Asana project as Helpdesk/Support Ticket System?

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Hi Guys,

I am trying to create a project to use as a help desk/support ticketing system.

Right now, I use Zapier to forward the email that is sent to our support email address. This then creates a new task within the project. However, each time there is a response to that thread where our support team helps the customer, it creates a new task that is a duplicate essentially.

I’m curious if anyone has tried to set up a support ticket system as a project and what it looks like. Any suggestions?

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Hi Jared,

I expect you could fix this by either:

  1. Adding a filter to your Zap after the trigger. So if a task for the ticket already exists (you could search by ticket #), then don’t run the Zap.
  2. Use the “Find task” action (instead of creating new task) then check the box to create a task if it doesn’t exist. That way you could update the task instead of creating a new one.

Hope this helps!

Paul

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I created a HelpDesk Ticketing System w/ Jotoform as the electronic secretary> Zapier > Asana across 5 departments nationwide and currently we have over 100+ users integrated. in 90 days we have already completed over 3k tickets. The tracking metrics is really poor within Asana and there isnt any “round robin” auto assignee but the workaround can be done is excel.

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May I ask how you deal with email communication between yourself and the support client? Asana does not allow any old emails to be sent into it, so I assume it has to come from an approved email. So if you need to reply to that task I assume it would not go to the customer email, but to the approved email (e.g. ours!) so how does one deal with communicating on tasks between the support client?

I too would like to use Asana as our support system. At the moment we use Helpscout because anyone can email our support email into Helpscout. But then we have to manually add that as a task in Asana, but then all communication goes trough Helpscout. All because Asana does not allow un-approved email addresses into it. Its not good!

Thanks

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Hi Team,
We’ve just transitioned from Freshdesk to an Asana based helpdesk I setup. We no longer accept support requests via email and instead have published an Asana form on our website for new ticket creation [see Convergence Ltd - eCommerce Integration - Support]

From there, we “multi-home” new tickets to a client support board by assigning the task to another project. We also have rules running to auto-assign new tickets to our primary helpdesk support engineer who may then re-assign the task or deal with it himself. We use the workload view in portfolios via the Asana business plan, which means we need an estimate to be on each task for this to work.

Correspondence with the client is facilitated via the comments field either by @mentioning them using their email address or by adding them as a collaborator. This works very well and the client can reply directly to the email notification they receive, which generates a new comment on the ticket.

Once the issue is resolved we mark it as complete and a rule moves the ticket from the section “Unresolved Tickets” to “Resolve/Closed Tickets”. Done.

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Hey Mark, we are looking at doing something similar for one of our IT teams that has less work/task requests than your typical Help Desk/Support team.

I know you mentioned correspondence with the client is done via the comments by tagging them or adding them as a collaborator, but outside of a task, can the client see all other tickets that aren’t “assigned” to them, or if not, how do you have permissions configured?

Thanks,
Chris

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Hi @Jared_Moore & @Doug_Williams :wave:

This might not cover exactly your needs, but iDO and Astogi have developed a small Asana additional tool (a bot) to help you assign people randomly to tasks (round-robin).
By simply adding it to your project, the bot will auto assign members to your project tasks.
You don’t need any Zapier or other external tool.

The beta version is free to use under a fair use policy

If you want to know more about it, check this page : https://ido-clarity.com/round-robin/

Good luck :wink:

@Bastien_Siebman @_Sander FYI :wink:

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Hi @anon30196395 and @Mark_Presnell -pretty old thread here, but since I came across it - I’m curious if anyone has solved the “can the client see all other tickets” question. Ideally, we’d like each regular user (customer) to only see tickets they submitted or collaborated on. Maybe we can live with allowing them to see any tickets submitted by anyone from the same customer. But we don’t want them to see tickets submitted by other customers (for various reasons).

I’m thinking of trying to have a different project for each customer with rules to multi-home tickets into the right project, and then set up security on the guest accounts to only have access to that project. But that feels like a lot of work, overhead, complexity and opportunities for exceptions to break things or not work right.

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If they are added as collaborators on their tickets only, it will work. Isn’t it @Tony_Sileo ?

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hmm - yes - actually that might work for the individual users. I can also see the benefit of being able to invite a user to collaborate or review a ticket from another customer that’s related to the same question/issue.

That still leaves the (less important but still nice-to-have) use case of allowing a manager/admin from a customer to see any ticket submitted by any of their users.

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Hey everyone, I have developed a free solution to solve for this use case, do explore. This gets the job done just like what everyone has been asking for.

It has scope for further customization and give full control.