Revision as of 22:25, 19 March 2010

WHMCS includes a fully featured helpdesk for your clients. This includes announcements, downloads, a knowledgebase and a ticketing system.

Announcements

The announcements system along with showing announcements in the client area will also output announcements into an XML RSS Feed for use in readers and on other websites. The announcements section can be accessed in Support > Announcements and announcements can be public or hidden.

Downloads

You can add downloads to the site for your users. These can either be hosted locally or remotely. For remotely hosted files, simply enter the full URL to the files starting with http:// in the file location field. For local files it should just be the filename.

Downloads can be either public or private and if private, only users who are logged in will have access to them. You can also specify certain products which can be downloaded only once the associated package is purchased.

Knowledgebase

The knowledgebase allows you to create a collection of commonly asked questions and their answers. You can group these into categories and set them to be either visible or private (admin only). The client area offers the user the choice of browsing through the articles in your KB or searching based on keywords they enter.

Support Tickets

The support ticket system is a fully featured ticket desk that allows you to handle all communication with your clients. Featuring threaded discussions, private notes, ticket flagging, varying priority levels, auto inactive ticket closing and much much more... Admins can be assigned on a per department basis so they have access only to the area they are meant to be dealing with.

Departments

Departments are the categories for tickets. The first step in the user ticket submission process is to choose their department. Different staff can be assigned to different departments so you can have the different areas handled by different people if required. Common departments are Sales, Support, Billing etc...

• To setup departments, go to Setup > Support Departments
• When creating a department you can enter a name and description to display to users, and define if it's a clients only department thereby requiring a login to submit there - for example Sales would be a public department while Support might be set to clients only
• You can also setup if no auto responder should be sent, whether it's hidden or visible, and create Custom Fields to be asked for during ticket submission
• After creating a department, you need to assign yourself and other staff to it as appropriate in Setup > Administrators by editing the staff profile before you will be able to access that department in Support > Support Tickets
• In order to have emails from users automatically import into the ticket system as tickets, you need to configure Email Piping

Automated Knowledgebase Article Suggestions

As a user enters a message for submission as a support ticket, WHMCS can lookup and display relevant articles that match keywords in the submission text and display them to the user in an attempt to answer a clients question without them needing to ever submit the ticket. This is designed to help reduce common support questions. To turn this feature on or off, go to General Settings > Support > Knowledgebase Suggestions

Ticket Rating

Ticket rating allows your customers to rate the responses they get to tickets and this then allows you to monitor how pleased your customers are with the support they receive from your staff. To enable the ticket rating feature, go to Config > General Settings > Support and tick the box for "Support Ticket Rating"

When enabled, each reply in the client area will show a row of stars for the user to choose from in rating the response. They range from 1 Poor to 5 Excellent. Rating a reply is optional so not every reply will get a rating. Those that do will be shown when viewing the ticket in the admin area and there are also 3 reports in the Reporting section that allow you to monitor the ratings, they are:

• Staff Ticket Ratings Graph - Showing the average ticket rating for each staff member
• Ticket Rating Totals Graph - Showing the number of replies rated at each of the 5 statuses
• Ticket Ratings Reviewer - Allowing you to filter and view replies with specific ratings within a given date range

Ticket Flagging

Flagging a ticket to another admin is useful if you want to bring the ticket to the attention of another staff member. Flagged tickets appear highlighted and emboldended to the staff member they are flagged to. To do this, open the ticket and on the Options tab, simply choose the admin user in the Flag dropdown menu then click Save.

Auto Closing

• This feature allows you to have support tickets automatically closed after a certain time of inactivity has passed.
• To set the length of time of inactivity before closure, go to Setup > Automation Settings > Support Ticket Settings > Close Inactive Tickets and enter the time in hours (for example 48 = 2 days)
• Tickets set to On Hold or In Progress are not closed automatically, only those set to Open or Answered
• When closing the ticket, the email template Support Ticket Auto Close Notification is sent to the user. You can customise that email in Setup > Email Templates as normal

Predefined Ticket Replies

Predefined ticket replies are useful if you get asked the same questions repeatedly via support tickets. With a predefined reply, this can be loaded into the reply box when replying to a users ticket and modified as required to answer the users question.

Adding a Predefined Reply

To setup a predefined reply, go to Support Center > Predefined Replies. You will first need to setup at least one category for predefined replies, for example "Pre-Sales", and then you can create your predefined replies inside the appropriate category.

Using a Predefined Reply

To use a predefined ticket reply when relpying to a users ticket, when viewing the ticket click on the Reply tab near the top of the page and then click the "Insert Predefined Ticket Reply" link located immediately below the text area for entering your reply. A popup window will appear allowing you to select the reply you want to use and it will then be loaded into the reply message box once selected. You can then edit the reply as required to customise it to the user and then click Reply button as normal.

Allowed File Attachments

Support tickets and replies allow a file to be uploaded along with them for if the user needs to send you something or if you need to send the user something.

The list of allowed file types is configured by going to Configuration > General Settings > Support Tickets. By default, the allowed file types are .jpg, .gif, .jpeg, and .png (ie. image files). It is not possible to allow the user to upload PHP files due to the security risks this creates. You can add new allowed file types to the list such as .pdf, .zip, etc... Just add them into the allowed extensions field seperating each allowed ending with a comma.

NOTE: The file upload restrictions do not apply to admin users and an admin user can attach any type of file to a ticket.

Search Engine Friendly URLS

Search Engine Friendly URLs are where a URL which once was "/knowledgebase.php?action=view&id=1" becomes "/knowledgebase/1/How_do_I_access_my_control_panel.html". You can enable these for the announcements, downloads and knowledgebase sections of the WHMCS client area.

1. To enable SEF URLs, go to Setup > General Settings > Other tab and tick the box for "KB SEO Friendly URLs"

2. You must also access your WHMCS root directory where you will find a file named htaccess.txt, you must rename it .htaccess.

3. Finally, mod_rewrite must be installed and compiled on your server.