I’ve been tasked with implementing ModernBill as a hosting billing and provisioning system. Simultaneously, I’ve been asked to come up with a ticketing system to replace an outdated, minimalist, broken implementation of help desk ticketing.
Extensive research tells me that ModernBill includes a ticketing system, but like the system which is being replaced, it is minimalist as far as features are concerned. Anyone who runs a decent-sized (more than 2 people) IT shop knows that for ticketing to be beneficial it needs to have important features such as escalation, reassignment, notification, and much, much more.
Extensive research also shows that several companies have attempted ticketing integration with ModernBill, and as far as I’m concerned, they have all missed the mark.
Cerberus: Apparently Cerberus 3.6 integrated with ModernBill 4, but then Cerberus’ developer decided that a rewrite was in order, and Cerberus 4 no longer integrates with ModernBill. Meanwhile, Modernbill has upgraded to version 5, which puts a damper on the idea of integrating the legacy version of Cerberus with ModernBill. Because of these inconsistencies, I didn’t even get as far as testing functionality.
Kayako: Kayako integrates nicely with ModernBill, but it is still woefully incomplete. On the plus side, customers can open a ticket within ModernBill and it goes into Kayako. Staff members can view the tickets within Kayako. Customers can view their open tickets in ModernBill. On the double-plus side, News and FAQ are integrated as well. This is great stuff. On the minus side, when a staff member pulls up an account in ModernBill, their tickets are not shown in the “last __ tickets” column. So the staff member has no visibility into what’s been going on for a specific customer. This is critical information. Also, it doesn’t appear that Kayako’s knowledge-base checkbox in ticketing actually publishes into the knowledge-base. More research is required into this area. One more thing, in Kayako’s interface, all that’s presented for customer information is the customer’s name. There’s no link back to ModernBill for the customer’s account information, which makes it difficult for a company such as the one I’m working for, who offers a number of different types of products, to determine what specific product a ticket customer subscribes to, or what “level” or “priority” that customer might be.
Anyone who can do this well could easily corner the market. Kayako is poised to do so. It remains to be seen if they have what it takes.
0 Responses to “ModernBill & professional ticket system integration”