Customer Service Ticketing System

End-to-end project delivering a centralised customer service ticketing system for CanTel Connect. Delivered within three weeks using a hybrid Waterfall and Kanban approach, the project replaced a fragmented, manual complaint handling process with a structured, measurable support operation, achieving a 96.8% ticket resolution rate, reducing the open backlog from 8 tickets to 1, and giving management real-time visibility into support performance for the first time.

CanTel Connect had no centralised system for managing customer complaints. All service requests were handled through individual agent emails, personal spreadsheets, and informal notes — resulting in missed tickets, duplicated effort, inconsistent service quality, and no management oversight. Managers had no way to see which tickets were open, pending, or resolved, and no performance data existed to identify bottlenecks or measure team output. As the customer base grew, the manual approach became completely unfit for purpose.

CanTel Connect commissioned this project to replace a fragmented, manual complaint handling process with a centralised, structured ticketing system, giving management real-time visibility into support performance and a scalable foundation for future growth.

Objectives

• Design and implement a centralised customer service ticketing system
• Redesign the complaint-handling workflow to improve resolution consistency and speed
• Build a KPI framework with category-specific SLA tiers that accurately measured support performance
• Deliver a Power BI dashboard giving management real-time visibility into support operations
• Achieve a minimum 90% ticket resolution rate

• The project was delivered using a hybrid methodology 
  Waterfall to govern the overall three-week phased structure, and Kanban to manage live ticket flow through the Trello board during execution.
• The delivery was structured across three weekly phases:
• Week 1 — Planning and Setup:
  Business case, project charter, complaint workflow design in Draw.io, requirements backlog, Trello board configuration, and Gantt chart creation.
• Week 2 — Execution and Simulation:
  24 customer complaints logged and managed through the full ticket lifecycle. KPI log built in Google Sheets. RAID log maintained. Lessons learned review conducted at week end identifying two key improvements.
• Week 3 — Testing and Closure:
  Second simulation round incorporating category-specific SLA tiers and a formal escalation protocol. Power BI dashboard built. Week 2 vs Week 3 improvement comparison produced. Full handover pack compiled and delivered to CanTel Connect.
• Weekly stakeholder presentations were held with CanTel management at the end of each phase.

I was the sole Project Lead across the full three-week delivery — responsible for every phase from initiation through to closure. This included authoring the business case and project charter, designing the complaint workflow, configuring and managing the Trello board, building the KPI log and Power BI dashboard, maintaining the RAID log, facilitating weekly stakeholder presentations, and compiling the final handover pack. All governance, analysis, reporting, and delivery decisions were owned by me throughout.

• Business Case
• Project Charter
• Requirements Document and Task Backlog
• Complaint Workflow Diagram (Draw.io)
• Gantt Chart
• Trello Kanban Board
• Ticket Log (31 tickets across 3 weeks)
• RAID Log
• KPI Log (Google Sheets)
• KPI Specification Document
• Power BI Dashboard
• DAX Measures
• Escalation Protocol
• Category-Specific SLA Framework
• Lessons Learned Report
• Week 2 vs Week 3 Improvement Comparison
• Stakeholder Presentations
• Handover Pack
• CRM Migration Roadmap
• Project Portfolio Document

• Challenge 1 — KPI framework was structurally flawed:
  The initial uniform 24-hour resolution target applied equally to all ticket types, causing billing queries and complex network faults to be measured against the same benchmark. This produced misleading performance data — the Week 2 resolution rate appeared at 31.25% when the team was not actually underperforming. I redesigned the framework in Week 3 to introduce category-specific SLA tiers, producing accurate data and lifting the resolution rate to 63.33%.
• Challenge 2 — Ticket backlog exceeded target:
  Eight tickets remained open at the end of Week 2 against a target of fewer than 5. Root cause analysis of the ticket log revealed inconsistent escalation decisions — tickets were sitting unresolved for days before action was taken. I introduced a formal escalation protocol with defined timers, embedded directly into the Trello board as checklist items on all High and Critical tickets. The backlog reduced from 8 to 1 by the end of Week 3.
• Challenge 3 — Power BI DAX measure returning incorrect values:
  The KPI card tracking percentage of tickets resolved within 24 hours was persistently returning 100% or 0.56 due to incorrect default aggregation of the binary ResolvedIn24h column. I wrote a custom DAX measure using DIVIDE and FILTER to explicitly control the calculation logic, producing the correct result of 54.17% matching the Google Sheets figure exactly.
• Challenge 4 — Category name mismatches causing dashboard data to return zeros:
  Abbreviated category names in the KPI log did not match the full names in the ticket log, causing every category average in the Power BI column chart to return zero. I standardised all category names across every document using the ticket log as the single source of truth, and added a data validation note to prevent recurrence after handover.

• The project was delivered on time, within scope, and within the planned budget of $6,331 CAD. All 20 deliverables were completed and the project was formally signed off by the Project Sponsor at CanTel Connect.

Key artefacts produced on this project. Confidential client material is appropriately withheld.