Third Insight - The Importance of Data Segregation

The Wheels of Ticketing - Desk Stories

The Importance of Data Segregation

Data segregation

In ticketing systems, data segregation organises data into logical groups or categories to reduce ticket backlogs and resolution time and improve the overall customer support experience.

Segregated data is useful data 

Why is data segregation vital for your ticketing system?

In a help desk environment, data segregation may involve categorizing support tickets according to factors such as customer type (e.g., VIP clients, regular users), department (e.g., sales, IT, customer service), issue type (e.g., refund, warranty) or sensitivity levels (e.g., confidential, public). This structured approach ensures that only authorised agents can access sensitive information, mitigating the risk of data breaches and safeguarding customer privacy.

 

Additionally, segregating ticket data can improve efficiency. Support agents can focus on tickets relevant to their department or expertise, leading to faster resolution times and a more streamlined workflow. It also allows management to generate more accurate reports and insights, as they can easily analyse trends and performance metrics within segregated groups.

Improves performance by reducing the amount of data users must interact with and focusing on relevant information.

In the second insight, we discussed the concept of Layouts, which provide businesses with a versatile and efficient way to implement and manage their services. Desk offers a variety of pre-built layouts and customizable templates designed to cater to different customer support requirements. The advanced multi-layout feature enables companies to quickly create compelling user experiences that accommodate multiple services at a lower cost. By leveraging these layouts and templates, businesses can significantly improve their support processes while prioritising what truly matters: their customers' satisfaction. 

A story for better interpretation

Segregate your data - A help desk story

Once upon a time, a small but dedicated team in a bustling tech company managed customer support through a ticketing system called "HelpNow." As the company grew, so did its customer base, leading to an overwhelming influx of support tickets. Although the team worked diligently, the increase in tickets created clutter. 

Once efficient, the HelpNow system became cluttered with old tickets, unresolved issues, and duplicate requests. Customer satisfaction started to decline as users waited longer for their problems to be resolved. Frustration lingered not only in the hearts of customers but also within the support team, which found it increasingly challenging to navigate the cluttered ticketing system.

One day, the lead, Monica, called for a meeting to address the urgent situation. "We need to organise our data," she announced. The team discussed various strategies, but Monica had a vision of what needed to be done—a systematic approach to decluttering their HelpNow system.

The first step involved reviewing and categorising all existing tickets. The team deleted the tickets archived for more than six months without follow-up, since they likely belonged to resolved issues. They set a clear deadline for this task, recognising that focused teamwork was integral to tackling the backlog. Each team member was assigned a category of tickets to review. They achieved this by creating custom views and sharing them with the team.

 

During this process, the team discovered an unexpected treasure trove of information. They also realised that some bugs needed urgent attention, leading to prioritised fixes for the product. With this discovery, Monica created a new layout, naming it the Bug Service Layout, and made it available for internal purposes.

 

As the organising data event continued, the team also acknowledged the importance of customer communication. They crafted an email update to inform existing customers with pending tickets about their efforts to improve support quality. Customers appreciated the transparency and felt confident that their concerns were being taken seriously.

 

After two weeks of hard work, their system was transformed. The volume of old tickets had been dramatically reduced, and the remaining tickets were prioritised and categorised effectively for quicker solutions. Customer agents could easily navigate the system and focus on resolving issues rather than wading through a resolution maze.

 

Reports generated from the organised data helped Monica and her team identify trends in customer inquiries and revamp their product support process and resources accordingly. Inspired by their findings, they implemented a new self-service help widget to empower users with immediate solutions. 

 

The results were incredible: response times dropped, customer satisfaction surged, and the support team thrived in their more organised environment. The HelpNow system became a case study in transforming mess into clarity, demonstrating the power of segregating unnecessary data to unveil the valuable.

In a ticketing system, various departments and services play crucial roles in contributing to customer support's overall efficiency and effectiveness. In Zoho Desk, multiple services in your business can be achieved using multiple layouts. You can segregate your customer tickets using departments if your company runs across numerous business units/regions and involves various support processes. By recognising the importance of each department in ticketing, businesses can create a more holistic and responsive approach to customer service. 

Summing up

Data segregation is not just a one-time effort; it requires ongoing attention to ensure the integrity and reliability of customer information. 

Establishing clear protocols and guidelines for data segregation will help agents understand their responsibilities and stay accountable for maintaining valid data. 

Please stay tuned for more Desk Module stories.

 

Cheers,

 

Kavya Rao

The Zoho Desk Team

Also read:

• Second Insight - Let's talk Layouts
• First Insight - Find your Fields
  

• Topic Participants

• Kavya Rao Addepalli

  

• Recent Topics

• Disposable Email Addresses

  Dear zMail Team, Can you also bring out a few disposable email addresses for each accounts? That way occasional registrations and imminent spam from them can be largely solved right? ---- Deepak Vasudevan http://thamizhththendral.blogspot.com/

• Zoho sheet - Zoho expense

  I want to schedule to create an expense using Zoho Sheet and flow. That is the EMI that I pay on a particular date to the bank and should be itemised, like principal and interest on the loan. Can someone help me in this regard??

• Ability to configure a schedule/shift for each user and/or crew in Zoho FSM

  Hello, In our team of Field Agents, we have different shifts. Some field agent always work from 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM while others work the evening shift like 4:00 PM to 11:00 PM. Sometime shift are on weekdays only or on weekend. It would be great to be

• Free webinar: Streamlining customer service paperwork with the Zoho Sign extension for Zoho Desk

  Hello Everyone! Have you been wondering about bridging the gap between digitised customer service and business paperwork? Join our free webinar to learn how you can do this by connecting Zoho Sign, our digital signature app, with Zoho Desk, our online

• Zoho Books | Product updates | July 2025

  Hello users, We’ve rolled out new features and enhancements in Zoho Books. From plan-based trials to the option to mark PDF templates as inactive, explore the updates designed to enhance your bookkeeping experience. Introducing Plan Based Trials in Zoho

• Mail Search should allow grouping by conversation like Gmail.

  Having switched from gmail I have found the search function hard to use. Mostly because mail is not grouped by conversation in search. If I search for a word when looking for a conversation had with someone then sometimes 10 emails will come up from the

• Improve Zoho Learn updated article notifications

  I noticed today while updating an article, that the notification users get says "[User Name] has published article [Article Name]..." My feedback to the product team is that it would be really helpful for an end user, if the system notification differentiated

• Safari Support

  Safari, the world's second largest browser, zoho desk does not officially or fully support. That needs to change.

• Can I get images from an "Image Upload" field in a webhook?

  I want to send images from 2 "image upload" fields via a webhook. Is this possible?

• Ticket closure notification - all contacts cc'd on email thread

  Hello, If a client sends an email to our service desk and cc's in other people that work at the same company - so that they are in the loop of the service request. When the we close the ticket, only the ticket owner (person who emailed us - which created

• Inactive account cleanup policy for Zoho Sign

  Zoho Sign reserves the right to delete accounts that are license free and inactive for more than 120 days. The account deletion will be initiated only after the user receives prior email notice about possible data deletion and how to backup the data.

• Missde API documentation for Sales Receipt

  Hi! I noticed that the Sales Receipt endpoint is not currently listed in your API documentation (https://www.zoho.com/books/api/v3/introduction/). Could you please provide any available temporary documentation for this endpoint, along with a detailed

• Multi-currency in Zoho CRM Forecast and Reports

  As a company we have branches in 4 different countries with as many different currencies. Our Sales Teams would like to work with their local currency as much as possible. The Forecast module using only 1 currency is practically usable only by the sales

• How to select from pricebook when creating a salesorder or quote

  I am creating a sales order and when selecting the Products I do not see any where to select from pricebooks. How do i associate this to my orders?

• Proposal for Creating a Unique "Address" Entity in Zoho FSM

  The "Address" entity is one of the most critical components for a service-oriented company. While homeowners may change and servicing companies may vary, the address itself remains constant. This constancy is essential for subsequent services, as it provides

• I cannot find my older documents from 2024 and 2023

  I cannot find my older documents from 2024 and 2023.

• System default SLA descriptions can't be modified

  The system default SLAs have identical descriptions for all SLA levels, but their settings differ. However, I am facing an issue where I cannot modify these descriptions and save the changes. The content of the description box can be edited but the changes

• Customising Help Center

  Hi I don't think it is possible to add custom pages to help center? We'd like to use this as a customer portal with support tickets, FAQ/Guides, Billing and contracts. Is there any plans to add a feature like this or an alternative way to do it other

• Replies sometimes creating separate ticket

  Sometimes when a customer responds to an email coming from Zoho Desk, instead of adding a reply to the original ticket, a separate ticket is created. This happens even though the response subject line contained the ticket number, and the person responding

• Ticket Approvals - External Users

  The ticket approval option - we need to be able to select external users (Contacts) for approvals. Sometimes we are working with an end user and their boss needs to approve a purchase. For example, working with a cashier on a broken cash register and

• Force Users to Ask Answer Bot a question... First

  End users will always skip talking to a bot. It would be nice if Zoho adopted the standard and forced users to first ask a question to answer bot (or zia in some fashion) and then pass to the agent if it wasn't answered. Options to force the user to speak

• View Answer Bot conversations?

  We are trialing Zia and are experimenting with Answer Bot on our knowledge base. So far so good! Management asks me if it is possible to view Answer Bot conversations, the purpose being to look over its shoulder and confirm that it is working as des

• Mass Email an Account

  It would be nice to mass email an account stating there is an outage at their business or something specific to an account is needed to be mass communicated. Even if it makes a ticket for every Email Out to every contact in the Account. Think: the customer

• Multiple Topics assigned to a single Campaign

  Hello, is it possible to assign multiple Topics to a single Campaign? We frequently write a content to our subscribers that spans multiple Topics and we would like to send it to all Contacts that are subscribed to at least one of the Topics. But it looks

• Zoho Projects Fonts and Accessibility missing

  I cannot find any more the tab where I can change the font in Zoho Project. I also checked the knowledgebase and there they have accessibility tab which I am completely missing. Is there some setup I am missing or is it a problem with our account?

• Zoho Books Custom Widgets Deprecation Error

  I created a simple sample widget with zet and published it using sigma Both in the Sandbox and Production the Widgets are showing this error

• Problems with PDF files in notebook

  I'm evaluating Zoho Notebook as an alternative to Evernote and imported my Evernote account to Zoho Notebook. First issue is that notes in Evernote that comprise a PDF are turned into a 'group' with a single note page (that has the text from the Evernote

• API (v3) Tasks sorting issue

  We are using the v3 API for Projects. When we gat all tasks, per page of 100 tasks, we get the task info alright. But when we try to sort based on DESC(last_modified_time) we don't get the correct sort order. It is roughly sorted by the last_modified_time,

• Assemblies make my stock go negative

  I am sure this is just the way that we are using this feature, but we use assemblies, a lot. The issue for us is the way that the relive inventory and the fact that it makes our composite item stock go negative. I have added flows to auto assemble and

• User Activity Reports

  I'd like to get data related to user activity.  For example, Login and logout times, emails sent/received, new records created , etc. Is that currently available. I just can't seem to find anything . Thanks, Dave

• Help: Populate “Contact Owner” details into Customer custom fields (for email templates) in Zoho Books

  We want to send invoices on behalf of our sales agents, and include the agent’s name, email, and phone in the email body using placeholders. Plan is to copy the Customer Owner details into three Customer custom fields, so they can be used as placeholders

• Undocumented Books API error message - 1000 - The requested action could not be completed. Please try again. | Unexpected error

  This code sometimes throws this error 1000 - The requested action could not be completed. Please try again. | Unexpected error What does it mean? result = zoho.books.updateRecord("salesorders",organization.get("organization_id"),salesorder_id,sales_

• Partial payments for retainer invoices

  When a customer does not pay the entire retainer invoice there is no way to apply a partial payment. PLEASE add this function.

• Making Tags Mandatory

  When creating an expense, is it possible to make the Tags field mandatory?  I see the option in settings to make other fields mandatory, like Merchant, Description, Customer, etc, but nothing about Tags. Thanks! Kevin

• Mass Update not trigger workflows

  Hi, I have performed a mass update of all records in a custom module using a custom view. I have a dummy checkbox on my module that I turn on or off - hoping to trigger all the new workflows that have been created for that module. However, no workflows

• Multi-Select lookup field has reached its maximum??

  Hi there, I want to create a multi-select lookup field in a module but I can't select the model I want the relationship to be with from the list. From the help page on this I see that you can only create a max of 2 relationships per module? Is that true?

• Generating CRM reports based on date moved in staged history

  Hi everyone, I'm trying to generate CRM reports of jobs (I think these are called usually deals) based on when they were moved to a particular stage, ie all jobs that were moved to Proposal/Quote in the previous financial year. I can see from other similar

• Modules for missed calls, emails, texts etc

  Hi there. Is there a way to create a module that would automatically show a list of all inbound calls that were missed by our users, as well as any inbound SMS's, emails & WhatsApp messages. That way, a user who is available, can work through that list

• Subforms and automation

  If a user updates a field how do we create an automation etc. We have a field for returned parts and i want to get an email when that field is ticked. How please as Zoho tells me no automation on subforms. The Reason- Why having waited for ever for FSM

• Conditional layouts - support for multi-select picklists

  Hi, The documentation for conditional layouts says the following: "Layout Rules cannot be used on the following field types: Auto Number Lookup Multi Select Lookup User Lookup Formula File Upload Multi Line" I have a custom module with a multi-pick list

• Next Page