MantisHub – The power of a unified issue tracking and customer helpdesk system

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With a goal of making your life easier and sparing you and your team from learning yet another system, MantisHub has a variety of in-built systems & plugins to complement any issue tracking solution.

By far the most popular of these is our Helpdesk plugin which is a FULL customer support ticketing system.

Often, companies purchase an entirely new, separate system to receive and respond to customer queries but with MantisHub, you can have customer emails funneled straight into your system to automatically create a new ticket in your project of choice. So your customer support can be fully integrated with your issue tracking and project management!

And the best part… its included with your plan*. Yep, I’ll give you a sec to just go back and read that again. Not only is MantisHub already, extremely well priced in the issue management market but it comes with “batteries included”, a complete Helpdesk solution. Other help desk system vendors will charge upwards of $25 PER AGENT and some double this. With MantisHub an issue tracking AND a help desk solution costs you only $4 per agent*.

MantisHub Helpdesk is really quick and easy to setup. In just a few minutes you are ready to receive tickets. The interface is simple and easy to use so your support staff need little training. Check out our support article including a helpful walk-through video, on how to set it up and use it. Also well worth a look is our Snippets plugin that goes hand-in-hand with Helpdesk to provide insertion of frequently used support responses. You can even start testing it all out with MantisHub’s free trial. Sign-up is also quick and easy with no obligation or credit card required!

You can, and our customers often do, use MantisHub as a help desk solution just on its own but coupled with an internal task tracking tool, it’s even more powerful. Here are 5 ways to increase productivity and efficiency by using your support ticketing and issue/task tracker together:

1. Collaboration between Development and Support

Having a single system accessible by your developers and your customer success/support team will have your team easily working together on customer tickets as well as the underlying backlog items. Information sharing can go both ways with your customer support team collecting bug & feature request details to pass along to developers. Developers meanwhile can provide information on fixes and work arounds for the support team to pass onto the customers. Re-assign support tickets directly to the relevant developer or @mention them to get questions answered. All internal communications can all be done within the customer ticket using private notes. So troubleshooting, internal processes, brainstorming etc can be added to the ticket, yet customers don’t see any of the background conversations.

2. Linking support tickets to backlog items

A handy practice is to create a link between the reported issues or feature requests that come in from customers, and the internal issue created to track progress of the bug or task. Using the Relationships feature in MantisHub, you can easily find and reference customer tickets for added information such as fault details or replication steps. This also makes it easier to take customer facing action once the fix or feature is implemented such as advanced deployment for affected customers or notifying them of upcoming fixes, features or deployments.

Relating internal issues and customer support tickets

3. Prioritize work & allocate team resources correctly

Creating relationships with customer reported issues or requests for a specific task, can help with prioritizing tasks within the development team. You can determine how often a backlog item comes up in support by checking the number of related support tickets. Then push those items with the most Helpdesk tickets linked, up the line as a high priority fix.

4. Easy creation of backlog items

Create backlog items by simply cloning the ticket out of help desk support project to the relevant implementation project . This way all the details needed are already added to the backlog issue and wont get lost in translation. Handy whether you want to add: 1. a bug fix for the development team, 2 a feature request for the product management team or 3 a task to amend or improve documentation for the customer success team.

5. Use Tags to analysis support tickets and improve efficiencies in your Support team.

There are 2 ways Tags can help refine your support processes and improve efficiencies.

  • Creating comprehensive knowledge base resources: Having collaborated and consulted on customer issues within your support tickets, these tickets can end up being a wealth of information. You can Tag and/or extract these data filled tickets for further action. You can copy or clone these tickets into a central repository project. This data can then be used for training support staff, creation of internal job aides or support snippets or development of new support procedures.
  • Analysis for high frequency issues: Tag each support issue depending on the area or team responsible. This allows review of what areas or services get the most highest frequency of support requests. You can then look into processes or procedures to alleviate these support loads or bottlenecks and improve customer experience. Create and allocate the tasks for these steps directly from within MantisHub.

Hope we’ve given you some food for thought. With this integrated system in MantisHub there is no need to purchase, maintain or train staff on a second system. That could save you time and significant dollars $$ every month.

I’m sure you can think of many other ways a combined tool for customer support ticketing and internal issue tracking helps with your business workflow. Feel free to share them in the comments section so others can benefit.

And as always, reach out to our team if you need any help signing up for our free trial, setting up your Helpdesk plugin or utilizing the power of MantisHub!

*Helpdesk plugin unavailable for starter plans. Based on Platinum plan for 30 users at $59.95 pm as of 02.2022. Pricing is subject to change and current pricing can be found on our website https://mantishub.com/pricing

Tracking Time in MantisHub

Whatever your business may be, keeping a record of the time that members of your team spend on your project tasks or issues can help in many areas, providing data to help with developing efficient, cohesive workflows for your business tasks. It’s also necessary where businesses have specific business needs to track time spent against tasks within your organization. There can be several reasons you need your team to record any time spent on their tasks.

  • Where clients are charged based on tracked hours spent on client services.
  • Managers and supervisors are required to regularly report on the efficiency of teams and measure performance.
  • Planners need to predict resource needs for future projects by identifying bottlenecks or high demand areas.

So among our many handy features and integrations, MantisHub have a few options to address your task time-tracking needs.

In-built MantisHub time tracker

Setup is easy: The easiest way to start tracking time is to turn on the in-built time tracking feature within MantisHub. Turning it on just requires a simple line of configuration and straight away you’ll be able to enter time details in your issues and run reports on time spent on issues. Full setup instructions can be found in our Setting up Time Tracking support article.

Enter time manually or automatically: Once enabled, your team can record time spent on the issue as part of issue updates. You can either enter these details manually, or enable the stop watch feature. With the stop watch feature you can just click the start button when you begin working on a task and stop when you’re done, to record time spent automatically.

Report on time spent: When you turn on time tracking, you’ll notice a new menu item on the left hand main menu where managers can run reports on tracked time within a project for any specified period. Project management and resource planning is easier with the ability to view just how much time your team is spending within each area. It’s also great for client chargeback as you also have the option to turn on time tracking billing. This feature allows you to specify a hourly cost for time spent and total cost per task will be calculated and displayed in your report!

For more information on using MantisHub’s in-built time tracking feature, check out this article or sign up for a free MantisHub trial to test it out.

Time Tracking Integrations

If you already use a dedicated time tracking service in your organization and want to tap into existing functionality, MantisHub offers integrations with several third-party time tracking services. Using browser (e.g. Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge) extensions, you can connect MantisHub to:

Toggl – Install the Toggl extension here.

Clockify – Install the Clockify extension here.

TimeCamp – Install the TimeCamp extension here.

Once installed, you’ll see a timer button when you head into your MantisHub issues. Just click, and time starts recording in your third party application. These integrations also import MantisHub project and issue information. So you can automatically populate fields such as task name, description and project!

So there are a few options for you to go ahead and try out! If you do have any other application that you prefer to use for time tracking, you can always reach out to your provider to request an integration with MantisHub or reach out to our team. We’re happy to work with them to provide a solution for you.

Scheduled issue creation with Recurring Tasks

Recurring tasks

MantisHub has just launched a super useful plugin exclusive for MantisHub customers to help you handle those regular ongoing tasks that every team has on their plate.

There is only so much information you can fit into a calendar reminder so having the added functionality of automatic creation of an issue that you can track through to completion, which includes any repetitive data and details, inherits default field values (e.g. priority or due dates), automatically assigned to the right person as well as triggering email notifications (or integrated with your chat application) to keep everyone in the loop is a huge bonus!

Available for Platinum and above plans, our Recurring tasks plugin allows you to set a schedule for automatic creation of issues with your desired settings.

Tasks can be set daily, weekly, monthly or annually and you can set a default description and assignment as well as restrict the number of times the task is created.

The use cases are endless. You can use it to automatically create issues and track tasks. such as:

  • annual service subscription renewals or performance appraisals
  • monthly reporting, invoicing, or payroll
  • weekly check on cloud consumption costs to avoid surprises.
  • daily dashboard and log checks

You know your system best and how recurring tasks can help in your workflow and business processes to improve efficiency. And to make sure those repetitive tasks (not always particularly popular) don’t get swept under the carpet.

Super flexible too. Once created, you can amend, re-assign, limit, disable or re-enable tasks as needed. Check out our support article for more details on how to turn it on and how it all works. 

Hope we’ve helped solve some of your work problems with the Recurring tasks plugin! If so, we’d love to hear from you! Tweet @mantishub and let us know what kind of automation you’ve set up with Recurring tasks. Or reach out to us at any time with your feedback.

 

Boost your team’s work from home productivity with MantisHub

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If you are like a good chunk of the world at the moment, you’re being responsible and staying home as much as possible to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. That means, of course, that many companies have mandated a work from home policy. Continue reading “Boost your team’s work from home productivity with MantisHub”

Integrate MantisHub with Microsoft Teams for easy team comms.

MSteams Integration

Announcing MantisHub’s latest chat integration to help keep your whole team up to date. With our Microsoft Teams plugin, you can connect your Team channels to your MantisHub projects to get live updates on all your issue creations, closures and updates. Continue reading “Integrate MantisHub with Microsoft Teams for easy team comms.”

Single Sign-on via Open ID Connect for Office 365, Google, Github and Bitbucket

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MantisHub team is excited to announce the release of Open ID federation support for single sign-on! With our AuthHub plugin, we provide open ID connect with multiple identity providers. Continue reading “Single Sign-on via Open ID Connect for Office 365, Google, Github and Bitbucket”

MantisHub + Bugsee integration for Crash Reporting and In-App Feedback

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When recording software bugs in your MantisHub bug tracker, there are several features you can make use of to assist developers in deciphering and reproducing the issue so they can get down to fixing it. You can: Continue reading “MantisHub + Bugsee integration for Crash Reporting and In-App Feedback”

Announcing MantisHub REST API

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At MantisHub we have been working for a while on the new modern REST API for remotely accessing MantisHub data and configuration.  We now feel that we have enough coverage of MantisHub functionality to encourage our users to switch to it.  The API can provide a great way to integrate MantisHub into your build system, IDEs, test management systems, other SaaS applications, or your own applications. Continue reading “Announcing MantisHub REST API”

TestLodge integration with MantisHub

Testlodge Integration

Some of you Mantis users out there are most likely in need or already using a test case management tool to pickup any bugs in your software product. You may be thinking “How useful would it be to have my issue tracker and test case manager work together!” Well, there are a number of test case managers out there that do advertise integration with Mantis and their instruction are available for you to test out. Continue reading “TestLodge integration with MantisHub”

Single Sign-on for MantisHub with GitHub and Bitbucket

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Just another way to make your life easier, MantisHub has just rolled out single sign-on support for GitHub and Bitbucket accounts. We know you’ve been waiting for it and now it is a single click away to enable it for all users of your MantisHub! Continue reading “Single Sign-on for MantisHub with GitHub and Bitbucket”