Why HaloPSA never actually routes your tickets anywhere

Connor: If you're still using the tickets by team service desk view, this video is going to reinvent the way you use Halo. Hi, I'm Connor. As always, I'm doing videos all about HaloPSA. And today, I really want to focus on ticket views because it's something that's overlooked on a lot of integrations or a lot of builds that I get involved with these days. The first thing I do is I jump into the service desk and I'm like, how do you even use this? You know, how do you even navigate your tickets? How do your tickets know where they're going? And a lot of the time, the answer is we just kind of do.

So I want to show you how I like to use Service Desk. And particularly I want to focus today on views. I'm going to start with a little bit of background, sort of how views work inside of Halo. Then we're going to touch on lists. And then I'm going to show you a few little cool tips and tricks to get the most out of it. So with that being said, let's jump into scene number one.

This is HaloPSA and this is a brand new build. So when I click service desk, oh, it let me down. It should have jumped into by tickets by team. That's what you get for testing off camera, Connor.

So essentially, the default way to use Halo out of the box is tickets by team. It's fine. That's it. It's fine. There's many ways to kind of leverage the views and I'm just going to start by slowing the pace down a little bit. Giving you a quick background of how views actually work inside of Halo for the most part.

Now I'm just going to give a quick warning. I could be jumping about a lot in this video. There's a lot of moving parts and pieces and puzzles that we all need to slot together. I'm going to try and mentally do it as streamline as possible, but just bear with me. So let's start with the fundamentals. Let's start with the foundation.

When we make a ticket in HaloPSA, where does it get routed to? And the answer to that is for the most part, again, need to be very clear here, for the most part, every ticket is always technically visible. So in Halo, we don't route tickets. We don't say if this ticket comes in here, put it in this place. For the most part, what we say is if this ticket comes in via email to this mailbox, then make the ticket this type. And I'll demonstrate that if I can very quickly.

So if we go to configuration and we go to email and we go to mailbox setup, click new. What we do is we make a new mailbox connection and say when a ticket or when an email comes into this mailbox and we make a ticket, pick one of these ticket types. Most of you will be familiar with this by now. That also translates to if we're in the service desk and we click new ticket, we have the ability to pick a ticket type.

Now, in a lot of the builds I do, I disable this. We won't touch on that today. But the first thing you must understand is that we're not saying where do you want to put this ticket, but more what ticket type are we creating.

Then what we do depending on the area we're in or the view we're in or the list we're in, we say only show me tickets of this ilk. That could be type, that could be of a thing, you know, a category or a team or a user or an agent or whatever we want. We basically filter out tickets and out of the box that is handled very basically in tickets and areas and we have two areas. We have service desk over here number one and then we have projects which is the other area here.

The reason I said at the start for the most part is because the CRM is kind of a law of its own. We won't touch that right now. We're just going to focus on standard tickets and projects.

So if I click on service desk and click on filters, what you will see is that we have a filter which says only show me tickets. Now if I just delete this, there is actually a field name called tickets or projects. This is a system field and we basically say only include tickets. We could just say actually ignore that. I want to filter down even deeper and say only show me the ticket type incidents or go one step backwards and say only show me the ITIL ticket type of incident or change request or service request.

So again we're filtering out what tickets we want to display in the areas. We're not saying put this ticket over here and put this project in this bin and do this. No, we're filtering out. The same logic applies to projects. So we say with projects filter only show me projects. Now what you may notice sometimes is there could be filters in here which inhibit certain ticket types being displayed. So this is the first place you want to start is in areas.

So that's how we get tickets to an area. Again CRM is a little bit different. The rules for this are strict. Basically whenever we make a ticket type and we select the use or the area the use is CRM then they will be routed to only the CRM. Now kind of flip it on its head. It's just saying only show me CRM tickets but you can't control this behaviour. If you ever use the use CRM they will be hardcoded to go into CRM.

And you can't control that. You can't have multiple CRM areas. You can't do tons with it. You can change the views and you can change the filters, but the CRM is the CRM. With tickets, however, you could have a different area for change requests, for alerts, for service desk, for anything you wanted. Basically, you can break them out really granular. With the CRM, you can't. It's very strict.

So that kind of summarises that hopefully. Service desk tickets, we don't route. We say what we want to show and how we want to show it. And this is when we come on to views. The whole point of today's video is showing you how I like to view my tickets. So we say every ticket in the help desk that isn't a project basically just tickets come to the service desk.

And by default it will show you tickets by team. Now this is okay. Basically if you click on it you will see all of the teams you have access to. If you're an administrator you will potentially see all the teams. And then in the list you can see all of the tickets, what are assigned, what are unassigned, and who they're assigned to.

The problem I have with this is it's very complicated and messy to handle. Because let's say if Amir said, or say, I'm not sure how to say it. Let's say Amir has both first line and second line responsibilities, his tickets will then be split between both areas. This to me is unmanageable unless you're a manager.

So I used to manage multiple teams and I like to see a team view which was this. I wouldn't work out of this view. I would just go in here to see ah, you know, how many tickets does Patricia have at the minute? Oh, she's got six in second line support. And this would be kind of my go-to area. Alternatively, you could just click on tickets by team at the top and click tickets by agent. And this will then show you a concatenation or grouping of all their tickets and how many tickets Amir has in total.

Now one thing you must notice again this is starting on the views already is what filter profile you are in. So tickets by team is a view. Okay. These are views. These are the way we're segregating or grouping tickets. This is the view. The filter is kind of this middle pane if you will. And you'll notice in the top right it says open tickets.

Now a trap that a lot of people fall into is that by default it's open tickets. I disagree with this. This is complicated. But open tickets is exclusively tickets that aren't on hold or closed. And I can prove that by going to configuration, tickets views and then filter profiles. And if I click on open tickets, you will see that the SLA status includes not on hold. Therefore, if the ticket is on hold, it won't appear in here.

Whereas SLA including hold doesn't have that filter. What I recommend doing is go to open tickets, delete the not on hold, delete the active inactive clients and press save and just have don't show me closed tickets. Basically open tickets including SLA hold.

I normally delete all the filters and just call it all tickets. Then we've got all tickets, closed tickets, and open tickets. This means when I go back to service desk, I now have open tickets. Oh, I'll now have all tickets, closed tickets, and open tickets. Yes, I have two for all.

Um, how did I handle that in my current build? Actually, let me have a quick look. Let's go into here. This would be tiny, I know. Okay, I still, okay, I limited the view of it basically. Um, so another hack around if you will. Let's say we don't want to actually see this. You could just stick it to, you know, an agent that either isn't in use or is spare like admin or even make a team quickly and just make that a placeholder so we don't see it. I'm just going to stick it to infrastructure. We don't have anyone in that team.

Um, that now means when I go to service desk I now just have the three open tickets, close tickets or all tickets. Okay, hope that makes sense. These are filters. So we have views, we have filters. Filters are what filter this pane. Views on the left hand side are how we filter out more granular if you will.

Um, another option that controls this is if we go to configuration, we go to advanced settings. You will see at the top we have this main screen page size. If I click one and go back to service desk, um, it will only show me one ticket per page. So I have 147 pages. I know it's beautiful.

Um, if we go back to advance and change this to 100 and we go back to service desk, we now have 100 tickets per page. Again, just a little quality of life thing just to help you navigate all of this mess. Um, again, we can control this here. Let's say you only want it to default to open tickets. We can go to configuration, tickets, views, configure filters, and make sure the default filter profile is open tickets.

Part two. So I mentioned that we do have tickets by team, which is the default. We've also got tickets by agent. We've got tickets by type, tickets by status, and then all tickets. The problem with all of these views is for me managing a team and telling them this is the order of priority of tickets is very hard to work through these. So what I recommend is you start to leverage the life out of my lists.

Now, what I recommend doing is you right-click each one of these, click edit, and click delete. Just go through these and delete them all because to be honest with you, out of the box, the only one that is slightly useful is unread. But let's just go through and delete all these now.

Now I'm not going to give you a full rundown of how I break down all of these lists, but all you need to know is the following. If you click create new list, you can add whatever filters you want to these. Again, leveraging the filter profiles as well. And you can restrict these based on agent or based on team.

Um, and you can get really, really creative with these. One more thing you can do is if you go to configuration, tickets and views again you will see that you can allow grouping of lists and we can make some list groups. We're going to make two. We're going to make the first one called unassigned tickets and put this list group sequence as 10. And then we're going to make another one and we're going to call this my tickets and make the list group of this 20.

If we then click service desk, um, and let me just see if I need to do this other way around quickly. Yeah, you can't currently do anything. It's kind of a bit buggy is this behaviour at the minute. So if we go back to configuration, go back to tickets and views, we now need to click configure lists.

You will currently see the use of all these lists of projects. Again, you can have these list per area. It's fantastic. What I'm going to do is click new and I'm just going to call this incidents. I'm going to say this is used in the ticket area. So not in the CRM, the service desk or project. So I'm going to say actually no, I'm going to say service desk. Sorry, rewind.

I'm going to say just show me this list if I'm in the area service desk. I'm going to say I want this to be unassigned tickets and I want this to be sequence 10, and I work in multiples of 10. At the top of the list, I want to show counts in the tree view. This will show you how many tickets you've got.

And then I want to add a filter and say only show me tickets where the ticket type includes incidents and I'm going to say this is only open tickets. Now when I go to the service desk, you will now see all open incidents. But I've said this is in the group unassigned. So we then want to go to edit this list, add a filter, click add on the right hand side, add an agent, and the agent must include unassigned. And that will then show us all unassigned incidents.

But then you say to me, Connor, what if I want to see alerts? Well, that's great. You right-click incidents. You edit the list. You scroll to the bottom. You click save as new. You edit incidents. You click sequence in list must be 20. You go to the filters page and you change ticket type from incident to alert like so.

And then I'm also going to edit it and rename it to be alerts. In this way, we're starting to really break down and segment our tickets. It's really overwhelming when you come into a desk and there's like a hundred tickets you've got to go through. You don't know if they're like high priority or alerts or change requests or new user onboarding forms or where to even begin in this mess.

So you want to build your SOP or your standard operating procedure to be we start top to bottom or we start A to B. You know, I say always start with unassigned incidents. Let's get those tickets routed. If you have a dispatcher or a call handler, someone may handle this part for you. They might triage these out to engineers. I'm on the fence about this. There'd be a video on that in the future, but essentially we're breaking these down.

Now that's great for unassigned tickets, Connor, but how do our engineers know what they need to do? Well, apply the same logic. I'm going to start at the top. I'm just going to do my tickets new. Okay, I'm just going to put in the word new. And I'm going to say this appears under the group my tickets show count in tree view. Go to a filter open tickets. Add where the agent includes logged in where the status includes new and then press save like so.

And what this allows you to do is really start breaking up the tickets. Now I'll just go to my production environment very quickly and you'll kind of see how we have. Fantastic. You will see in my environment how we have unassigned tickets at the top and these groups are collapsible by the way so I can expand and collapse them as I need to. And we have support tickets, alert tickets, finance tickets, even sales inquiries.

You know we have a um what do we have here? I think this is an accounts app. So if you're a customer of ours, we have an accounts app. You could email this, which is usually a support based question. I haven't got the last invoice. Can you update this? Can you do that? That for me is a service request, not a CRM, a sales opportunity. And then under there, we have my tickets. And again, I kind of like to think of these as waterfall. I start with anything I've got new, anything that I've got acknowledged, then in progress, then checking anything that's with a customer, and then seeing what they've updated. And again, you can build these out however you desire.

The takeaway is I love working with my lists. I use this for CRM. So I have all my opportunities here broken up into leads, opportunities, today's plan, this week's plan. Again, I even use all areas. So I want to see there's only two of us right now who do sales, but I want to see what we're both working on and kind of where we're at. I even leverage requires assistance. So if one of us is on a sales op and we need the input from another member of the team, we flag the status, it appears at the top. We know we need to action it. I do the same with projects.

Just trying to make sure I don't flash everything there. Um we have projects. So you know, we say these are all of my consultation projects. These are my onboarding projects. These are tasks that we have to do. Um these are project tasks that are universal. So either me or the team can do it. And again, leveraging lists inside of Halo for me is fantastic.

So just to go back through, by default, you're going to have tickets by team. I recommend starting to leverage lists. It's really powerful. A few things to be conscious of is that when you go to tickets and go to areas and click service desk, there is default views in here. So once you've built out the lists area, you want to change the default view here to be my lists.

And again, don't forget when you're building out lists that you can restrict who can see these. So you could have service desk for level one, level two, level three engineers, management, escalation, account management. You could limit it and say only show me these customers because I account managed them. You can get really creative with this. Only show me tickets where it's gone over SLA for instance.

Um, if you want to get really, really nerdy, you can use custom SQL database to even pull more metrics in. So I used to do this and I used to have a filter profile in here which basically showed me where the customer's location was. I leveraged that from the customer entity. And again, for me, it's about making my tickets in bite-sized chunks that I can actively and easily get through them. I'm not lost in a frenzy of ticket data. I'm not overwhelmed by seeing 40 tickets and I don't know where to start. There's a process. There's a plan. It's structured.

And that is my takeaway for today. As always, I really do appreciate the support the channel's been getting recently. If you have enjoyed this, please do subscribe, like, or add a comment below. Helps me motivated to get these videos made. Any questions, you know where to find me. Um, and have a lovely day. I've been Connor. Peace out. Bye-bye.