Revision as of 22:07, 14 April 2008

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. For this to work, all you need to do is ensure the announcements.xml file is CHMOD 777 (writeable).

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 there 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 browing 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.

In order to have emails from users automatically import into the ticket system as tickets, you need to configure Email Piping

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.