Overview
Booth and Partners, a leading outsourcing company, uses Zoho Desk to meet the requirements of both its internal and external teams. They find Zoho Desk efficient and scalable.
The company
Booth and Partners, a leading outsourcing company, helps over 150 clients worldwide solve their talent and workspace challenges. Based in the Philippines and founded in 2013, the company’s mission is to support global startups by providing flexible, cost-effective solutions. Booth and Partners specializes in building remote teams for clients, ensuring they seamlessly align with their clients' values for smooth scaling. The Philippines is one of the leading outsourcing destinations in the world, and Booth and Partners has equipped itself with advanced solutions to be an industry leader.
The challenge
Back in 2018, the team at Booth and Partners was considering a ticketing platform for their IT department, supporting around 70 employees at the time. The main requirement for the business was a simple, efficient solution since their needs were not too complex. They were not handling calls—just emails and occasional chats; they were still operating in the office, so senders could directly talk to the team. However, the lack of accountability within the team resulted in missed emails and verbal requests, leading to a time-consuming support process. Booth and Partners started looking for a solution that fit within their budget, with a subscription model that offered good value compared to other SaaS applications.
The Solution
Booth and Partners evaluated Zoho Desk and decided to move forward as it perfectly fulfilled their requirements. Furthermore, as their business grew, Zoho Desk proved to be agile enough to support their scaling processes.
How did they optimize their entire support workflow with Zoho Desk?
The support flow at Booth and Partners is a mix of both internal and external requirements. Internally, they help employees who report to clients and those who handle backend business operations. Externally, the team manages client requests, such as onboarding or specific inquiries, by raising tickets.
The process begins when an email is sent to the company’s support email address, which is mapped to their domain. This automatically creates a ticket in Zoho Desk. Once the ticket is created, it's manually assigned to the appropriate agent who tags the ticket, assigns priorities, and categorizes it.
The agent then coordinates with the requester, starting with questions to fully understand the issue. After gathering enough information, they map out an action plan, carry it out, and confirm the resolution. Once the issue is resolved, the ticket is closed. This structured approach, which was not part of their manual support process before Zoho Desk, ensures that both internal and external support needs are met efficiently.
The team currently consists of 18 to 20 members, and a significant portion of their ticketing activity revolves around three main processes: onboarding, support, and separation.
Onboarding process
Onboarding tickets are a key part of their workflow. When a new employee joins, a ticket is created to track the necessary steps. These tickets include details such as the type of laptop and software to be issued, as well as account setups and licenses. The IT department also issues IDs and RFID cards for building access, particularly for offices with biometric or key card systems. With chats and emails, the team found it difficult to track whether the request was closed or not. Now, these tasks are organized within Zoho Desk, ensuring that all required actions are completed before the new hire starts.
Operational support
The second major category is support for operational issues. In outsourcing companies, the operational support plays a major role since it affects the clients' and their own productivity. Employees who have difficulties with devices or applications submit tickets via email, which are logged in Zoho Desk. The team resolves these issues based on importance, ensuring minimal disruptions in day-to-day operations.
Employee separation
When an employee departs, a set of tickets is created within Zoho Desk to manage deactivating accounts, retrieving company equipment, and completing necessary paperwork.
Throughout all of these processes, communication—whether through email or ticket updates—is consistently logged in Zoho Desk.
SLAs give more visibility to management
The team has customized their service-level agreements (SLAs) based on priority levels rather than using the default settings. They have four priority levels:
- P1 (Priority 1) : Resolution within 4 hours
- P2 (Priority 2) : Resolution within 8 hours
- P3 (Priority 3) : Resolution within 24 hours
- P4 (Priority 4) : Resolution within 1 week
These SLAs are configured to match the urgency of different issues, and they ensure timely responses for each priority level.
The team regularly monitors performance through analytics. By analyzing ticket data, they can assess if SLAs are being met and track key performance indicators (KPIs).
Everyday key features
Blueprints
At Booth and Partners, we rely on blueprints to define and automate our ticket workflows. For example, during onboarding or other routine processes, tickets follow a predefined sequence. As agents move through each stage, they fill out specific fields or take actions—like sending an email—before progressing to the next step. These blueprints in Zoho Desk have helped us maintain an effective support process, ensuring we never miss any crucial steps.
A blueprint was created for the troubleshooting process. Whenever a ticket is assigned to this blueprint, it follows a defined path. The blueprint ensures that before escalation, agents have investigated the issue thoroughly and included all necessary troubleshooting information.
Scheduled automation
When a ticket for a scheduled task is created, a corresponding task is tagged and assigned to the appropriate person. For example, if a backup needs to be performed, the automation creates a ticket in Zoho Desk task in Zoho Projects and notifies the responsible person. This helps streamline routine operations and ensures nothing is overlooked.
Custom dashboards and real-time monitoring
The team uses custom dashboards to track ticket statuses in real time. A dashboard is displayed on monitors in their workspace, allowing team members to see whether tickets have been assigned, if there are any aging tickets, or if there are tickets that need immediate attention. This visual setup helps the team stay on top of ticket management and respond quickly to critical issues.
For the dashboard, Booth and Partners created custom views to track key metrics, such as the number of tickets awaiting resolution on specific dates, the number of unassigned tickets, and the amount of time spent by agents within a specified period. Booth and Partners also uses Zoho Desk analytics for generating detailed weekly and monthly reports.
Organizing ticket details with ticket layout rules
Ticket layout rules are used with blueprints to automate ticket assignment. For example, if a ticket is related to onboarding, the system detects the keyword "onboarding" in the subject line and automatically assigns the appropriate onboarding layout.
As for field dependencies, these have been set up mostly for the category and subcategory fields. Since there are over 100 subcategories, the team has created field dependencies to simplify the process. This ensures that agents can quickly fill in the correct information without confusion.
Round-robin ticket assignment: Adoption challenges and success
At Booth and Partners, the Workspace team, which uses round-robin assignment rules, faced a challenge. When adopting this system, the Workspace team had to get used to toggling their status as "active" or "inactive," as opposed to their previous method of just opening and closing the platform without actively managing their status.
However, once the team adapted, the round-robin system began to work effectively. Tickets are now automatically assigned to the available agent based on their online status, and the workload is distributed evenly among team members.
Benefits & ROI
Almost all of Booth and Partners' departments now use Zoho Desk, each with its own specific needs. Their People and Culture team (HR), Workspace team (office needs, reception, and admin), Finance team (accounting and payroll), and Development team (new projects and development) all use the platform. The Client Services team, which only recently activated ticketing, has also integrated Zoho Desk into their workflow.
I’d like to talk about our Client Services team, as they are the most recent to adopt Zoho Desk. We rolled it out just a month or two ago, and overall, I’d say the platform has been very easy for them to use. They’re still in the process of fully adopting it, but the simplicity and functionality of Zoho Desk have made the transition smooth so far. It’s been a great fit for our needs.
- Industry typeOutsourcing and Offshoring Consulting
- EmployeesAbove 500
- Type of businessB2B
Looking forward
Ronald Ocampo at Booth and Partners said that the team is planning to create more knowledge base articles since they're highly beneficial in resolving their team members' and clients' questions. They also want to start using Zia more within Zoho Desk to increase their agents' productivity.
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