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Setting up the ticketing system

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You can set up a ticketing system in Xentral and use it as the primary communication point with your customers. Using the ticketing system compared to standard email correspondence offers many advantages:

  • Clearly defined communication threads assigned to a ticket number.

  • Ticket assigned to a specific agent.

  • Full control over the processing status of a ticket.

  • Centralized and structured processing of incoming customer messages by one or more agents.

Before setting up the ticketing system, please ensure you have the necessary permissions. The ticketing system setup consists of several processes in Xentral .

Set up an email account for the ticketing system

You can set up an existing email account to receive queries from your customers.

  1. Go to Administration > Settings > System > Email accounts.

  2. Open the email address that you want to use for the ticketing system.

  3. In the Ticket system section set the Selection drop-down menu to Ticket-System aktivieren (activate ticket system).

  4. You can optionally set Standard projects and a Standard queue. Incoming emails to this account will then automatically be assigned to the agent (queue) or the project you defined here.

  5. You can configure the following options to customize your ticketing system:

    1. From date - Starting date from which Xentral picks up emails and converts them to tickets.

    2. Outgoing email address - Select this checkbox so that this email address is always used as the outgoing one.

    3. Delete emails on server - Select this check box to delete emails from the server after receipt. This action cannot be undone.

    4. Mark ticket as completed - Select this check box to automatically mark the ticket as completed during import.

Set up queues

  1. Go to Administration > Settings > System > Queue.

  2. Enter the name and identifier in the corresponding fields.

  3. To set a dedicated person for this queue, enter their name in the Responsible person field. Otherwise this queue will be available to every contact who has access to the ticketing system.

Set up auto-responder

You can set up the auto-responding email for incoming emails to the ticket system. Xentral sends a predefined email to the customer. To turn on the auto-responder feature, set the Auto-responder drop-down menu to aktiv (active). In the text editor you can define your auto-reply message. You can also include the following variables:

  • {BETREFF} (subject) -This variable adds the subject line to the body of your email.

  • {TICKET} - This is the ticket number. You can add this variable to the email's subject and body.

Important

To ensure the automatic assignments of the follow-up emails in the ticket system you must add the # symbol before the {TICKET} variable in the email subject. The correct format is #{TICKET}.

Import emails automatically

To import emails automatically you need to set up the process starter in Administration > Settings > System > Process starter. Please note that emails imported to the ticket system might be deleted from the IMAP account, depending on how this process was set up. You should delete emails only if other software ensures the email archive.

Note

Xentral will only import new emails that haven't been opened yet.

The following procedure describes how to create a process starter to retrieve emails automatically. If you already have it set up, you only need to activate it.

  1. Go to Administration > Settings > System > Process starter.

  2. Click +NEW and add the following information to the corresponding fields:

    1. Designation - Any designation

    2. Type - Periodic

    3. weekday - Every day

    4. Type - Cronjob

    5. parameter - Tickets (for Office 365: Tickets_oauth)

    6. Active - Select this check box.

  3. Click Save.

A ticket is now automatically created for each incoming message for one of the configured email accounts. All incoming and outgoing messages that contain a ticket number in the subject are automatically assigned to this ticket and added to the communication history of the ticket.

Process tickets

You can find the list of all tickets that do not have the status Closed or Trash under Team > Tickets. You can filter tickets according to their status. The In Progress tab contains all open tickets that you can work on.

Tickets_filter.png

Select any number of tickets and in the Bulk Batch Processing section choose one of the options you want to apply to them:

  • Remove spam

  • Move unread to archive

  • Mark as personal

  • Mark as private

  • Mark as priority - emails marked as priority will be marked with the Prio label.

Each ticket has a status that reflects its processing state. The following table provides an overview of ticket statuses.

Status

Description

New ticket_15.png

Automatic status for all new incoming messages.

Open ticket_16.png

Status for the tickets that are currently processed.

Waiting for internal ticket_17.png

Status for tickets that have not yet been completed and require feedback from within your company before further processing.

Waiting for customer ticket_18.png

Status for tickets that are not yet completed and require feedback from the customer before further processing.

Clarify ticket_19.png

Status for tickets that require clarification for assignment or processing.

Completed ticket_11.png

Status for tickets which processing is completed (because customer stopped replying or status was set).

Trash ticket_10.png

Status for tickets that should not be processed. For example, for tickets that arrived as spam emails.

To open a ticket click Screenshot_2022-04-14_at_15_41_58.png. The Internal comment field allows you to leave comments that you don't want to share with your customers.

Reply to tickets

Important

To reply to tickets you need to allow pop-ups in your browser.

To reply to an incoming ticket, click the Answer button. The pop-up window opens. In this window you can type your reply or add one of the templates. In addition to your reply, you can select Attach the original message to include it in your response and also add attachments. Once you've finalized your message click Send.

Create rules for tickets

In the Rules tab you can define options for incoming emails. For example, you can set that emails from certain addresses are marked as spam, or assigned to a certain queue. You can create rules based on recipient or sender email address, name, or subject.

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