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

Photo by Jopwell on Pexels.com

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.

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

SSO-2

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”

Your MantisHub Data at your fingertips

exportdata

The beauty of hosting with MantisHub is that you will never need to worry about the retention, accessibility or integrity of the data stored in your MantisHub issue tracking system.

All the advantages of cloud hosting are at your fingertips. Like logging into your system from any place or any machine securely.  No need to worry about the security of your servers or disaster recovery. MantisHub hosting is robust, reliable, and secure, with daily backups of your data. Continue reading “Your MantisHub Data at your fingertips”

Walking you Through Getting Started

For those of you who have already signed up for a free trial, here’s a tip to get you going.

If you log into your new trial and head to your ‘My View’ page we have a little getting started video guide for first-time users. It covers the steps involved to get projects going and create issues.

If you’re tired of reading and you just want someone to tell you how to do it, we just put together a little walk-through video for you. Go ahead and check it out! Continue reading “Walking you Through Getting Started”

Email Training Course

We know you’ve probably got a long list of possible issue and bug trackers that you could use and may have already signed up for a bunch of trials. We want to help you out!

Now when you sign up for our free trial, you’ll automatically be subscribed to our 10-day email training program to walk you through everything you need to know to determine if MantisHub is for you. We’ll cover the basic getting started tasks, our great features and plugins, customization options and much more.  You’ll also have the opportunity to take advantage of our special offers! Continue reading “Email Training Course”

Turbo charge your team’s productivity with MantisHub. Get going in less than 2 Minutes.

For some companies a simple bug tracking tool without the hassle and complexity of installing, maintaining and supporting it in-house is the best fit. Some companies just want to get up and running now, while keeping their team focused on their business!  If a cloud solution is the best fit for you, take a look at MantisHub.

Utilizing the great features and usability of the highly popular MantisBT, MantisHub offers a bug and issue tracking software service solution so you can avoid the setup and maintenance overhead.

When you sign up with MantisHub for your issue tracking needs, what you’ll get is: Continue reading “Turbo charge your team’s productivity with MantisHub. Get going in less than 2 Minutes.”