DESKFLO

TICKETING SYSTEM & CUSTOMER PORTAL

Capstone Proposal

CST 499

California State University, Monterey Bay

by

Trinidad Ramirez

Summer 2022
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OF PROPOSAL

DeskFlo Ticketing System and Customer Portal

by

Trinidad Ramirez

California State University, Monterey Bay, 2022

The purpose of this project is to promote an easier workflow for help desk analysts

through better customer engagement and simplicity. Many ticketing systems become so

customizable and feature-heavy that it bogs down the speed of the system and makes the user

interface harder to navigate. DeskFlo will avoid this by only offering the most essential features,

making the application easier and more efficient to use. Some of these features include ticket

search, short and long descriptions, date, ticket list, and ticket creation. To promote customer

engagement, DeskFlo will have its own implemented chat system for customers to directly reach

out to analysts for inquiries instead of sending an email and having to wait longer for a response.

The DeskFlo ticketing system is for company help desks that want to improve the

operations and customer service of their department. DeskFlo is a great option for smaller

businesses and startups since the features are limited. It’s also for customers that want better

communication with their help desk department. The anticipated outcome of DeskFlo is to

improve and sustain a fast and efficient workflow for help desk analysts, and to give customers a

tool to connect better with their customer support team while receiving faster responses and

resolution times.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OF PROPOSAL 1

PART I 4

INTRODUCTION 4

INTRODUCTION/BACKGROUND 4

PROJECT NAME AND DESCRIPTION 4

ISSUE: SCALING, UNUSED FEATURES, AND CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT 4

SOLUTION: EASIER SCALING, TRIMMED FEATURES, CHAT SYSTEM 5

EVIDENCE OF NEED 5

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES 6

GOALS 6

OBJECTIVES 6

ENVIRONMENTAL SCAN 7

PART II 8

SOCIAL AND LEGAL CONSIDERATIONS 8

STAKEHOLDERS 8

ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS 9

LEGAL CONSIDERATIONS 10

PART III 12

PROJECT SCOPE 12

TIMELINE AND BUDGET 12

TIMELINE/MILESTONES 12

RESOURCES NEEDED 13

RISKS AND DEPENDENCIES 13

PRELIMINARY USABILITY TEST PLAN 13

FINAL DELIVERABLES 14

APPROACH/METHODOLOGY 14
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REFERENCES 16

APPENDIX 18
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PART I

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION/BACKGROUND

PROJECT NAME AND DESCRIPTION

The project to be delivered is called DeskFlo, a web-based ticketing system application

that is used by customer support teams to create, manage, and resolve customer-reported

problems by converting them to tickets. DeskFlo will be composed of two different sites that will

communicate with each other. One site will allow customers to submit their tickets, and the other

site will be for help desk teams to receive and manage the tickets. In general, ticketing systems

provide better organization for help desks, and using them allows for improved customer service.

For example, if a technician doesn’t know how to resolve a ticket, they can look up the ticket

history to see if the issue has been resolved before. If so, they can use the resolution on the ticket

to fix the current ticket they are working on. From private to public sector, any company that has

a customer support team can benefit from DeskFlo. Without it, help desks would be highly

disorganized, which in turn would affect customers.

ISSUE: SCALING, UNUSED FEATURES, AND CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

Ticketing systems are almost a staple in any customer support team; however, they are

not always effective, and they can end up slowing down workflow and being inefficient for

customers. Many companies that sell their own ticketing systems have allowed their software to

be customizable to fit client needs as best as possible. Although this may sound great on paper, it
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can hurt the efficiency of the software. To customize, companies will buy the software, and then

use in-house developers to hack it away in order to shape it to their needs. This can introduce

many bugs and slower speeds. Ticketing systems like Cherwell offer way too many features out

of the box that are not used. DeskFlo will come with the most universally important features

only, like being able to change the status of a ticket. Lastly, people don’t want to feel like they

are talking to a ticketing system. They want to talk to another human, and if the ticketing system

doesn’t provide an IM feature, customers have to resort to external sources like Microsoft Teams.

SOLUTION: EASIER SCALING, TRIMMED FEATURES, CHAT SYSTEM

To fix scaling issues and customer engagement, DeskFlo will aim to make customizations

easier for administrators. For example, if a company wants to add or change their ticket

categories, they shouldn’t have to change any hard code of the software. They should be able to

make edits in the database instead and allow the software to change itself. Embedding custom

forms tend to create tons of bugs, and forms are always changed; therefore, DeskFlo will not

embed forms. Ticketing systems have added a barrier between customers and help desk analysts,

making conversations more transactional rather than fluid. This can make customers feel like

their support team is less engaged with them. It also increases the time to resolution since they

have to wait on a response. DeskFlo will implement a chat system to ensure the quality of

customer engagement and promote faster resolution times.

EVIDENCE OF NEED

As an experienced IT help desk analyst and user of Unicenter and Cherwell, ticketing

systems with transactional communication frustrates customers, and they end up requesting more

follow-ups because of unresponsiveness and slow resolution times. Instead of using email
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through the ticketing system, customers use messaging apps like Teams to communicate because

they can actively engage with an analyst and receive faster support. As for scaling, in-house

customizations present many bugs and slowness in the software, and this disrupts efficient

workflow which leads to more work for analysts and longer wait times for customers.

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

GOALS

● 1) Limit out-of-the-box features to the most important ones

● 2) Make customizations easier for developers

● 3) Improve customer engagement

● 3) Create faster response and resolution times for customers

● 4) Ensure the sites are secure

OBJECTIVES

● 1) DeskFlo will include features like changing statuses of tickets, adding short and long

description, priority, categorization, attachments

● 2) DeskFlo will not allow forms to be embedded since these customizations present bugs

and are constantly changing. Instead, tickets will allow PDF attachments

● 3) Implement a chat system to promote better customer service, communication, and

engagement

● 4) Add a login system for analysts and customers to keep out unauthorized users
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ENVIRONMENTAL SCAN

Some of the ticketing systems that exist today are Cherwell and Zendesk. Starting with

Cherwell, it has codeless configuration, omnichannel support, a portal, dashboards, and incident

and request management (Ivanti, 2022). Zendesk also supports incident and request management

and omnichannel support, but one of the key features it offers that Cherwell doesn’t is an AI chat

bot (FinancesOnline, 2022).

While Zendesk does offer an AI chat bot, the fact that it’s a hybrid chat system where AI

works alongside the support team calls for a hefty price tag. Like Cherwell, it’s overloaded with

features, and you can only get the most out of it if you pay for the most expensive plans, that

being the Enterprise and Elite plans. Zendesk’s essential seems simple at first by saying $5 per

agent, but there are far more costs added on when getting more specific into the packages. For

example, Zendesk’s Sunshine Conversation package monthly prices start at $490 (Gorgias,

2022). While it’s great for large companies, the features and pricing are overkill for smaller

companies. DeskFlo will try to represent simplicity in the application by limiting features to

ticket lists, short and long descriptions, requestor, and a chat system. If DeskFlo was on the

market, keeping features to a minimum allows for the application to be sold at a low, competitive

price.
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PART II

SOCIAL AND LEGAL CONSIDERATIONS

STAKEHOLDERS

A stakeholder is an interested party of a company, and they can positively or negatively

impact or be impacted by the business. While that is the general definition of a stakeholder, it is

broken down into two different types, internal and external stakeholders. Internal parties have

direct relationships with the business, while external parties do not (Fernando, 2021).

Let’s first discuss the internal stakeholders of the ticketing system, DeskFlo. Internal

stakeholders include the owner of the business; therefore, a Cohort 12 student who is also the

developer is significantly impacted by the outcome of this project. The student has a vested

interest when considering the possibilities of gains and losses based on the success of the project.

The financial investment is the price of the course hosting this assignment, which is around

$2000, but the ultimate gain is a B.S. degree in Computer Science from CSU Monterey Bay.

The external stakeholders of DeskFlo are parties that are impacted by the business. Some

of the biggest parties that fall into this category are help desks and their customers. Help desk

teams are beneficially impacted because DeskFlo will aim to keep costs low and competitive by

keeping the application resources limited to the most important features. That said, this will

decrease the learning curve since the app will be simple and user-friendly. Not allowing DeskFlo

to be customizable by client developers will keep the system down-time and bugs to a minimum,
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which in turn becomes an impactful gain for their customers. A simple ticketing system

alongside a chat system will maximize customer engagement and improve business relationships

between help desk analysts and customers.

ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Regarding a ticketing system and customer portal that are each hosted on the web, it

raises two major ethical concerns during and after the implementation of the capstone project

that go hand-in-hand: consumer privacy and storage of personal information.

During the production of DeskFlo, or any business, it’s important to be transparent on

what information we have and how the application is being designed to protect the customers’

privacy and personal information. Anyone who uses the app could be negatively impacted if

enough security measures are not taken to protect the storage of customer data. DeskFlo plans to

eliminate these ethical concerns through following the law of the California Consumer Privacy

Act of 2018 (CCPA), and disclosing one’s personal information if asked by the authorized

individual. The CCPA gives consumers more control over the personal information businesses

collect on them. This law allows California residents to know about the information collected on

them and how it’s used and shared. It gives users the right to delete their personal information

and to not have it sold (State of California Department of Justice, 2021). Depending on time

constraints, the application should have a frontend UI option to delete one’s account. Until that

feature is implemented, customers can request to have their account deleted, which in this

method, we would simply remove the user’s information from the database. As for protection of

personal information, the potential clients of the app are companies that likely already have

trusted network environments with configured firewalls. In addition, DeskFlo will implement
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authentication and authorization, and use hashing on user passwords to increase security of its

accounts.

Lastly, there is an initial accessibility concern with DeskFlo regarding vision. The

application will not have its own screen reader attached; however, there are plenty of third-party

screen readers that users can purchase upon need that should work when used with DeskFlo.

LEGAL CONSIDERATIONS

One major legal concern of hosting a ticketing system and its corresponding customer

portal on the web is application and data security. There are obligations California companies

must fulfill when customers request their data, and when the company’s application encounters a

security breach. Let’s discuss the negative effects each situation has if companies do not abide by

the law, and what DeskFlo plans to do in each instance to ensure the laws are followed.

The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) requires California companies to

provide a user, upon request, with their own data, how it’s used, and the ability to opt out of the

data being sold to third parties. Now, people cannot sue companies for most CCPA violations;

however, people can sue companies if their non-encrypted personal information is stolen in a

data breach from lack of security procedures and practices. Specifically, people can sue for

monetary amounts lost because of the breach, and for statutory damages up to $750 per incident

(State of California Department of Justice, 2021). There is also a law in effect that requires all

California companies to notify state residents whenever their unencrypted personal information

was, or is believed to be compromised (State of California Department of Justice, 2019). If a

business does not report a breach, they will likely be met with a hefty fine. In 2016, Uber

encountered an incident where 600,000 drivers and 57 million user accounts were breached.
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Uber did not report it, and when the incident was uncovered, the company was fined $148

million (Spirion, 2021).

What does DeskFlo plan to do to follow the laws and minimize lawsuits? Regarding the

CCPA, the solution is simple, and it’s to provide any personal information, how it’s used, and

provide the option to opt out of the data being sold if the authorized user requests it; however,

there are security risks associated with this. The CCPA stated that companies should verify a

person’s identity to a “reasonable degree of certainty.” For some companies, that’s only an email

address to send the data upon request. Security researcher James Pavur impersonated his fiancee

and was able to get personal data on her since only a few of the companies asked for verification

(Whittaker, 2020). To avoid this issue, DeskFlo will require the user to verify the last four digits

of their social security number before turning over their data. As for data breaches, DeskFlo

plans to report them via email to all affected users and provide a recommendation to change their

password immediately.
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PART III

PROJECT SCOPE

TIMELINE AND BUDGET

TIMELINE/MILESTONES

Agile is the SDLC methodology that will be used for this project since it brings an

iterative approach to the development process. Specifically, an Agile framework by the name of

Scrum will be implemented, and this will consist of sprints to promote faster releases. For each

release, client feedback will be gathered and used to make adjustments or improvements to the

project. The milestones of this project consist of beginning and completing sprints, with each

sprint encompassing frontend and backend development. After the completion of each sprint, the

sites will go through user-acceptance testing where feedback will be gathered to make

improvements.
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RESOURCES NEEDED

This project will be developed with a MacBook Pro using Visual Studio Code for the IDE

(Integrated Development Environment). Additionally, DeskFlo will be created using the MERN

stack: MongoDB for the database, Express.js for the backend, React for the frontend, and

Node.js for the runtime. The ticketing system will also be deployed using AWS. There should be

no monetary expenses to complete this project.

RISKS AND DEPENDENCIES

Since the developer has little experience with AWS and chat systems, these features

could possibly extend sprint deadlines; therefore, the chat system might need to be completed

last since the ticketing system is not dependent on it to be fully functional. The first sprint is the

most important, and the goal is to have an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) ready by the end of

Sprint 1. The success of Sprints 2, 3, and 4 depend on Sprint 1 since the Agile/Scrum method is

being used. Without a working product by Sprint 1, this risks pushing deadlines for the following

sprints. The main goal of DeskFlo is to improve customer satisfaction and engagement, and that

is the role of the chat system. Without a functional site, the chat system cannot be implemented,

and this is why focusing on creating an MVP is crucial.

PRELIMINARY USABILITY TEST PLAN

Two state agency workers agreed to be testers for this project. They both work in IT and

are frequent users of the Cherwell ticketing system. One tester is a help desk supervisor, and the

other is a help desk specialist. The plan is to have them test the product every two weeks, and

subsequently provide feedback and recommendations. As for the customer portal, the goal is to

find testers with little or no experience in IT to really gauge the user friendliness of the site.
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Another state agency employee will test the portal. This person works in investments, so this will

provide a more realistic customer perspective on the usability of the site.

FINAL DELIVERABLES

When DeskFlo is completed, there should be two sites, one for the admin ticketing

system (including the chat feature), and the other for the customer portal. The project will be

deployed using AWS.

APPROACH/METHODOLOGY

Agile development and the Scrum framework will be used to create DeskFlo. That said,

the timeline will consist of 4 sprints and 3 scrum reviewers. This method promotes collaboration,

continuous improvement, and faster production releases. THe figure below shows the general

process that will be followed to carry out the development of this project.

Figure 1: Scrum sprints diagram provided by Visual Paradigm

Building a functional skeleton of the product for sprint 1 will make it easier to meet the

following sprint deadlines. The frontend of the ticketing system and portal will be developed

first. Doing this will provide a visual understanding of how the backend should work. After the
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frontend is developed, the REST APIs will be created, and MongoDB will be wired to them.

User authentication and authorization might be pushed to later sprints to save time for building

an MVP by the start of Sprint 2.

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REFERENCES

Fernando, J. (2021, August 19). Learn what stakeholders are and the roles that they play.

Investopedia. Retrieved June 2, 2022, from

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stakeholder.asp

FinancesOnline. (2022, February 15). Zendesk pros and cons: What's the best help desk

software. Financesonline.com. Retrieved May 16, 2022, from

https://financesonline.com/zendesk-pros-and-cons-whats-the-best-help-desk-software/

Gorgias. (2022, May 16). What Zendesk pricing will really cost you and is it worth it? Customer

Service Made Easy for Online Stores | Gorgias. Retrieved May 16, 2022, from

https://www.gorgias.com/blog/zendesk-pricing

Ivanti. (2022). Enterprise IT service management - Cherwell ITSM | Ivanti. Ivanti - Making the

Everywhere Workplace Possible. Retrieved May 16, 2022, from

https://www.ivanti.com/products/cherwell-service-management?utm_source=cherwell&u

tm_medium=redir&utm_campaign=migrate

Spirion. (2021, March 23). What are the risks of not reporting a data breach?

https://www.spirion.com/blog/penalties-not-reporting-data-breach/

State of California Department of Justice. (2021, June 22). California Consumer Privacy Act

(CCPA). State of California - Department of Justice - Office of the Attorney General.

Retrieved June 4, 2022, from https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa

State of California Department of Justice. (2019, November 26). Data security breach reporting.

State of California - Department of Justice - Office of the Attorney General. Retrieved

June 6, 2022, from https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/databreach/reporting

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Visual Paradigm. (n.d.). Why fixed length sprints in Scrum? Ideal Modeling & Diagramming

Tool for Agile Team Collaboration.

https://www.visual-paradigm.com/scrum/why-fixed-length-of-sprints-in-scrum/

Whittaker, Z. (2020, February 8). California’s new privacy law is off to a rocky start –

TechCrunch. TechCrunch.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/08/ccpa-privacy-law-rocky-start/
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APPENDIX

USABILITY/EVALUATION TEST PLAN

After the completion of each sprint, there will be a meeting with the state agency help

desk supervisor and specialist. They will have the opportunity to test the DeskFlo application,

and subsequently provide any feedback regarding fixes or enhancements. The feedback will then

be taken into consideration for the following sprint. A separate meeting will be scheduled with

the investments state worker to test the customer portal and provide any feedback on the

user-friendliness of the site.