creation using our IT web forms, such as new account request or
new computer requests. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/information-
technology/forms-fees/

 Full integration with other HUIT departments that support our email and
networking systems allowing quicker turn-around time for those related service
requests.

On the customer side, the major change you will see are the emails you receive when a ticket
is opened or resolved will have a different look than the current emails from the Origin
system.

Please contact us if you have any questions on this new ticketing system.

Thank you,
Taso Markatos, CIO
HSPH Department of Information Technology
It was nine months ago that we started the process of introducing a new software system for our
support team. Many parameters and details needed considering and adjusting to ensure a
seamless transition from the old to the new. Now, we are very pleased to announce the upcoming
launch of our brand-new support ticketing system in February 2018.

In a previous blog article, team leader Sebastian Knopp already provided some insight into the
daily work operations of the mailbox.org support.
We frequently receive support tickets that contain common questions, where good answers can
also be found in our knowledge base. We have improved our software to make this repository
easier to use and search through, to improve how our users can find the information they need.

In the future, support requests can be made through our new dedicated web portal
at https://help.mailbox.org. Upon starting to type the problem description, a list of potentially
helpful knowledge base articles will be displayed to the user, which gets more and more refined
the more information is provided. So, hopefully, a fitting answer can be presented right away if it
happens to be in the knowledge base already. This might make raising an actual ticket
unnecessary in some cases, which reduces the load for our support team. As a result, they will be
able to react quicker and spend more time with the other cases that really require their attention.
Whenever a ticket is required, the improved workflow will enable us to help our users more
quickly and more specifically. Also, references to existing helpful entries in our knowledge-base
will be easier to provide for our support members under the new system.

Internally, our software development team has been working with a system called “Jira” for a
long time, and the new customer support system is now also based on the same solution. The
move away from “OTRS” towards “Jira ServiceDesk“ will make many things easier in the
future. Ideas and problems can be exchanged more uniformly between end users, developers, and
admins. Similarly, we will have a standardised channel of communication between the various
units that may be involved in solving a problem.

To the point: How will the mailbox.org

customer support work in the future?
There are three main contact points available for any questions concerning mailbox.org:

 
1. Knowledge Base
https://kb.mailbox.org
Our knowledge base is freely available and offers general information, definitions, background
information, and answers to frequently asked questions.

If you experience a problem or have a question, have a quick look if this was previously
discussed here and if not, then feel free to ask your question in the forum. Use your account
credentials to log in to the user forum.

The user forum is also an excellent source of information for individual questions concerning the
use of third-party software in connection with mailbox.org. Due to the huge amount of external
software in existence, we are unfortunately unable to provide specific support for all these
solutions, so the user forum is your best bet for information and advice.

Our staff members are trying to keep an eye on what is going on in the user forum and will
sometimes engage and help with issues whenever their time permits. However, please be aware
that staff participation in the forum is entirely voluntary. The forum is not part of our official
support processes and any cases discussed here will not be tracked systematically.

3. Technical support
https://help.mailbox.org
Log in to the support system using your mailbox.org main e-mail address and password. Here,
users can get directly in touch with our technical support by filling in a web form, in case a query
cannot be resolved through existing answers in the knowledge base or the user forum. Please
note that this support channel can also be used if the mailbox.org e-mail account is currently
unavailable. The knowledge base is also integrated in the support system for convenience.

We hope that our users will benefit from the new helpdesk system in the future and find
any information and advice they require a lot easier than before. In the upcoming weeks, we
may still need to perform some last-minute tweaks and optimisations, and possibly even remove
a bug or two before everything runs smoothly. Therefore, we hope for your understanding should
something not work as intended from the start – our team also needs to learn and adapt as the
new helpdesk system becomes integrated into their everyday work. Any feedback our users give
us will be greatly appreciated!
Your mailbox.org team