Why Use SharePoint as a Ticketing System For Your Business?

Over the years, businesses have transitioned from legacy systems by adopting innovative digital processes and approaches. Manual processes are giving way to digital automation; one such area is the ticketing system.

Ticketing systems play a vital role in businesses. It allows companies to deal effectively with high customer requests from various communication channels. An IT support ticketing system or process enables organizations to provide a token or ticket assigned against a query, recommendation, or dispute raised by a customer. A ticketing system helps address a customer’s concern systematically and accurately.

While Microsoft SharePoint is a collaboration and document management system, it is possible to build a ticketing system using Microsoft Automate and Forms. This SharePoint ticketing system enables businesses to assign, track, and manage requests, inquiries, or disputes raised by customers or employees. It provides a flexible and scalable way to provide transparency and automation of resolving queries.

This article explores ways a SharePoint ticketing system can benefit various business sectors.

Benefits Of SharePoint As A Ticketing System

1. Integration with Existing SharePoint Environment: If your organization is already using SharePoint for other purposes, such as document management or team collaboration, using SharePoint as a ticketing system would make it seamless. SharePoint provides a familiar environment, making it easier for users to adopt the ticketing approach.
2. Centralized Information: Centralizing all ticket-related information, including tickets, attachments, comments, and status updates, is allowed. This makes tracking and managing issues in one place easier, reducing the chances of information getting lost or overlooked.
3. Customization: SharePoint is highly customizable, enabling tailoring ticketing systems to meet your business needs. You can create custom ticket forms, workflows, and dashboards to match your organization’s processes and requirements.
4. Permission Control: Offers robust permission management capabilities to access the ticketing system for creating, updating, or closing ticket requests and who can view specific ticket categories. This helps ensure that sensitive information is only accessible to authorized personnel.
5. Integration with Other Microsoft Tools: Enables easy integration with other Microsoft tools like Outlook, Teams, and Power Automate. This allows for seamless communication and automation of ticket-related tasks.
6. Audit Trail and Version Control: SharePoint maintains an audit trail of ticket changes, ensuring transparency and accountability. Further, version control ensures that you can track changes made to a ticket over time.
7. Search and Reporting: SharePoint’s search and reporting capabilities make finding and analyzing ticket data easy. You can create custom reports and dashboards to gain insights into ticket trends and performance metrics.
8. Scalability: The tools enable scale-up to accommodate the growing needs of your business. Whether you have a small team or a large enterprise, you can adapt your ticketing system accordingly.
9. Mobile Access: This provides mobile-friendly access, allowing users to create, update, and monitor tickets from their smartphones or tablets, which is especially valuable for remote or on-the-go teams.
10. Cost-Effective: If your organization already has SharePoint licenses, using it as a ticketing system can be cost-effective compared to purchasing a separate ticketing solution.
11. Security: This tool offers robust security features, including encryption, authentication, and access controls. It helps protect sensitive ticketing data.
12. Compliance: It can be configured to adhere to various compliance standards, such as HIPAA or GDPR, which is essential if your business deals with sensitive customer information.

Conclusion

A sound ticketing system should provide real-time status updates and visibility towards the tickets raised. At the same time, the support team should be able to open access, update status, review or add comments, and close tickets. SharePoint ticketing system offers all of these and more.

SharePoint is great for collaboration and for storing records and documents. However, using SharePoint as a ticketing system is a bit complicated and a time-consuming process. Organizations often start with a minimum viable product (MVP) and build a system based on it, but these may not be scalable or future-ready. The answer lies in using Power Automate and Forms to create a customizable, scalable, and robust ticketing system. Some apps required to develop a powerful, scalable ticketing system using SharePoint are Microsoft Forms, Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Power Automate, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Lists, and Teams. Connecting with a Microsoft-certified gold partner can give companies access to a qualified and skilled team of developers who can help develop high-performing solutions.