A helpdesk does exactly what its name suggests: it’s there to help you when problems arrive. Typically those are of a technical nature; you need someone to troubleshoot the printer or help you get access to a new system. Every day we rely on helpdesks to solve user issues such as help with troubleshooting our mobile phone or disputing a credit card bill.

A helpdesk could be:

  1. Customer Service Helpdesk: A customer service help desk focuses on external customers who might have questions regarding the products and services they buy from your company.
  2. IT Support Helpdesk: An IT help desk ensures internal staff is supported, and their problems are solved, whether it be a password reset or the whole network going down.
  3. Business Helpdesk: Teams outside of IT like HR, finance and legal can adopt a business help desk. HR can help employees modify payroll elections or get employment verification letters. Legal can respond to contract review requests while finance can field accounts payable or expense questions.

I am sure that most of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM users would already be using CRM Service module for external Customer Service Helpdesk. Here you have support for email-to-case channel as well as a self-service portal.

Now question is can we use the same set-up even for our internal helpdesk?

Sure, why not? Why duplicate the efforts?
You could easily use your existing external Customer Service Helpdesk even for building your internal helpdesk for IT, HR, Finance and other departments!

Below would be the typical steps required for building your internal IT Helpdesk using Dynamics 365:

Step 1: Create a dedicated mailbox or shared mailbox for internal support: eg internalhelp@zapobjects.com

Step 2: Create a CRM Queue (eg Internal Support Queue) pointing to this mailbox.

Step 3: Create CRM Contacts for all the users of internal helpdesk.
Dynamics CRM Cases have a mandatory field called Customer. When an email is received in your CRM support queue… Email-to-Case will extract the sender email, find a matching Contact and automatically link the Case Customer to this Contact.
In order to facilitate automatic linking of case to the email sender… you would need to create all helpdesk users as contacts in CRM (even though they may already be existing as Users in your CRM system).

Step 4: Modify the case forms and views to add some custom fields to easily distinguish between customer support cases and internal cases.

Step 5: Setup the workflows for sending various email notifications on case creation, escalation, closure etc

Dynamics 365 CRM out-of-box email-to-case is very basic in terms of functionality and far too complicated to set-up. On the other hand, Zap Helpdesk – Email to Case App for Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM provides a very advanced level of email-to-case functionality. The App has been built with many years of experience and will help in making your support process very efficient!