How to Set Up a Simple & Efficient Open Source Help Desk System for Garage and Repair Services?

As a garage owner or a repair shop manager, you are required to treat all your customers well and supervise your employees to ensure the quality of service. Do you find it easy to manage all the day-to-day tasks efficiently? Are you able to organize every activity in your garage and make each and every customer happy and satisfied? Using an open source help desk system will help you to do your tasks efficiently. So, this article focuses on how to set up an open source help desk system for your garage or repair service store.

Sometimes, it is difficult to handle all the customers in your repair store if there are so many customers waiting in the queue. They must be serviced according to the emergency and priority. Each customer’s details and vehicle history needs to be recorded for better handling of the vehicles in the future. Also, you need to buy tools and equipment for the shop frequently. All expenses and bills must be recorded properly for monthly auditing.

There are so many things that need to be done for the better management of your garage or repair store. It is not easy to manage everything manually and keep a bundle of bills and invoices in your drawer. The better option is to choose a help desk management system to manage your garage or repair service shop!

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Benefits of using a help desk system for Garage and Repair Services

There are many benefits to using a help desk system in ‘any business’. It can be used as a tool to get connected with your customers and manage your day-to-day tasks. Furthermore, the same tool can be used to track the performance of your employees based on the rating and feedback provided by the customers after each service. So, basically, it is about digitalizing the entire process.

If a customer’s vehicle has a breakdown or is not working properly, it will affect their entire day till the vehicle gets repaired. Sometimes they can call you and ask to send a mechanic to the location. Or, they need to get their vehicle into your shop using a tow truck. At the same time, you may need to service other vehicles in your shop. Or, you may get a call from some other customer asking for help. In such situations, as a shop owner or manager, you would get stuck for a while since you need to deal with so many customers at the same time.

If you use a help desk system, the customers can raise a ticket and submit the query to you through a portal. If they got stuck in an emergency situation and called you by phone, you can raise a ticket on behalf of the customers from the dashboard.

In an intuitive dashboard, you can receive and gather all tickets and assign them to the right employees to deal with them. After the repair, you can close the tickets and get the rating or feedback from the customers. Using this feedback and rating, the help desk system can generate an employee satisfaction score, using which you can track their performance.

Also, by triggering proper notifications, you can alert the designated employees to repair the vehicles assigned to them on time. It will improve the overall productivity. Also, the customers will be happy and satisfied as you will not delay any work as you can track the status of all tickets as and when required and ask the employees to repair them within the estimated time.

In the same system, you can feed the customer history, vehicle details, invoices, and bills associated with each customer seamlessly. These recordings of vehicle issues of a customer will be useful to diagnose any other issues that may occur in the future easily.

Also, it will be very useful for the customers and mechanics if you provide documents and instructions on the help desk portal for dealing with simple problems which can be solved easily.

How can you choose a help desk system for your garage and repair service shop?

There are many help desk systems available in the market, which are free and premium. You can choose the best suitable help desk system according to your requirements as well as the feature set provided by the system. But, if you choose an out-of-the-box help desk system, there are chances that it may miss some features you need. Or, sometimes it will be overpriced to fit into your budget.

Building a personalized help desk system will not be a budget-friendly choice if you own a small scale or medium scale business. Hence, it would be better if you choose an open source help desk system, and customize it as per your business requirements.

Open source help desk systems can be customized by tweaking their source code with the help of a developer. But, some open source help desk systems’ developers and support teams will help you to customize the system as per your needs.

Which is the best open source help desk team in the industry that helps to extensively personalize a help desk system for you?

Open Source HelpDesk & Customer Support Ticketing System – Simple & Flexible

Open Source HelpDesk & Customer Support Ticketing System is one of the top-notch open source help desk systems in the market, which comes with 3 subscription plans from which customers can choose one option such as Starter, Pro, and Ultimate. These plans are based on the number of tickets required to handle in a day.

You can discuss your requirements with their support team, and get your personalized help desk system done as per your wish. The major features of this open source help desk system are as follows:

Compatible with multiple website platforms such as WordPress, Wix, WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, etc.
Open to integrate any third-party tools and software such as live chat, social media platforms, and so on.
Ensure data privacy and security by allowing you to store all your data on your server.
Helps to make the support portal a subdomain of your main website.
Can also be used as an out-of-the-box solution if you are convinced with its default features.
You can add unlimited agent profiles.
24/7 expert consultation.
Also available as a managed hosting plan.
Efficient knowledge base integration, etc.

Moreover, this help desk system is coming from the family of an established WordPress help desk plugin – WSDesk – ELEX WordPress Helpdesk & Customer Support Ticket System Plugin. It inherits all features of WSDesk!

Now, let us check an example of an open source help desk system configured for a repair service shop.

How to configure an open source help desk system for a repair service shop using Open Source HelpDesk & Customer Support Ticketing System?

Step 1: Subscribe, download, install, and activate the WSDesk – ELEX WordPress Helpdesk & Customer Support Ticket System plugin.

To know more about the subscription, installation, and activation, refer to the article: How to set up WSDesk – WordPress Helpdesk Plugin?

Step 2: Create a support form for featuring on your website.

To create a support form, go to the Plugin Settings > Ticket Settings > Ticket Fields > Add as many fields as required under Active Fields > Click Save Changes.

I have added 6 fields to be filled up by the customers. They can enter their details in the respective fields.

After entering the details, the customer can submit the request. In the above example, the customer has chosen to get an appointment with a mechanic.

After submitting the request, the ticket will be received in the backend from where you can open it, assign it to a responsible mechanic, and solve the issue of the customer.

You can open the ticket and assign it to a mechanic to solve the problem.

The assigned person can enter the response and submit the ticket with its status as Solved, Unsolved, or Pending.

Here, for example, the response has been submitted as a Solved ticket.

The response will be visible to the customer when they check the status of their submitted tickets.

They can view all tickets raised, and their ticket status from the portal. And, they can open a ticket and continue the communication with you.

Well, this is how it will work. This is just an example to demonstrate how it will work on your repair service help desk system. You can customize the system and its functionalities as per your exclusive requirements.

Conclusion

It is important to manage your customers and organize the overall workflow of your garage or repair service shop systematically. With this open source help desk system, you can assist your customers as well as manage your employees efficiently. Thereby, you can improve the productivity of your staff and increase the ROI of your business.