Hello!
I work with alarm systems and use SharePoint as a kind of knowledge base for my customer service operators. We have many procedures and instructions in the form of site pages, but I am tired of having these massive walls of text and want to go in a new direction to make it easier and more intuitive to produce the correct answer for an employee.
To provide a specific example we often create service tickets where a technician needs to physically visit a customer to perform a task on their alarm system. There are several different types of service errands; fixing a technical issue, installing new components in an existing system, dismounting and moving components around etc. These errands each carry their own requirements for the instruction text within the service ticket.
Today, each operator writes this text with their own words, naturally resulting in many service tickets with incomplete and substandard instructions for the technician. Rather than having a massive instruction manual, I envision a set of drop-down menus and input fields with branching logic that, when completed, will spit out a complete service text based on the input.
Example:
1. Category
[Drop-down]
a. Technical issue
b. Installation of new components
c. Relocation of existing components
Based on the selection in the drop-down, new fields will appear.
If they selected 1a, the next field to be shown could be:
2. Specify the issue
[Drop-down]
a. Specific error 1
b. Specific error 2
c. Specific error 3
But if the operator selected 1c, it will show them instead:
3. Describe the task as requested by customer
[Text input field]
I think you get the idea. Finally, when the operator has filled in all required fields, ideally they would click a button saying "Generate text" that produces a complete text based on the inputs chosen by the operator:
"Service category: [Result from field 1]. Customer describes the following issue: [Result from field X]. Operator has done the following troubleshooting: [Result from field Y]. Customer is informed of the total cost of $[XXX] with a $[YYY] discount given by [Operator Name]. Call [Customer name] on [customer phone number] to schedule an appointment."
I imagine there are several different ways to go about this, primarily I'm thinking Excel and PowerApps could do the job. I'm not really a fan of Excel so I'm leaning more towards PowerApps, but I've never built anything there myself and wouldn't know where to start.
Before I go ahead trying to learn PowerApps from scratch I wanted to see if any of you guys have an even better solution :) Sadly I don't have the budget right now to purchase any premium add-ons to SharePoint, Teams or Office Online in general, but I have access to PowerApps already and of course standard apps and add-ons in O365.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this!
