The user profile is probably one of the most boring pages on iDesk. It serves very little function other than to change an email address or a password.

But there are two important items on the user profile.

The first is Ticket Notification. If your help desk isn’t busy you can check this box and iDesk will send you an email when you receive a ticket or a ticket is replied to in the department you are assigned to.

The second is ticket signature. A signature can actually save you time even if it’s only to save you from typing your name at the bottom of each email reply.

Of course you can always do something interesting like include a coupon code in your signature or a link to your signup page or shopping cart.

Anywhere that you can help to market yourself is a great help for your business. Remember to use the user profile to help you in this regard.

Personally I just can’t get enough of the use of departments.

They are so useful and helpful in organizing your support requests. Lets take Nicecoders help desk as an example. We currently have 8 departments.

Eight? Yes.

One department for general support. Then one department for each of our products as “level 2″ support. Then a department for custom work, installations and license issues.

Generally tickets are assigned to the department they are sent to. Emails to support get sent to the General department. Emails to custom are sent to the custom work department and so on.

This helps us to know ahead of time what the issue might be. It also helps us to know who is supposed to look at a particular ticket. For example, for iDesk Level 2 Support the person who looks at those tickets is Dewa, who is the iDesk programmer.

But as I said in a previous article, the Level 2 Departments are not available to users. Meaning that a user can not send a ticket to any Lever 2 department.

We do this creating the department and making it a Staff Only department. Then when a request comes in to support and it requires Level 2 support, we simply assign it to the appropriate Level 2 Department and that user then takes care of it.

It’s an excellent way to process tickets and to ensure that the right user sees what they are supposed to.

If you want to go further, you can assign users so that the only tickets they will see are tickets in one specific department. This helps to ensure that you’re not wasting a programmers time by making them wade through simple support requests so they can find the one ticket they need to asnwer.

Departments help to save time, allow for faster response times from the people who need to view tickets and offer better internal organization.

One of the nice features of iDesk is the Message system.

The Message system can be used to send a message to all staff or to an individual staff member.

Sending a Message to all staff would be like making an announcement. Lets say for instance that you ran a large web host and you have 8 staff on the help desk who all worked in different locations.

You could send out an email to everyone, but you’re not always sure email will be received. You could call them, but that can take a whole bunch of time and has a physical cost associated with it in the form of long distance.

Instead you could message all of your staff to inform them that the server will be undergoing maintenance at 11:00 PM so that when they receive support tickets, your staff don’t have to try and troubleshoot the issue. They already know about and can inform the customers.

Using the Message feature of iDesk is a convenient way to communicate with your staff and since they are already using the help desk, there is no need to use a secondary method of communication.