Support Departments

Departments

Support Departments help you categorize tickets. The first step in the user ticket submission process is to choose a department. You can assign different staff to different departments, with different people handling the different areas. Sales, Support, and Billing are common departments. You can find more information on the Support Ticket system at Support Tickets.

Creating Departments

To set up departments:

• Go to Setup > Support > Support Departments and click Add New Department.
• Enter a name and description to display to users. The system will use the email address to send notifications relating to the ticket to clients. Make this unique for each department.
• For the Clients Only option, specify whether it's a clients-only department, which requires a login. For example, Sales would be a public department while you might set Support to clients only.
• For the Pipe Replies Only option, select whether to require clients to log in to the client area to open new tickets. Attempts to open new tickets via email will not succeed. Clients can still respond to tickets via email.
• You can also configure whether to send an auto responder email when a new ticket opens, and whether it's hidden or visible. Clients can only access hidden departments via a direct link.
• For the Feedback Request option, specify whether the system will send an email request for a user to provide feedback for their support ticket experience. You can review the results of the feedback emails via the Ticket Feedback Scores and Ticket Feedback Comments reports.
• After creating a department, assign yourself and other staff to it in Setup > Staff Management > Administrators, as appropriate. You must edit the staff profile before you will be able to access that department in Support > Support Tickets.
• For staff to receive email notifications of new tickets and client responses in a particular department, select the Enable Ticket Notifications checkbox on the previously-mentioned page. The system won't email ticket attachments to staff.

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

After you create a department, you can create Custom Fields to display during ticket submission. Click the Edit icon next to the department and then the Custom Fields tab.

Assigning Staff to a Department

After creating a department, you need to assign yourself and other staff to it as appropriate. This enables you to define which staff can see certain messages. For example, you can have dedicated billing staff who can only see tickets in the billing department.

Navigate to Setup > Administrators and edit the staff profiles. Select the appropriate department checkbox to enable them to access that department in Support > Support Tickets.

Email Piping

You can configure emails from users to automatically import into the ticket system as tickets (Email Piping). See the Email Piping documentation for configuration instructions.