How to Create a DIY IT Helpdesk for Free SmartSuite Tutorial

I started my soap business to serve a few customers, but now I just sold out over 10,000 pieces of soap and all of a sudden everything is just, oh, customer needs help. Hold on. Okay. Another customer needs some support. Okay, Just. Okay. Another and another and. Holy shit. I don't need this. This ain't even worth it. I'm just shutting the business down. You know, Uncle Chuck, it might be time for you to go beyond just emails for this. Sure, you can do it, but it's going to be pretty tiring. And if you just set up some kind of help desk where you could have all of the issues one by one, and a place to track all your notes and make sure they're resolved, it'd probably be a lot easier to keep track of them. Just a help desk? What the hell you think I'm doing here? I'm a soap maker. I'm not an IT fancy computer sitting type all day kind of guy, okay? I work with my hands, not my fingers. And besides, I don't have the funds for those kinds of fancy pieces of software. I'm just trying to get by with what I've got. No, you're totally right. I would be in the same boat. But the thing is, we don't need to have some kind of fancy help desk software, at least at your scale, in order to get the benefits. We can build some kind of DIY ticket tracking help desk for. For your IT needs, for your soap making business, for whatever it is that you need to do right inside of this tool called SmartSuite. Have you heard of that before? Smart sweeties. Ain't that that little. That little candy you get a Halloween Smart. Sweet. Something like that? No, Uncle Chuck, you're thinking of smarties. This is smartsuite, the sponsor of today's video. Yeah, what smartsuite does is allows you to build your own software essentially to organize data and tasks and, and even support tickets inside their tool. You can then access it on your phone or on your computer and make sure that you can see all the information you need at a glance. And actually, let me just go over my computer and I'll show you what exactly this would look like. If we wanted to build out a help desk in SmartSuite, here's what it would look like. It's a help desk where you have all of the different tickets and requests from customers coming in to this one spot. We could create these tickets manually by clicking right here. Or we could have a form that our customers fill in that allow them to submit their own support Tickets so we don't have to do so much typing ourselves. We'll just drag in the fields that are important to us into this area and then we can share this form with our customers. And as soon as they fill it in, it will automatically create a new ticket for us inside the system right here. Once we have this, we have the ability to connect this back to our customers. If we want to keep track of which customers have had which kind of tickets, this is going to be particularly good for those like high end wholesale clients. You have Uncle Chuck for your casual consumers. Maybe this is overkill, but it's great to be able to say, hey, you know, swing and cradle. How many issues have they had with their order over the last year? We can do that by having our customers all in here and connecting them to the tickets that we have processed, such as this right here. We can link that ticket. This gives us one spot to track the progress to email customers and communicate with customers and ultimately process all of those requests. And did I mention it all starts at free. Like you can use pretty much everything I've shown you here without having to pay anything. It's really cool. Well, I do like free and I'll admit that looks pretty nice. Get in there a little bit. But I'm not real techy. Like it's gonna take me forever to set up something that looks like what you have there, Layla. Nope, that's not true. I'll actually prove it to you by setting it up right now. Okay, so we're gonna go into SmartSuite. The last link is in the description for anyone who wants to follow along. And we're going to go to this big old button saying add new solution. When we are in here, we're going to start with a template. This is my little cheat code to make sure we're able to set this up very quick. And we're going to be searching for the word ticket to look for the support ticket template. You can also do the facility work. Tickets, they work very similarly. But we're going to go with the support ticket one today. Then we're going to click Use template. This is going to install all of that good stuff I just showed you in the other screen and into our account right here. Once this loads, we can give this a name. So we're going to click up on the top and I'm going to call it. What do we want to call it? Chuck's Soap. SOAP support. Something simple like that. And once we have this set up, we now have two different areas to organize our information in SmartSuite, they're called apps, but you can just think of them as areas. We've got all of our tickets here and all of our companies here. So this would be for you customers because you're not usually working with other businesses, right? So instead we're going to go in here and we're going to rename this customers and on the other side we're going to keep it as tickets. Now, right now this template is loaded with a bunch of demo data to help you see what it would look like when this is all filled out. Like it has different layouts and views showing how to work on different things. But if I click on any of the actual tickets themselves, these rows in this spreadsheet, I'll just give it a click and open it up. You can see there are a bunch of fields here and this is really where the magic happens. Each of these little square fill out able areas is a spot for you to track information that other otherwise you just have to figure out from the email. And I know, I've seen some of your emails, Chuck. Like customers will email in and they'll just say, hey, can I get a new order? And you're not sure if they need a new order because something went wrong. If they're reordering, if they're looking to get on your subscription soap plan, it's not clear. But with this we've got some clear dropdowns so we can track what type of ticket it is, what someone actually means when it was submitted and what we need to do to actually resolve that ticket. All of these different fields are all added in here by default and give you one spot to kind of track the progress of each request. All right, like I like what you got here, but some of these things just don't make sense, like importance. What am I supposed to write? Every single ticket, I just need to solve the ticket, not prioritize them in a color coded cube. That's a great point. I mean, but that's exactly why I'm suggesting you go this route as opposed to getting some kind of fancy help desk software. Because in those fancy softwares you'll have all the bells and whistles and fancy settings and analytics and this, that and the other. And it's probably overkill, but with this we can kind of make it as complex or as simple as you want. So for example, if you don't care about that importance field, let's just scroll down till we find it. Go over here and click delete, delete Done, gone, don't need to worry about it anymore. And that can be the same for other fields too. Maybe you don't care how many days it's been since someone submitted this. Right here is a formula field that's automatically calculating this based on when the actual ticket was submitted to today's date. Now, if this number doesn't matter to you, you can just go ahead and delete this as well. But I'm guessing you do want this because you want to make sure these tickets are moving pretty quickly. But everything inside the SmartSuite account, from deleting, editing, adding new fields, you can all do very quickly based on whatever you want to see. So one thing that I would suggest is to to kind of look at what you do in your email inbox currently. What questions are you asking? What data do you need to process a refund? Do you need their email? Do you need their address, order date, whatever you need. Let's make fields for that. So for example, if we wanted to track order date, we could go in here, add date, order date. We might want to default the date to today, assuming that, you know, typically your refunds come in the day that the order happens. And then click add field, whatever those fields are for you. We can add these in here to make sure that everything you need is all here in one spot. Well, that is pretty nice. But. But here's the problem. I still gotta type them all. And I'm not too fast on a keyboard, so whether I got this Smarty suite or I gotta just use Gmail or Outlook, I still gotta sit there and type all these dang emails. I don't think this is gonna save me that much time to begin with because I still gotta type them all. Well, you could make some templates where you could actually delegate your inbox to another person on the team. And if you're interested in that topic, I did cover that in detail up here. But I think for Uncle Chuck, we're going to start it a little bit simpler and not overcomplicated quite yet. So. But let's just keep it simple. With SmartSuite, we can actually incorporate email right into the platform. So it's not an either or. You can do them both together. The way we do that is over here in the communication center. It's this little chat icon that's built into every record, which is what this thing is called. If we click on this by default, it doesn't look like much, but go over to this little settings gear and click on emails. This is going to Turn on the Email from and to SmartSuite feature, where we can now go in to emails and send emails to, say, our customer, our contacts, our team, whomever. If we're going to go this email route before we start sending things, I'm actually going to go one step further and add an email field field to our ticket. That way we know who we're emailing. So let's just go ahead and add an email field. Let's just call it Contact Email and let's allow multiple in case there's a few people reaching out. And then click Add Field. I'm going to go over here and click New Email. Once I fill in this contact email, go back into that contacts area and go to Email. I can click the plus button and actually select the email from this email field in the dropdown. That was a lot of words, but essentially it'll look it up for us. So I can just click right here and it'll always be whoever our contact email is, and then I can send whatever email it is. So refund request, update and if I had a template that I saved, which you can save these inside of SmartSuite through their manage Templates feature, I can create an email template for how I want to handle refund requests. For example, something like this. This is an email that I've written using variables, which is just basically saying, like the fields, the things in the ticket, I'm going to have them pop in automatically. I'm going to then save this as a template, an email template. And then anytime I want to send that refund request, I can just go here to Templates, click Refund Request and it'll automatically populate with all of those fields without me having to type it all out one for one. But even though this is a template, you can customize this based on the person you're sending it to. So, for example, if this is Margie and you want to give that person personal touch to show that you remembered your order, you can customize this to whatever you need, attach their own files, whatever else it is that you need to do, and then click Send Email to send it out. Now, when you do that, your customer is going to receive an email that just looks like a regular email. It's going to be formatted the way that you've set it up to be. They don't experience anything different other than the name showing a different email address, which you can customize if you wanted to. When they respond to that email, here's what happens. They're going to respond Just like they would any other email, such as thanks, Chuck. And then they'll send it. And when they respond, you're going to receive a notification in SmartSuite as well as on the actual record itself, saying, hey, there's new activity here. Check out what happened. And here we can see in our notifications of SmartSuite, we have a response to that refund request from the test email address. And if I open it up, it'll take me right to that record showing me that this person said, thanks, Chuck. Now, just to push things a little further, if you had other people who are working inside your smartsuite with you. So like Chuck, let's say I was working for the summer at your soap business. I could come in here and comment internally saying, this is great. Excited, she was happy with the refund. And this comment is going to go internally, so only our other SmartSuite users are going to see it. But it's a good way for us to kind of swap notes, discuss things, share announcements with one another. So you're not just emailing in a silo by yourself. And this allows you to collaborate on your emails, both when sending them and when getting responses and when creating those email templates. Like, we showed a lot of really good stuff here that allows you to organize information that you may need. All right, well, it's nice that it's all together. I'm glad I don't have to go into a bunch of other things and do all that. But I still gotta write all those emails. So I. I just don't know if it's gonna be worth the setup since I gotta do it all anyway. That makes perfect sense. I couldn't make SOAP to save my life. But, you know, have you heard about this artificial intelligence stuff that's all the rage? You might have heard it called AI not besides those AI Take over the World movies. Are we talking about that kind of thing? Because I don't know what this whole Elon musk is up to, but it does sound like it might be going that way. Yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna unpack that, but let me show you something that you might find kind of cool. It's using artificial intelligence and it might help you on that email drafting thing. So let me just write right here. We essentially need to just find somewhere in SmartSuite where we can type a bunch of information. And my go to spot is usually in these kinds of descriptions. Anything with a SP Smart Doc area. All we're going to do is write slash and then AI and then click this little button or click Enter. When we do that, we're able to access AI prompts inside a SmartSuite, which all that really means is we can have a robot do some stuff for us. For example, we could write something like this. Write a two to three sentence email saying a refund request has been processed. Be cheerful and concise. Just some guidelines for this little robot. Then we're going to click Enter. When we click Enter, some magic is going to happen and we have an email being written for us. No hands to turn into an email template. So here we see refund request processed. I hope this email finds you well. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Perfect. Now, if I wanted to, I could make it maybe longer. I could click make longer and they're going to make the email a little bit more detailed. Well, I'll be. That is cool as. Here we go. Magic is happening. As this is being written, I'm looking for what I like and don't like about it. If it looks good, then I can copy this email and turn this into one of those email templates. Essentially, I've written a few phrases to the AI. I then have an email template that I can put into SmartSuite and I don't have to type this email out ever again. If you are someone who doesn't really enjoy a lot of typing, this AI option could be a nice way to either polish up the stuff that you do write to check it for grammar or for style or for whatever or. Or avoid writing altogether. Well, I'll be. If I had known I could just whip up this smart, sweet, organize all this stuff and have it write things for me, I would have saved so much time answering all these darn tickets. Said I've been sitting here sending emails, hoping to remember them, missing some of them. It's like when you compare it, it's like I've just been sitting around with my thumb up my butt this whole time. Now, I would argue a better place for using your thumb would be thumbs upping this video by liking it below and leaving a comment. Oh, wait, can I. Can I have this smart sweetie thingy just kind of focus in for me so I only see some of the tickets like the ones I gotta work on and keep the other ones kind of tucked away until they're important. Oh yeah, it can. Those would be called SmartSuite views. They allow us to view information in different ways by slicing and dicing and reformatting things. But Uncle Chuck, we're on YouTube here today and I don't know that the audience would be interested in seeing that, and we're really just trying to produce what they want to see. Well, damn right they do. Hey, you. You there. Yes. If you want to see more videos with me, Chuck, going over views or other things, go ahead and write Chuck in the comments below. Let this lady know that here on the Boob tube, we want to see more Chuck and views. Okay, Uncle Chuck. But until those votes come in, if anyone wants to learn how to keep building with what we've built so far, check out this video next, where you can actually check. Take what we've built and add your own custom buttons that add automatic actions into your IT Help desk. For example, you click a button and it sends an email to the customer requesting missing information without you having to lift the finger. If you're interested in taking what we built here and automating it with or without AI, definitely check out this video. It is super, super cool. And don't forget to enjoy the process. Oh, and real quick, yes, this. This is a piece of that plant. It's probably slowly poisoning me, but don't question my commitment to YouTube here.