Organizing your helpdesk into departments can greatly improve the efficiency of your support operations. If you have a Lite license of SupportTrio, you may have up to 5 departments. With a Full license, you may set up an unlimited number of departments. Departments can be added by clicking the Add Department button in the main Departments area.
When submitting a ticket, your users will have the option to select the most appropriate department for their request. You may want to set some departments to "Hide from public section", in order that only your support staff or automatic filters can place support tickets within them. Departments can be arranged hierarchicallly into two levels. If you would like a department to be at the top--or root--level, you will want to assign its parent department to be "Root". The Add Department page also gives you the option to assign the numerical Order in which the departments will be listed to your public.
If you set an number of "Hours of inactivity to auto-close a ticket", your support system will then automaticaly close tickets within that department if no changes are made to them within the specified number of hours. You may additional choose to have the system "Delete ticket fields data when auto-closing a ticket" if you feel that the additional data will not be useful to you in the future.
Managing your departments
The Departments menu in your SupportTrio admin interface allows you quick access to all the tools you'll need to set up and manage your departments. This includes editing the department details and deleted unwanted departments, as well as:
Fields
SupportTrio allows you to set up an unlimited number of custom fields for each department. Adding fields allows you to clearly communicate to your users what information will be necessary to assist them with the problems addressed in that department, and to collect the information in an orderly way.
These fields can be plain text fields, or larger text boxes. Additionally, they can take the form of radio buttons, checkboxes, or dropdown menus.
Radio button and dropdown list fields all have the ability to display different values to the user than will be stored in your database. This is useful in the case that you should wish to emply a coding system, or in the case that your users might not understand the information if it were presented in the way that your staff may find easiest or most efficient.
In each of these cases you will need to enter your values in a specific format, with a single entry per line and each line containing the value your users will see followed by the value you would like to see, separated by two pipes, "||", such that a list of states might be formatted like this:
California||CA Florida||FL Illinois||IL
You must include both parts of each option regardless of whether you wish for the two values to be identical. In the case of states, for example, you could store the same value in your database that was being displayed to the users by adding your values in the following format:
If either the display value or the stored value are left out, or if your values are entered in any other format, you will experience problems with these field types.
Saved Responses
Saved, or "canned", responses save your support staff time by providing quick access to commonly-asked questions as well as easy access to lengthy explanations. Like each of the other features of the Departments section, saved responses are set up separately for each department. When responding to tickets, these saved responses are readily accessible from the dropdown at the top right of their edit field.
Email Confirmations
SupportTrio e-mail confirmations allow your staff and your public to interact via e-mail, while still routing all messages through your support center. E-mail confirmations designated "(Public)" are sent to public, non-admin users, whereas "(Admin)" notifications are sent out only to internal, 'admin' users. Notification messages can be customized using any of the following Customization Keys:
%TICKETID% Ticket ID
%EMAIL% Email address
%LASTPOST% Inserts last message posted
%TICKETLINK% Link to view ticket
%CLOSETICKETLINK% Link to close a ticket
%STATUS% Current status of ticket
%SUBJECT% Last subject of ticket
%DATE% Current Date
%TIME% Current Time
%EXTRA-INFO% Extra Ticket Info (Custom Fields)
%CLIENT-EMAIL% Email address of person who opened ticket
%CLIENT-USERNAME% Username of person who opened ticket
%CLIENT-IP% IP address of person who opened ticket
%LAST-IP% IP address of last poster
%OPEN-DATE% Date that ticket was opened
%OPEN-TIME% Time that ticket was opened
%DURATION% Duration from when ticket was opened till the current email confirmation is being sent out
%PRIORITY% Priority of ticket
%POSTS-COUNT% Number of posts in the ticket
%DESK% Name of desk that the ticket was submitted under
%RELATEDKB% Lists links to a 4 closest matches to a last post out of KB
Because e-mail confirmations are sent out from SupportTrio itself, replies to them go back into SupportTrio, and are processed by the mail parser. In this way it is possible to reply to tickets entirely by e-mail. Replies are automatically added onto the existing ticket, and resulting confirmations are in turn sent out to all concerned parties as you have configured them.
