Support Center

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 on the WHMCS homepage, will also output announcements into an XML RSS Feed for use in readers and on other websites.

To create an announcement navigate to Support > Announcements and click Add New Announcement.
Enter the date, title and announcement itself into the appropriate fields.
If the announcement should be available publicly tick the Published? checkbox. In this way an article can be drafted, saved and published at a later date.
If you operate in multiple languages click the language beneath the main text area to reveal an additional text area into which the article can be translated.
Finally click Save Changes

To edit an existing announcement simply click the edit icon next to it.

Downloads

You can add downloads to the site for your users, this could be anyting from product user manuals, relevant software utilities or even the actual products being sold. They can either be hosted locally or remotely.

The first step is to create a category to contain downloads, navigate to Support > Downloads and click the Add Category tab
Enter a name and description to be displayed to clients. Tick the Hide checkbox to make this category invisible, it will be available only via direct links. Click Add Category.
Now click the Add Download tab to enter the file type, title and description of the file.
In the Upload File section select the location of the file. If the file is large it's recommend to upload via FTP and select the Manual FTP Upload to Downloads Folder option, for smaller files the Upload File can make the process easier.
Manual FTP Upload to Downloads Folder - For remotely hosted files simply enter the full URL to the files starting with http:// in the Enter Filename field, for files uploaded via FTP to the /downloads directory it should just be the filename.
Upload File - Click the Browse button and locate the file on your computer, it will be uploaded to the /downloads dir.
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: Product Downloads Distribution
Finally click Add Download.

To edit an existing download simply click the category name and then the download name.

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.

The first step is to create a category to contain articles, navigate to Support > Knowledgebase and click the Add Category tab
Enter a name and description to be displayed to clients. Tick the Hide checkbox to make this category invisible, it will be available only via direct links. Click Add Category.
Now click the Add Article tab and enter the title of the first article and click Add Article to be taken to the editing page.
The Category field displays which categories this article belongs to, a single article can be assigned to multiple categories by ctrl + clicking.
The views and votes statistics can be changed here, it displays how many people have viewed this article and how many rated it helpful.
Ticking the Private checkbox will mean this article is not visible to visitors so clients must be logged in to read it.
Enter the contents of your article in the large text area.
If you operate in multiple languages click the language beneath the main text area to reveal an additional text area into which the article can be translated.
Finally click Save Changes

To edit an existing article simply click the category name and then the article name.

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 and click Add New Department.
When creating a department you can enter a name and description to display to users. The email address will be used to send notifications relating to the ticket to clients.
The Clients Only option defines 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.
The Pipe Replies Only option requires clients to login to the client area to open new tickets, attempts to open new tickets via email will not be successful. Tickets can still be responded to via email.
You can also setup if no auto responder email should be sent when a new ticket is opened and whether it's hidden or visible; hidden departments can only be accessed via a direct link.
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.

Once a department has been created it is possible to create Custom Fields to be asked for during ticket submission. Click the Edit icon next to the department and then the Custom Fields tab.

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 Setup > General Settings > Support tab > 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 Setup > General Settings > Support tab. 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.

To enable SEF URLs, first check and ensure you have mod_rewrite installed on your server
Next go to Setup > General Settings > Support and tick the box for "KB SEO Friendly URLs"
Finally, you must also rename the file named htaccess.txt to .htaccess. in your root WHMCS directory

The above steps apply to Apache. For IIS environments, you must make sure IIS has URL rewrite installed (http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/460/using-the-url-rewrite-module/), and then you can setup the rewrite rules as follows:

Open IIS Manager
Browse to the site you want to add rule to
In the right pane double-click and select urlrewrite
On right side inbound rules select import rules
Cut and paste the rules from the htaccess.txt file in the root directory of WHMCS into rewrite rules field
Finally click Apply to complete the process