Hornbill Service Management launched Supportworks ITSM Enterprise v.3.2, a new solution that integrates both Twitter and smartphone-based support with the service desk.

IT departments can now improve service delivery by proactively identifying and responding to service issues that often fail to surface in traditional communication channels. Supportworks ITSM Enterprise v.3.2 combines these new capabilities with a range of ITIL-compatible enhancements that continue to support the IT Service Management journey, from help desk to ITSM maturity.

“Having the ability to proactively address support issues is an ongoing challenge for IT. This is particularly important during a time when there are an increasing number of savvy users such as ‘digital natives’ and Generation Y in the workplace. Customer demand, especially from service desks providing IT support to this audience, led us to look at the opportunities to develop social functionality into our service management solution, Supportworks,” said Patrick Bolger, Chief Evangelist at Hornbill.

“Our first priority has been to enable IT support teams to incorporate a social monitoring capability into their support offering. We are increasingly seeing examples where users air their frustrations via social media channels long before contacting the service desk. In these instances IT is the last to know, which not only lets issues fester but can damage the reputation of support teams. With Supportworks v3.2, service desks can discover, react and resolve requests via Twitter and create an auditable record of these interactions in the Supportworks database.”

Supportworks ITSM Enterprise v.3.2 takes a major step toward the proactive service desk through the integration of Twitter. More specifically, this innovative new feature gives service desk staff the ability to:

* Search Tweets: Searches for specific hashtags, words or phrases can be saved and scheduled to run automatically, with real-time results displayed and options available to reply to the tweet.

* Monitor mentions and issue updates: Track what customer followers are ‘tweeting’ and enable immediate access to these followers and the ability to broadcast service updates

* Resolve customer records from Twitter ID: Match tweets received from customers with records in the Supportworks database to create an auditable record of interactions and ensure greater consistency across all support channels.

* Raise a Tweet as an Incident: Reply to a tweet from within Supportworks or raise an Incident, Service Request directly from the tweet. In turn, a new call form is opened, the customer details are resolved and relevant information is copied from the tweet.

* Manage multiple Twitter accounts: Use Open Authentication (OAuth) to integrate several Twitter accounts with the Service Desk, enabling support staff to tweet and reply from accounts they are approved to use.

Supportworks ITSM Enterprise v.3.2 also includes an updated Mobile Web Client with a more intuitive interface. In just a few clicks, support staff on the move can log, update and resolve requests, as well as authorise and update tasks without having to enter large amounts of text. This mobile functionality can be utilised on a variety of popular smartphones including Blackberry, iPhone and Android devices.

Additional enhancements to Supportworks ITSM Enterprise v.3.2 include updates to business process features in areas such as user authorisation and task setting, as well as new Configuration Management Database (CMDB) settings.