Potent Combination: Guest Tickets + Power-pack (Productivity) + Email Support

August 9, 2017 | Tips

Have you ever wanted to give your new support users a way to get support without ever having to log into your support system?  With Awesome Support there is a way that your new support users can interact with your support system without ever needing to visit your website.  To properly set this up you need three add-ons:

With the GUEST TICKETS add-on, your new users can immediately submit a ticket simply by entering an email address.  The add-on modifies your standard Awesome Support login page to add a new option called Guest Log In.  It looks something like this:

 

The EMAIL SUPPORT add-on enables your customers to respond to tickets using just email.

The POWER-PACK add-on adds a couple of critical "email tags" that you can embed in email alerts sent to support users:  Click-to-close and Click-to-view.

The Support Cycle

Here is how a typical support cycle might evolve:

  • Generally a new user will enter their email address and then be redirected to your ticket form where they will submit their first ticket.
  • An agent will respond to the ticket which will send an email to the customer with the agent's response.
  • The customer might choose to respond back with an email which will be imported into the ticket
  • The customer might want to view the ticket - which they can do because of the special click-to-view link that was embedded in the email they received.  This link will take them directly to the contents of the ticket.
  • The customer might choose to close the ticket - which they can do because of the special click-to-close link that was embedded in the email they received.

Notice that the customer never once had to enter their user id or password in order to view, respond or close their ticket.

Setting It All Up

Here is how you can set this all up.  The key is going to be embed the proper "tags" in the ticket email alerts that your customers receive.

  • Install Guest Tickets: Instructions
  • Install and Configure Email Support: Start here
  • Install Powerpack/Productivity: Instructions
  • Enable One Step Click-To-Close:  Go To TICKETS->SETTINGS->PF OPTIONS and scroll down to the click-to-close section.  Enable the checkbox and click the SAVE CHANGES button at the bottom of the screen.
  • Enable One Step Click-To-View:  Go To TICKETS->SETTINGS->PF OPTIONS and scroll down to the click-to-view section. Enable the checkbox and click the SAVE CHANGES button at the bottom of the screen.

At this point everything you need is enabled.  The final step is adding the appropriate tags to your outgoing emails.  These tags will insert the appropriate links in outgoing emails that will allow the recipient to view and close tickets.

The tags are:

  • {click_to_close_url}
  • {click_to_close_link}
  • {click_to_view_url}
  • {click_to_view_link}

You can add these to any of the email templates in TICKETS->SETTINGS->EMAILS.  You can even attach these tags to images using standard ANCHOR <a> links.

Satisfaction Survey

BONUS: If you want to encourage your users to close tickets you can install the satisfaction survey which will give you additional email template tags.  These additional tags will allow your users to use a single click to close and rate a ticket!  Learn more about satisfaction email template tags in the Survey Types section of the Satisfaction Survey documentation.

Wrap Up

Making it easy for your users to interact with your support system is critical to maintaining customer satisfaction.  Using the configuration outlined above you can make it very easy for a new user to submit and manage their first ticket - without ever having to log in directly to your support pages.  For your end users, it can't get any easier than that!

Additional References

You can find more information about some of these topics here:

Power-pack Documentation

Email Support Documentation

Satisfaction Survey Documentation

THREE EASY WAYS TO GET STARTED WITH AWESOME SUPPORT TODAY!

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