Contents 

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Purpose of ticketing system

The ticketing system serves as a central e-mail communication interface to customers. Using the ticket system in comparison to conventional e-mail correspondence offers a number of advantages:

A ticket system helps to avoid that e-mails from customers are lost or forgotten. With an increasing number of customers, the ticket system increasingly shows its strengths.

Setting up ticketing system

The appropriate permissions in the xentral user account are required to set up the ticket system. Otherwise, menu items are partially not visible.

Setting up queues (agents or queue)

In Administration → Settings → System → Queues, depending on the organizational structure, individual employees, departments, groups or similar can be created, who will later be responsible for processing tickets.

A new entry can be added via "+NEW". 

Individual employees cannot be assigned directly to a department. However, the field "Responsible person" can be left empty, so that the queue should represent a specific department from which employees can then take out tickets.

Setting up email accounts 

In Administration → Settings → System → E-mail accounts, the connection to the e-mail account(s) used to contact customers can be set up. In the Ticket system section, "Activate ticket system" has to be selected. Optionally, a default project and a default queue can also be specified here. Incoming e-mails on this account will then be automatically assigned to the agent (= queue) set here or to the project set here.

• Selection → Possibility to activate or deactivate the ticket system
• Default projects → Select project for which the ticket system is to be activated
• Default queue → E-mails are automatically assigned to the queue
• From date → Date from when the emails are picked up and converted to tickets. Under certain circumstances, it may be useful to send an automatic reply for the e-mail accounts used here. This can also be configured in the settings of the e-mail account in the section 'Autoresponder'
• Outgoing e-mail address → Select that the incoming e-mail address is always used as the outgoing one
• Delete e-mails on server → Selection that the e-mails are irrevocably deleted from the server after receipt
• Mark ticket as completed → Selection that tickets are automatically marked as completed during import

Auto-Responder

An auto-responder can also be set up for incoming e-mails to the ticket system, which sends a predefined e-mail to the customer. It is possible to provide this e-mail with variables for the subject (of the incoming e-mail) and the ticket number generated.

Here you can see an example of the settings for such a text:

Important:

In order to ensure an automatic assignment of follow-up e-mails in the ticket system, a # must be placed in front of the variable {TICKET} in the subject. The correct formatting would then be: #{TICKET}.

This would then lead to the following e-mail response for the customer.

Automatically retrieve emails

In order for e-mails to be automatically imported into the ticket system on a regular basis, another process starter has to be set up under Administration → Settings → System → Process starter. Please note that e-mails imported into the ticket system might be deleted from the IMAP account, depending on how it is set during setup.

Emails should only be deleted if email archiving is ensured with other software.

A new process starter can be added under Administration → Settings → System → Process starters → "+NEW".

The listed settings for the newly created process starter should be adjusted as follows:

• Designation → Any designation
• Type → Periodic
• Day of week → Every day
• Type → Cronjob
• Parameter → tickets
• Active → On

If everything is set up correctly, a ticket is automatically created for each incoming message on one of the configured e-mail accounts. All incoming and outgoing messages that contain the ticket number in the subject are automatically assigned to this ticket and added to the communication history of the ticket.

Ticket list and filter 

The ticket list under Team → Tickets (until version 21.1 under My section → Tickets) provides an overview of all tickets that do not have the status 'Closed' or 'Trash'. If tickets with one of these two statuses are to be displayed as well, the filter 'all' has to be set. The sliders in the upper area can be used to filter the tickets according to certain statuses. The free text fields in the upper area allow filtering within certain table columns according to specific terms.

Under the 'In progress' tab, only tickets that are currently in edit mode will be listed.

Batch processing 

The tickets in the overview can also be sorted as a batch:

• Remove spam → Moves e.g. newsletters to the archive with the marker
• Move unread to archive → Moves e.g. newsletters to the archive with the marker
• Mark as personal → Marks the e-mails as personal
• Mark as private → Marks the e-mail as private
• Mark as Priority → Marks the e-mail visually in the overview (in the ticket itself the marking "Prio" is set as a checkmark)

Edit tickets

Assignment of tickets to customers

Tickets can be assigned to customers from the master data stock. The assignment is only retained after the ticket has been saved. 

Ticket agent (queue)

Tickets can be assigned to an agent (also 'queue'). The agent is set via the corresponding selection field. The agents (or queues) available for selection here must be created beforehand under Administration → Settings → System → Queues. The agent of a ticket can be changed at any time.

Ticket

A ticket is provided with a status. This status reflects the processing status of a ticket. The status of a ticket usually has to be set manually. The ticket list can be filtered and sorted by status.

Here is an overview of the different statuses:

• New: status for not yet processed tickets - this status will be set automatically for new incoming messages

• Open: status for tickets in process, not yet closed

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

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

• Clarify: Status for tickets that require clarification for assignment or processing.

• Completed: Status for tickets whose processing is completed (because customer stopped replying or status was set)

• Trash: Status for tickets that should not be processed. For example, for tickets that are advertisements.

Internal ticket fields

In order to provide information about the ticket, the internal comment field can be used. In addition, it is possible to assign tags that can be used to filter the ticket overview.

Answering messages

"Reply" can be used to reply to a message in a ticket. A dialog for composing a message opens.

If necessary, standard templates can be created under Administration → Settings → System → Ticket Templates to facilitate the work here. Please note that the templates are project-specific. This means that they are only available for tickets that are assigned to the corresponding project.

Attach previous answer

Files can also be attached here under "Attachment for ticket".

Security: Block external content

There is an option to not load external URLs in the ticket system by default under Administration → Settings → System → Basic settings → System.

This blocks external content from incoming emails to increase security.

Print ticket content

Individual responses of a ticket history can be printed via the printer icon in the upper right corner.

Rules for tickets

In the "Rules" tab, tickets can be automatically marked with attributes or marked as spam.

Add new rule

The "New entry" button can be used to add a new rule.

Note:

If only one word in the subject is to be filtered out, the % character can be used for this, e.g. %prio% Rules entry.

The filters that are to apply to the incoming e-mails can be set here.

Action

It is possible to specify how the emails detected by the filter are tagged. The tags can then be selected in the ticket overview in the filter or directly in an individual ticket.

Link file attachments with receipts

File attachments that appear in the ticket, for example, can be forwarded or linked to a liability.

Then, the document type can be selected and either a new document can be created with the file or linked to an existing document.

Example structure ticket system

At this point, an example of the structure of the ticket system is to be shown, which is oriented to the different topics with which the customers could address the company.

The following structure is intended to be used for...

• Accounting issues (questions about the invoice received, etc.)
• Support/complaints
• Sales (information about offered services/products)

...can be intercepted and clarified via the ticket system. First of all, an email account must be created for each of the above points under Settings → Email accounts.

If a main responsible person is defined for one of the areas, who distributes the incoming customer messages to his employees, then this person should be stored as "Default queue" in the respective email account. If each agent is to take the tickets themselves, then this field can be left blank. No address groups can be addressed via the email account, only responsible persons.