Setup Guide - Helpdesk Portal

1. Sign up

   Get Started: Signing into your Admin Console

   After you have completed the signup process, follow the below instructions to set up the email and web ticketing system of the helpdesk portal.

   All the below items are available in raiseaticket's settings.

2. Work flow

   1. Operating Hours

      By default, operating hours are set to eight hours, five days a week in the time zone specified in your organisation's profile. Add the hours when your agent or group is ready to support customers.

      
      1. Holidays

         Add Holidays to specify the dates and times when your team is unavailable.

      

   2. SLA

      Add Service Level Agreements to define goals for your agent's performance and link to agent/group work schedules, operating hours, client agreements. Multiple SLAs can be set up based on the email id or domain following unique business hours. SLAs are used to ensure that the support team completes the ticket in a defined amount of time. You can define the pause condition of the SLA such as timer pause conditions as when you want any details from end users you can make the pause condition when the state is awaiting user reply. You can monitor the SLA statistics with our built-in advanced reports.

      

   3. Ticket

      1. Ticket Properties

         Ticket ID	A unique number assigned to every support request
         Subject	A summary of the support request
         Priority	Type of Impact of the ticket to the user
         Status / Flag	Status of the support request as it progresses through the support system
         Category	Classification of the ticket category (Problem, Incident, Question, Request)
         Description	Detailed description of the support request
         User	Contact details of the support requester or client
         Creation date	Date and time the support request is submitted
         First and last Response	Time of first and last reponses
         SLA	Time left to Resolve or Respond

      2. Ticket Priorities

         When creating a new SLA, there are four priorities: Low, Medium, High and Urgent. The priorities require first response time and resolution time to ensure optimized support for the tickets. The tickets are organized and prioritized based on business factors. The optimal prioritization method is different for each company and depends on several factors.

         

         Your organization may choose to stick to one SLA or multiple SLA, or to change models when necessary based on business requirements. The focus of ticket prioritization should be to provide the most effective customer support for end users.

         By default, we have added the below default SLA. Timings can be amended accordingly.

         

         Priority	Response Time	Resolution Time
         Low	4 hours	1 day
         Medium	4 hours	8 hours
         High	2 hours	4 hours
         Urgent	1 hour	3 hours

   4. Add Agents

      Add your primary support person(s) or employee(s) who will respond to clients on a full-time or part-time basis. The agents would be invited to activate their account via email. An agent can be a member of one or more groups.

   5. Add Teams (Groups)

      Add teams as groups to help your organisation classify the agents in the support system based on skills, expertise, clients, domain, SLA, operating hours and departments (like Sales, Billing, HR). An optional service email ID can be created and mapped for every group.

      A support group is designed to group agents forming part of a function such as billing, technical, sales, etc. so that notifications and ticket viewing are consolidated. Teams or groups is the right mix and number of members, optimally designed for tasks and processes and promote positive dynamics. The group also defines the operating hours for agents.

   6. Add Custom Ticket Status

      The default ticket status values available in raiseaticket are:

      Open - A ticket that has been opened by an agent or client. The first response time is calculated from the timestamp the ticket is created.

      Closed - A ticket that is closed and on which no work is being done and acknowledged by the client for closure. The resolution time is calculated from the timestamp the ticket is created until the timestamp the ticket is closed.

      Pending - The ticket is awaiting a response from another vendor, admin or developer, not the client or agent. The on-hold time is added to the client's wait time and not agent's wait time. Pending is set where there is no predictable estimated time for a reply.

      In Progress - A ticket on which work is currently being done.

      Resolved - A ticket on which work has been finalised and assumed as solved by the agent.

      Re-opened - A ticket which has been re-opened.

      

      The above standard ticket statuses cannot be edited; however, you may wish to add further statuses to fit your requirements.

      Awaiting Customer Response - A ticket is waiting for a reply or action from the client.

      Awaiting 3rd Party Response - A ticket is waiting for a reply from a vendor, developer or service provider for an approval. The agent contacts the 3rd party and gets the approval for the client's request and updates the ticket.

      The above two statuses are editable and could be enabled/disabled based on your requirements.

3. Channels

   Communication is the key to your business success. Set up the popular channels for your customers to reach you such as web, email, etc.

   1. Web Ticketing

      Collect support requests directly on the web portal. This helps your organisation improve productivity by responding to customers faster. You could redirect your support link (https://helpdesksitename.raiseaticket.com) and refer your customers to use the self-service portal for service requests.

   2. Email Ticketing

      After you have completed the signup process, you will be assigned with an email address like support@yourdomain.raiseaticket.com. Your customers could directly open support requests by emailing eg:support@yourdomain.raiseaticket.com. You can add additional or alternative email addresses for submitting tickets under Settings/Groups.

      In order to receive support requests to your existing email address or to an external email address, you need to forward the emails received to the support email address of your Raiseaticket portal.

      Email forwarding process differs from provider to provider. Please follow the below instructions:

      Gmail Yahoo Office 365 Exchange

      

4. Agents

   Add your primary support person(s) or employee(s) who will respond to clients on a full-time or part-time basis. The agents would be invited to activate their account via email. An agent can be a member of one or more groups.

5. Self-help

   Create articles to build a knowledge base repository for how-to, troubleshooting and procedural information with the knowledge base feature. Keep the content searchable, organized, and relevant, this helps clients to easily find the information they require. Publish the FAQ for your clients on your free raiseaticket helpdesk portal which empowers end-users to resolve their own issues in their own time is a worthy long-term benefit for the remote support future.

6. Notifications

   1. Email Notifications

      Notifications make agents, clients and admins aware of the responses and tickets. raiseaticket.com has enabled notifications for all rules. You may wish to disable notifications for certain rules to fit your requirements.

      

   2. Notifications Integration

      Integrate real time notification by messaging the support team in Microsoft Teams and Slack.

      

As a next step, check out the FAQs on how to deploy the Raiseaticket.com helpdesk.