Tickets and Email

Introduction:

Managing tickets & email is the reason for DeskPRO’s existence. DeskPRO has been designed from the ground up to provide the interface and tools to make it easy for agents to resolve questions. For some customers, this will be the only DeskPRO channel they use.

The features on this page give you an indication to the power of DeskPRO’s ticket functionality. Different customers will use different features to achieve very different workflows and processes that suit their organization.

What is often important in software like DeskPRO is not just that a feature exists but how it has been implemented, the attention to detail in making that feature simple and quick to use or to get it out the way if it is not a feature you need. This is where DeskPRO will save you time and money; and make using the software a pleasure for your agents.

Features:

Email → Ticket

DeskPRO converts your email into tickets; tracking email replies and inserting them into a single ticket – this workflow makes resolving issues much easier to manage.

You can use triggers to set the properties of the tickets created by email, for example setting different departments for emails sent to support@domain.com and sales@domain.com

Ticket Form

Tickets can be created by email, but they can also be created by a user filling out a web form. This form might be embedded into your own helpdesk (using a single line of javascript) or you may use the DeskPRO User Interface.

You have a lot of control over your forms; DeskPRO includes a form builder where you can specify the fields, validation requirements for those fields as well as specify the look and style of the form.

Departments

The Department field (e.g. Support/Sales/Billing) is used to organize your helpdesk. Customers often use this field to control which agents can view which tickets, what email notifications to send to users, what questions to ask when a user is creating a ticket and how escalations should work – but you have lots of other options as well.

Small helpdesks may only have 1 department, and that is fine as well.

Custom Fields

Custom ticket fields allow you to add additional data to tickets. Custom fields can be a range of form types (input, select, checkbox etc.) and include options for data validation and styling. You can associate different fields with different ticket departments using the ticket editor and set permissions to enable field that can only be viewed by agents.

Agent Ticket Notes

Ticket Triggers

Triggers are used to change the property of a ticket based upon certain criteria. There are over 30 criteria you can use, including the incoming email (support@yourdomain v sales@yourdomain), the user/usergroup creating the ticket or the custom field data entered in the ticket form.

Once you have created the trigger, you can then specify the actions you want, for example; assigning the ticket to a different agent, raising the ticket urgency or sending an email notification.

Ticket Escalations

Ticket Escalations can be created using the Ticket Trigger system. Instead of a trigger running when a ticket is created or modified, this trigger runs based on a time criteria – for example, if it has been an hour since a ticket was created. You can use these time based rules to build ticket escalations as well as a number of other workflows.

Ticket Log

Every action or property change linked to a ticket is logged with the action, date and person that made that change all saved; this allows an agent to rapidly review a ticket’s history and determine how a ticket property was set.

Quick Search

The DeskPRO agent interface includes a quick search bar to rapidly find a ticket of interest. Enter a ticket id, reference, phrase or name / email of the user and you will presented with a list of matching tickets.

Ticket Marcos

Ticket Macros allow you to group a number of actions into a single command. You may wish to reply to a ticket, increase the urgency and assign it to another agent all in one step; with ticket Macros this becomes a single command.

Mass Actions

Mass Actions save agents significant amounts of time by allowing them to perform the same action on multiple tickets at once. As well as changing the properties of tickets, agents can also reply to similar tickets at once, very useful if you have an incident that has affected lots of customers.

Drag and Drop Attachments

Tickets fully support attachments, but DeskPRO makes handling attachments even easier. You can simply drag and drop attachments from your filesystem into DeskPRO. You can get a full list of attachments in a ticket in one place. DeskPRO also supports in-line images, if someone sends you an email with the attachment in the body of the email, this is how the image will be displayed in the Agent Interface.

Ticket Tasks

You can create tasks linked to tickets that can be assigned to yourself or to another agent. You can view all tasks linked to a ticket from the ticket page, or alternatively view all your tasks from the task interface.

Labels

Ticket labels allow agents to self categorise tickets into named groups. Labels are a simple categorisation tool that can be used for a range of purposes be it finding grouped tickets or, by integrating with the trigger system, they can be used to make changes to a ticket’s properties. DeskPRO’s quick search bar allows for rapid searching of tickets with a particular label.

Agent Teams

Tickets can be assigned to both an agent and also an agent team. Assigning a ticket to an agent team gives that team responsibility for resolving a ticket, while still making it possible for a principle agent from within that team to me the ticket leader.

CC’ed Users

DeskPRO includes in depth management of CC’ed users. If a user CCs other people to a ticket, DeskPRO retains this information and sends notifications and agent replies to all users. CC’ed users can reply to the ticket, with that reply also going to everyone specified. Agents and the User ticket owner can manage who is CC’ed to a ticket if needs change during the life of the ticket.

Ticket Merge

Sometimes a user will create more than one ticket about a particular issue. To ease management, agents can merge multiple tickets into one, retaining all ticket messages, attachments and other ticket propery data.

Ticket Flags

Ticket flags are a way for agents to create lists of tickets for their own ticket management. These lists are not shared with other Agents, and the names agents give to their list of flags are for their own management only.

Quick Grouping

The first column in DeskPRO enables agents to rapidly see tickets that require their attention. These tickets can be easily grouped by a ticket propery (Department, Agent, Language etc.) enabling agents to quickly find the tickets that require their attention.

Ticket Filters

Ticket filters can be thought of as “saved ticket searches”. They are a list of ticket criteria that make it easy for agents to find tickets to work on.

Table View / CSV Export

Agents can view a list of tickets in a large window. This is useful if they need to see a long list of properties for tickets. These tickets can also be exported to a CSV for further processing.

Customizable Views

Tickets in DeskPRO can have essentially an unlimited number of properties. With DeskPRO you control which properties are showing in ticket lists. Perhaps the most important thing to your agents is how long the ticket has been open, perhaps it is a crucial custom field, or the usergroup of the ticket owner; simply set the properties that matter the most to you.

Agent Email Reply

Your agents can reply to email notifications they receive, those replies will be added to the ticket and sent to the user. This is particularly useful for sending replies to tickets from mobile clients – any phone/tablet that supports email can process tickets.

Text Snippets

The reality of a lot of helpdesks is that the same question can be asked regularly. Although a knowledgebase with lots of content can help prevent this; the next line of defence is the Text Snippets system. Text snippets can be full replies or simply small pieces of text you can include as part of an individually crafted response.

Advanced features of this feature include the use of replacement variables, e.g. Dear {{ user.name }} and the ability to restrict which agents can see which snippets.

Print & PDF

DeskPRO includes a printable view of a ticket making the resulting printed output cleaner and easier to understand. You can also save a ticket as a PDF to distribute as you see fit.

Agent Create Ticket

Agents can rapidly create tickets for users from the agent interface. This is typically used when a ticket needs to be created as a result of a phone call or some other off-helpdesk interaction.

DeskPRO includes a Ticket Message Template feature, this makes it easy to automate the creation of tickets for regular situations for example a password reset or a DMCA notice.

Google Apps Integration

DeskPRO has been designed to work out the box with google apps integration. Simply enter the account details for the google apps account you will be using for email and DeskPRO will process emails sent to that address as tickets.