HelpSpot is a help desk ticket system and yet that label, ticket, never appears in the system. It's one of the first things I choose NOT to do when designing HelpSpot. In my time working with both good and bad help desks I've found that the major difference between them isn't usually the people per se. They are often hard working and relatively competent. No the difference is usually attitude. A bad help desk almost always has a bad attitude. They look at each new ticket in the system with disdain.

I mean just think about the word ticket. It's so impersonal, it makes me think of standing at a deli counter. Do we really want our employees feeling like they're behind a deli counter? What about our customers? Every time I get an email with a help ticket ID I inevitably feel a little down. It just has that, I'm standing in line feeling to it.

So HelpSpot uses the word "request" where other systems use support ticket or issue. Now I'm not claiming this is a revolution, or that it will turn bad employees good, or make angry customers happy. What I do think is that over time it can help change the tone, just the tone, around the help desk. Let's try something together shall we?

Say this out loud:
"Did you see that new ticket from Bill Sanders?"

Now:
"Did you see that new request from Bill Sanders?"

Yes it's subtle, very subtle. But you can hear the inflection the upper one would be said with (especially if you've worked in IT) vs the lower. Will it help? I don't know, but I think it can't hurt and over a year I could see it perhaps changing attitudes just a hair. Making help desk tickets seem just a little tiny bit friendlier, perhaps making responses to those "requests" a little bit nicer.

From a business perspective it's interesting because to me it's a feature that has no marketing value. How would you describe this in a feature list? It also actually hurts from a search engine perspective because nobody searches for help desk request system or help desk request tracking, where as help desk ticket system and help desk ticket tracking do get searched on. But this is one of those features that I hope will pay off in results even if UserScapes customers don't know why the help desk seems more upbeat since they installed HelpSpot ;-)