A helpdesk does exactly what its name suggests: it’s there to help you when problems arrive. Typically those are of a technical nature; you need someone to troubleshoot the printer or help you get access to a new system. Every day we rely on helpdesks to solve user issues such as help with troubleshooting our mobile phone or disputing a credit card bill.

An internal company helpdesk could be:

  1. IT Support Helpdesk: An IT help desk ensures internal staff is supported, and their problems are solved, whether it be a password reset or the whole network going down.
  2. Business Helpdesk: Teams outside of IT like HR, finance and legal can adopt a business help desk. HR can help employees modify payroll elections or get employment verification letters. Legal can respond to contract review requests while finance can field accounts payable or expense questions.

Below would be the typical steps required for building your internal IT Helpdesk using Dynamics 365 CRM:

Step 1: Create a dedicated mailbox or shared mailbox for internal support: eg internalhelp@zapobjects.com

Step 2: Create a CRM Queue (eg Internal Support Queue) pointing to this mailbox.

Step 3: Create CRM Contacts for all the users of internal helpdesk.
Dynamics CRM Cases have a mandatory field called Customer. When an email is received in your CRM support queue… Email-to-Case will extract the sender email, find a matching Contact and automatically link the Case Customer to this Contact.
In order to facilitate automatic linking of case to the email sender… you would need to create all helpdesk users as contacts in CRM (even though they may already be existing as Users in your CRM system).

Step 4: Modify the case forms and views to add some custom fields to easily distinguish between customer support cases and internal cases.

Step 5: Create new Helpdesk Email-to-case configuration record

As you would have noticed that the majority of steps needed to setup internal company helpdesk would remain the same as setting up a customer facing helpdesk… except for step 3 above.