Turbo Charging your Fuzzy Help-Desks with Yammer + Teams Integration

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.

What’s a fuzzy help-desk?

 

Your company is probably using them already and you might not even realise it. If you’re reading this blog there is a good chance you’re a Yammer community manager and running one yourself!

 

The term ‘fuzzy help-desk’ is used to describe support communities which are usually hosted on an Enterprise Social Network (ESN) such as Yammer. They are place where employees can ask the “who do I speak too” or “how do I do that” type questions for either a piece of software, process or a business strategy.

 

Some examples include:

 

  • Communities to support a piece of software e.g. your companies travel booking system.
  • Communities to support a process e.g. submitting travel expenses.
  • Communities to support a business strategy e.g. reducing carbon foot print while travelling.

 

Yammer is amazing for these communities as it gives your support teams a scalable collaboration space where the user-base can ask ad-hoc questions. Yammer + support communities fits neatly into two Yammer use-cases of crowdsourcing and communities of practice.

 

It’s important to note that the type of questions answered in fuzzy help-desks are informal. For more serious issues we always suggest employees to raise a ticket in suitable IT support system.

 

Fuzzy help-desks just got turbo charged!

 

With the introduction of Yammer + Microsoft Teams integration and now Yammer Question and Answer, fuzzy help-desks just got a lot smarter. Let’s see how:

 

Identify questions and answers:

 

Your support teams no longer have to trawl through the communities feed to find new questions. They can now quickly identify posts marked with the question’s icon.

 

Your community no longer has to guess if they’ve found the right answer as the support team can mark responses as “best answer”.

 

Swarming on problems with Yammer + Teams:

 

Support teams are now able send those tricky “how do I do this” or “why isn’t this working” questions straight into a Team channel. Here the support team can swarm on the problem in private, before pushing a solution back out to the Yammer group. In fact, Teams is perfect a hub for any support team to not only swarm on issues but also to store help documents, stock responses in OneNote and help videos in a Stream channel tab. Everything they need to provide speedy answers in one place.

 

Let’s see this in action using an example of a fuzzy help-desk which is used to support employees with their SharePoint questions:

 

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Hopefully that gives you some ideas to start thinking about using a fuzzy helpdesk within your own organization. 

 

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Simon is a collaboration subject matter expert based in the UK. Working for large scale enterprises he helps to drive adoption of new ways of working, culture change and solutions to meet business needs. When he's not at work you can find him in the mountains either on his bike or with his camera

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