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FrontRange has upgraded its HEAT Service and Support, a help desk and external customer support tool, for the first time since the beginning of last year, excluding the handful of patch versions the company has issued since then.
This version, release 8.4, focuses on improvements to the user interface, as well as better integration with HEAT's voice services. It also continues to build on the company's recent trend of integrating certain functions into the Goldmine application.
Dashboard Reporting
The biggest change to HEAT in 8.4 is the addition of a Call Logging Dashboard that allows individual users access to incident records based upon commonly used search criteria through hyperlinks to personal call groups.
A Metrics Section gives users access to popular Help Desk metrics. At the back end, a new Administration Navigation Dashboard helps the administrator find and locate information and functions.
The new Dashboard reporting capabilities are the major advances in HEAT, according to Jason Holmberg, HEAT product manager. "We also made some other enhancements too, such as changing a lot of the tool bar icons to make the application look and feel more consistent with other business applications, such as Office," he told CRM Buyer.
Automated Access to Specific Topics
Other changes in HEAT 8.4 include the ability to run Auto Ticket Generator, a utility used to update and create incident records through e-mail 
monitoring, as a Windows NT Service. Additional features allow users to link call records to specific incident reports such as a recall notice.
Also, the IVR (interactive voice response) functionality is more tightly integrated in this version, allowing users to call in after hours to get a status update about an earlier service request without having to wait for a live rep, for example.
It also is able to automatically route calls on a certain topic without technical processing.
Connecting to Goldmine
These enhancements are part of an overall strategy by FrontRange to facilitate "data dips" from the HEAT application to its CRM software, Goldmine. For example, the system can send an automatic notification to the appropriate sales rep when the service application receives a call for assistance from someone associated with a particular account.
"We have enhanced the user experience in several ways because more than 8,000 organizations rely on HEAT for IT Service Automation," said Kevin J. Smith, vice president of products for FrontRange, of the latest version of HEAT. "We are constantly looking for ways to improve."
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