We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #427.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to Cloud helpdesks.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
This release fixes a critical security issue that affects earlier DeskPRO On-Premise versions. It is important that you update your DeskPRO installation immediately.
In most cases, you can update from the admin interface home page using the automatic updater:
If that does not work, please either:
a) Use the command-line updater.
b) Manually update your helpdesk.
If you have any problems updating, please immediately contact DeskPRO Support at support@deskpro.com.
The DeskPRO team apologies for the inconvenience caused by this urgent security release but stresses the urgency of upgrading your DeskPRO installation immediately.
Note: The Cloud platform is NOT affected.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #425.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #424.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #423.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #422.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #421.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
With Deskpro's snippets feature, your agents can quickly insert common phrases or "canned answers", and use variables to add a personalization, so the pre-written text can address each user by name or refer to details of their ticket.
To get the best out of snippets, it's important to write them carefully and only use them at the right time.
We've now added draft snippets, enabling you to create snippets which aren't shown by default.
You can now save a draft snippet and ask a couple of agents to review it, without making it visible to the rest of your agents until it's ready.
Another use for drafts is to hide snippets that are only useful at a certain time of year. No need to wade through all the snippets about your Easter product line to find the pumpkin spice FAQ.
We've updated the snippets section of the agent manual with full documentation of how to use drafts.
Deskpro On-Premise admins, update your helpdesk now to get this feature. If you're a Deskpro Cloud customer, we'll be rolling this out to your helpdesk soon.
If you have a lot of multi-step procedures that your agents need to carry out, you're probably already speeding things up by storing them as one-click macros.
If you've built up a big library of macros, it can take a while to find the right one. We've now added macro filtering so your agents can find the right macro more easily.
With macro filtering, you type a few letters or a word, and Deskpro instantly displays only the macros which match what you entered.
We've also added the ability to store your macros in nested folders.
Now it's easier than ever for your agents to find the right macro for each situation.
You can even filter within a folder:
Deskpro On-Premise admins, you can update your helpdesk now to get these features. If you're a Deskpro Cloud customer, we'll be adding this to your helpdesk soon.
Deskpro turbo-charges your agents with features to speed up everyday support tasks. Snippets let them quickly insert common phrases or "canned answers". Macros enable them to store several tasks and then carry them out with one click.
So you can ensure you're getting the most out of snippets and macros, we've now added snippet and macro usage reporting through Deskpro's existing powerful reports interface.
You'll find built-in reports about how often each snippet or macro is used on your helpdesk at the bottom of the Tickets section.
Now you can see if your agents are making the best use of Deskpro's high productivity interface, or if more training is required. Real usage information also helps you plan new snippets and macros.
If you need a more specific question answered, the same usage information is now available in your custom reports. You'll find the new variables you need to do this documented in the Reports manual.
DeskPRO On-Premise admins, you can update your helpdesk now to get this feature. If you're a Deskpro Cloud customer, we'll be adding this to your helpdesk soon.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #420.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #419.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
We are rolling this update out to the Cloud. This post will be updated once all Cloud helpdesks have been updated.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
"Automation" and "great customer service" seem like two opposing concepts. Many of our worst experiences as customers arise from attempts to remove the human element from a service: endless robotic phone trees with dodgy voice recognition, confusing ticket machines, misfiring text message notifications...
Done right, though, automation can actually improve your customer experience. This post outlines why and how you should be using helpdesk automation.
Of course, as customers, we all want to feel that an organization we're dealing with offers the "human touch". But your carbon-based helpdesk staff only have so many hours in the day to help customers, and you may not always have as many staff as you'd like. Your helpdesk software can't soothe an angry end-user or troubleshoot a complicated problem, but it can carry out simple tasks instantly.
If you're making your agents spend time prioritising incoming tickets, or sending out routine messages that could easily have been automated, you're burning valuable brainpower that could be better spent actually engaging with your customers.
Most helpdesks can't be open around the clock, so your customers or end-users will run into problems when human help is unavailable. Automated responses can reassure a worried customer that you've received their ticket, set expectations for an answer, and even solve the problem by pointing to self-help content like FAQs and troubleshooting guides.
Even if you have the resources to have some agents cover out out-of-hours tickets, or hire agents in multiple time zones, automating business rules is important to avoid confusion between agents from different shifts or locations.
Lately it's become fashionable for #custserv experts to extol the virtues of surprising and delighting your customers, exceeding their expectations and generally rocking their world. But some research indicates that, in reality, customers who have their expectations exceeded aren't any more loyal than those who were simply satisfied.
What really drives customers away is the perceived effort of a transaction: if customers need to contact you multiple times, wait a long time or explain themselves to multiple different agents to get an answer, they will be much more likely to stop using your service. If this research is right, it makes sense to invest in automation to solve the customer's problem faster and with less effort on their part.
Every helpdesk is different, but in general there are three types of tasks you should automate:
Are you making agents go through old tickets to mark them resolved? Automate it! Even if each agent only spends 5 minutes a day on busywork, over a year, that adds up to two working days wasted: time that would be better spent on actual customer service.
Your QA team suggests you follow up on resolved tickets where the user gave a bad rating but no comment, and ask them for more information in exchange for a discount coupon. Great idea, but there are so many open tickets to get through... This is the kind of idea you shoud automate.
Are you relying on agents to remember to carry out rules like "always copy in manager B on tickets from organization C"? Automate it! Sometimes a rule like this requires human judgement, but still requires the agent to carry out several steps once the decision is made. Explore the use of macros or triggers to speed up the process, so the agent makes the decision, clicks once, and moves on.
A well-designed helpdesk software platform will offer you a wide range of flexible automation options. Even fairly complex rules can be automated, as long as you can boil them down to combinations of ticket and user properties.
When a user stops replying without confirming that the problem is resolved, it's a good idea to follow up and check what happened. Did they not answer because your last response solved their issue, or because they've been busy, forgotten about it, or given up in despair?
You should send a custom follow-up email once you've been waiting for the user for, say, a week, and prompt them to reply again or mark the ticket solved. This lets the customer now you're dedicated to making sure their problem is really solved. It also avoids tickets hanging around in limbo for too long, needlessly driving up your average ticket resolution time.
Often there's an unavoidable delay between a user creating a ticket and the first reply from an agent. Between these two events, the ticket will usually be assigned to an agent.
You can use automation to inform the user when this happens, providing reassurance that the ticket they sent hasn't disappeared into the ether. You probably don't want to send an email every time the ticket is assigned to a different agent, though, just the first time.
Inevitably, automatic messages get turned into tickets. Deleting these is busywork and should be easy to automate using title matching. A more advanced helpdesk may even include automatic detection of bounces and automated messages to make it even easier to set up the automation.
Any modern helpdesk software platform will offer a ticket deflection feature, which shows customers suggested solutions based on their query.
This requires some investment of time to build up your Knowledgebase, but even a few hours spent writing up answers to your top 10 most common questions will quickly pay off.
How do you decide which agent takes which ticket? Sometimes the ticket properties will tell you that it needs to be passed to a certain agent or team (automatically, of course), but what if this isn't possible? Either a senior agent can spend time assigning tickets manually, or you can let agents take tickets for themselves, which will naturally tempt them to cherry-pick the easiest problems.
With 'round-robin' automation, you can define a queue of agents, and each new ticket is assigned to the next agent in the queue, until the end is reached and the round robin begins again. The effect is that incoming tickets are handed out evenly and fairly. Agents always have a queue of problems to solve, and don't spend time wondering which one to tackle next.
Always test your automation from the customer's point of view. Be sensitive to email frequency: unless emails are directly related to something the customer just did, space them out to avoid sending a flood of surveys and reminders all on the same day.
Make sure that you send all automated messages with a From: address that goes back into your helpdesk, and let users know they can reply to you if needed.
It's easy to get carried away with the possibilities of automation and over-complicate things. Before you implement an idea, make sure you're addressing a real problem. Even better, get your agents to suggest boring tasks they'd like to automate, and ask customers about gaps in your communication. If you hear the same suggestion from multiple people, you know it's time to get automating.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #418.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to Cloud helpdesks.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
Deskpro's authentication apps enable your agents and users to log in to your helpdesk with their account details from other services, saving you time on password management.
We know that a lot of Deskpro helpdesks use authentication apps, so we're always looking for ways to improve them. We're pleased to announce two ways we've made our support for external authentication better.
When you enable agents to log in with an authentication app, you can choose what permissions they are granted.
You couldn't do the same thing for users, until now. For each user authentication app, you can now pick a usergroup that users will automatically join when they log in.
Suppose you have a database full of user records, but you only want to grant portal access to active subscribers; or you have an Active Directory containing records for everyone in your company, but you only want staff from the IT department to become agents.
We've now added a powerful filtering feature that lets you define which user records you want to use for DeskPRO authentication. You can create filters based on any information in your Active Directory, LDAP store, OneLogin, database or other external source.
You'll find full documentation about how to create your own filters in the Filtering a usersource section of the admin manual.
If you're using DeskPRO Cloud, we'll roll both these new features out to your helpdesk within the next few days. If you're using On-Premise, update your DeskPRO to get them now.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #416.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #415.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
If you're the system administrator for a Deskpro On-Premise installation, you'll naturally take the security of your helpdesk very seriously.
Deskpro uses a one-way hashing function to store all user, agent and admin account passwords. This means that the real passwords aren't ever stored in the database at all: just a mathematical 'fingerprint' that can be used to confirm the right password was entered, but can't be used to reconstruct it (short of spending decades crunching numbers on a supercomputer).
So even if some wrong-doers get hold of your database backups, they can't get anyone's password.
However, Deskpro can't use this hash technique to protect the passwords for your ticket email accounts. Your helpdesk has to provide the real password to your mail server or provider so it can download emails.
We've added a new option to the next version of Deskpro On-Premise which provides more security for your email account passwords.
In the new Server > Encryption section in the admin interface, you'll see an option to encrypt the stored passwords. The details are all explained there, but the up-shot is that this prevents anyone reading the passwords from the database or a backup.
On-Premise admins, update your helpdesk to the new version now to get this feature. (Cloud users, as always, don't have to worry about technical details like this - the way Cloud handles email access means it doesn't store your passwords).
For more information about the improved password security feature, see the Sysadmin manual.
Sometimes a single glitch can produce a flood of tickets. A server goes down or a shipment goes missing, and now dozens of your users have the same problem.
To make it easier to handle that sort of situation, we've added support for problems and incidents to Deskpro.
A problem is the underlying glitch: the burnt-out server or the missing shipping container.
A problem's incidents are simply the tickets generated by that problem.
(We've taken this terminology from IT support, but we think you'll find this feature useful no matter what you use Deskpro for).
Tracking problems produces the following benefits for your helpdesk:
We'll be rolling this feature out to all Cloud helpdesks shortly. On-Premise admins, you can update your installation to get it now.
You'll need to enable this feature as explained in this section of the admin manual, and there's full instructions for how to use it in the agent manual.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #414.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
When users email you directly, rather than writing to your support address, you can just forward their message to DeskPRO. DeskPRO is clever enough to process the forwarded email and make a ticket for the user based on the original message.
This makes for a fast and easy way to get emails into your helpdesk.
We've now added an option to make this feature even easier to use.
At the moment, when you forward an email into your helpdesk, anything above the forward gets processed as a message to the user. So if your email software adds a signature automatically, you have to remember to delete it - otherwise the user will get a short, enigmatic message with just your signature.
Of course, on a busy helpdesk, it's easy to forget to remove your signature.
If this is a problem you've run into, you'll be glad to know that we've added a setting to address this.
In Tickets > Forward Settings, under Ticket Forwarding — Inbound, you'll soon find this option:
Select this option, and any text above the forwarded message is treated as an agents-only note, not a reply to the user, preventing any stray signatures turning into puzzling 'empty' messages.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #413.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
Deskpro's billing and time log feature enables your agents to record monetary charges payable to the user, or track the time spent to resolve a ticket.
We've now added the ability to add your own custom fields to billing and time charges. This is ideal if you need to record extra information like the type of service rendered or a billing code.
Custom billing fields give you the same flexibility as Deskpro's other custom fields: you can store text, dates, or predefined choices, choose if a field is compulsory, and even validate entered text against a pattern using regular expressions.
You can create custom billing fields in the new Fields section under Admin > Tickets > Time Log & Billing. (If you're not already using billing, you may need to enable it in the Settings section).
We'll be rolling this out to Deskpro Cloud helpdesks over the next few days. If you're a Deskpro On-Premise admin, you can update your helpdesk to the latest version to start using it right now.
See the admin manual for full documentation about setting up custom billing fields.
Do you check your DeskPRO email notifications on a smartphone or tablet? If so, you've probably noticed that the message previews you get aren't very informative.
On most mobile devices, the previews come out something like this:
REPLY ABOVE, REPLY ABOVE, REPLY ABOVE...
This was bothering us, so we've fixed it. In the next version of DeskPRO, we've tweaked the ticket notification emails so that, on most email apps, you get a preview of the actual message text:
For a few email apps, like Aquamail, you may need to change a setting to see the previews: see this article for details.
If you're a Cloud user, you will start seeing the improved previews in the next few days. DeskPRO On-Premise admins, update your helpdesk to the latest version to get this improvement now.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #411.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #410.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
While we're proud of DeskPRO's web interface, we think it's also important to give your agents the flexibility to help users by email alone.
Currently, agents can reply to any email notification from DeskPRO to create a new ticket message and sent it to the user. Some of our customers have told us that this doesn't fit how they work.
In our latest update, we've added a new setting for admins, plus more guidance for agents.
Admins can now choose whether an agent reply by email becomes a reply to the user, or an internal agent note.
We've also made it much clearer in the notification text what will happen when the agent replies:
If your agents ever need to override the default setting you've chosen, you can train them to use email action codes.
Simply adding #note or #reply at the very top of an email reply lets them specify if they want it to be a reply to the user or an internal note.
This article has full details of how agent replies by email will now work (your agents can also find it using the Help link next to REPLY ABOVE in any email notification).
We'll be rolling this out to Cloud helpdesks over the next few days. If you're a DeskPRO On-Premise admin, you can update your helpdesk to the latest version get this feature right now.
Great helpdesk software is essential if you’re in the business of solving people’s problems (and obviously, here at DeskPRO, we have strong feelings about which helpdesk software is the greatest).
But whether you’re using your helpdesk for customer service or IT support, great software can’t solve problems on its own. Poorly planned deployment or bad policies can make life miserable for users and agents alike.
For this post, we've interviewed agents and end-users from several organizations (none of which are DeskPRO customers, incidentally) about their experience of badly managed helpdesks.
Here are some pitfalls to avoid if you’re contemplating a new helpdesk rollout. And if you’re already running a helpdesk, make sure you’re not doing any of these things.
Modern helpdesk platforms are sophisticated pieces of software. Before making your agents do something the hard way, it’s worth spending some time exploring what your helpdesk can do for you automatically.
Here’s a spectacular example of an organization’s failure to understand what a helpdesk can do:
Jane* works for a professional accreditation body.
When we switched to using a Cloud helpdesk platform, nobody knew we could email back by replying to a ticket from the helpdesk interface.
So we kept on replying to clients in our email clients, but then we’d have to go to the helpdesk and type in that we’d received an email, enter all the user’s details and describe the email we’d written.
Installing the helpdesk was supposed to track how much time we spent helping clients. Instead, it ended up increasing our workload.
It took months before some senior staff went on a training course and found out that we could make the helpdesk convert user emails directly to tickets.
Not only is this a terrible way to use any helpdesk platform, but the organization failed to train the front-line agents in the software, so they didn’t realize the problem.
Make sure that it’s easy for your agents to access manuals and help guides.
It can sometimes be a struggle to get users to give you all the information you need to resolve an issue - but some helpdesks have the opposite problem.
Patricia* works for a large government department.
When a printer breaks down, the IT helpdesk always insists on taking all of my details, including my PC tracking number. Even if it’s a shared network printer, and it isn’t working from any PC.
Calling to report something simple like ‘the printer on the 4th floor isn’t working’ can take upwards of ten minutes.
The helpdesk even insists on taking down instructions on how to access my building - even though they’re in the same building.
The result is that printers stay broken for weeks before somebody bites the bullet and reports the problem.
This isn’t a problem that’s confined to big government. We’ve heard of companies asking for all sorts of irrelevant information before they’ll answer the simplest questions.
Maybe some of this data-gathering is because helpdesks are under pressure to prove they’re helping real users rather than making them up. Maybe it’s sometimes a cynical way to manage demand, by making the process of asking for help so onerous that users avoid it unless they’re desperate.
DeskPRO lets you add custom fields to store useful information about a ticket, but crucially, you can always make a field optional. Think carefully about how much compulsory information you demand from users before you help them.
There's no point investing in helpdesk software to manage your customer communications if you don't communicate through the helpdesk.
Tom* worked in a company that provided IT services for finance professionals, some of them very demanding.
Customers would try to get around our helpdesk ticketing system constantly. They’d find our direct email addresses from the website, or email staff members they’d dealt with previously, even if their query wasn’t something that member of staff could help with.
They thought that going outside the helpdesk would get them quicker service. It actually didn’t, because we were told to deal with everything in strict chronological order. It just wasted our time going back and forth between the helpdesk and emails.
Management wouldn’t let us make it clear that support requests had to go to the official help address, for fear of angering customers.
This is a tricky situation. The key is to make clear to users that it’s in their own best interests to go through your standard support process, without offending them.
DeskPRO can help resolve this issue using its inbound ticket forwarding feature. This means that your agents can just forward emails from users to the helpdesk email address; DeskPRO is smart enough to create a ticket as if the user had emailed the correct address in the first place.
Once customers see that their emails always end up as tickets that can be dealt with by any agent, they will be less likely to try to jump the queue.
Even after taking 10 minutes to file a report, Patricia’s printer troubles weren’t over:
When you phone up to report a problem, you become the “owner” of that problem whether you like it or not. So you could be about to move a new team member into a vacant desk, but notice that the phone at that desk has stopped working. So you contact the helpdesk and provide all your details - and boom, you are in charge of the broken phone problem.
In the case of the printer, I had raised the issue right before going on holiday for two weeks. Even though they’d taken the number for my Blackberry, they never called it. Apparently, talking about a broken network printer was too sensitive for anything but a landline.
So because they couldn’t reach me, they closed the ticket.
There’s a number of things that have gone wrong here: the reliance on phone calls when an email would do, for one. And while it makes sense that a ticket should have an owner, why couldn’t this helpdesk change the owner when necessary? Was it an inflexible policy, or badly-designed software?
Jane’s helpdesk ran into trouble with the wording of an automated email.
Our helpdesk sends out an automatic message to our clients which says: ‘This ticket has been allocated to <currently assigned>’.
Our clients are older professionals, not web natives, and they find this completely confusing. Many of them don’t realize the email is generated by software, or think it means they need to do something to assign a ticket.
The wording should make clear that you don’t have to do anything.
Put yourself in the user’s shoes and check that all your emails, forms and other user-facing copy make sense to them. Don’t refer to your internal terminology or processes unless it’s something the user needs to know about. (Plus, make sure you pick a helpdesk with a flexible template system so you can customize all user-facing text).
* All names have been changed.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #409.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #408.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
While helpdesk agents should have the writing skills to clearly explain solutions, nothing beats showing the customer what to do.
Customer service experts emphasize the importance of resolving problems with the first message (so-called first contact resolution). Every time one of your agents types out a description of a software interface, or tries to describe how to assemble a physical product, there's a chance of miscommunication.
It's much clearer to use an image to show an answer, and once you have the right processes set up, adding a screenshot can be accomplished in seconds.
In this post, we'll explore some of the best practices for using images to help your customers.
You shouldn't necessarily use the built-in screen capture method for your operating system:
It's best to find software which minimizes the overhead involved in taking a screenshot.
You don't need to buy screen capture software for all your agents. There are several free and high quality screen capture utilities available.
Pick software that:
For Windows, a good option is Greenshot.
Your agents don't have to be Photoshop wizards, but they do need to bear in mind the following points:
Don't forget that showing an image isn't enough on its own if the user doesn't understand the context or purpose of what you're showing them. Make sure images are supported by text.
Once your agents have captured a screenshot, or taken a picture of a physical product, make sure it's easy for them to share it with customers.
DeskPRO is designed to make this process easy. For example, you can paste a screengrab right into a ticket reply with the usual 'paste' keyboard shortcut.
You can also drag and drop images from the agent's desktop to the helpdesk.
Ensure that your helpdesk platform makes it easy for customers to send you images. Does the ticket form support sending an image attachment? Can users send an image during live chat? When a customer emails you an image, is it included in the resulting ticket? (In case you're wondering, DeskPRO does all of these).
You should encourage your customers to send images whenever it helps you to solve their problem. Even if you're supporting a physical product, most users will be able to use their smartphone to snap a picture and email it to your support address.
On the part of your website where your user can look up your support email or submit a ticket, consider including text to encourage taking a screenshot. If your helpdesk platform supports custom forms for different ticket types, you could display this suggestion only for problems/products where an image is likely to help.
Emphasise that sending an image will make it faster for you to diagnose the problem - the prospect of a quick solution will motivate customers to overcome the hassle of taking the screenshot or photo.
If your user base is less technically inclined, you should add a Knowledgebase article explaining how to take a screenshot on whichever platforms you support.
No matter how much you streamline the process, producing a good image to illustrate a particular solution can take time.
Promote image re-use among agents by training them to use your helpdesk software's 'snippet' or 'canned answer' functionality to build up a shared library of images that are easy to browse and insert.
If you have a frequently asked question with a complicated answer that is best answered with text and a series of images, write it up as a Knowledgebase article, and link to that instead.
Some issues can be hard to explain with a single image, or even a series of stills. For example:
Embedded video is one way to provide a solution to these sort of issues. However, playing a video can cause technical issues for users, and producing a professional video with a good voiceover is time-consuming and expensive.
Animated GIFs are ideal for getting the point across quickly where a still image won't cut it.
Making a GIF requires a slightly more elaborate production process than taking a screenshot. You'll need to capture a video of the process first, then convert it to GIF.
If you want to streamline the process of making GIFs as much as possible, consider investing in commercial software that can capture video and export to GIF, like TechSmith Camtasia. However, there's plenty of free software to capture video of your desktop, and you can make GIFs with the free Windows/Mac software Instagiffer.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #407.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
Sometimes when you're creating a ticket on behalf of a user, based on a phone call or live chat or a watercooler conversation, you don't want to send them a message telling them that you know what they just told you. You just want to write down the problem and assign it to the best agent or team to fix it, and then message the user when you actually have something new to say.
We've now updated DeskPRO with the option to create a ticket and start with an internal agent note, instead of a message to the user.
You'll soon see a new TICKET NOTE tab when you're making a new ticket:
You'll notice that the default when you start with a note is to make the new ticket Awaiting Agent - which is what you'll want in this situation 99% of the time.
Of course, you can switch back to the ticket message tab if you realise you do want to send a message after all.
We're going to be rolling this out to your Cloud helpdesk soon. (DeskPRO On-Premise admins: you can update your helpdesk to version #407 or greater to get this right now).
Getting all your support email into a modern helpdesk platform is definitely the way to go (yes, we have a vested interest in saying that, but if you're already using DeskPRO then you'll have seen the benefits for yourself - and if you're not, the free trial page is this way).
But the downside is that it's all your support email. The bounces from the newsletter you just sent out; the misdirected LinkedIn invites; the out-of-office autoreplies, and the incomprehensible automated messages from misconfigured mailservers on the other side of the world.
Not every incoming email is a real user inquiry that should be turned into a ticket.
The solution is to use Deskpro's flexible triggers system to automatically sort incoming tickets and get rid of these non-ticket tickets. Previously, you had to create triggers that matched common subjects, or the most persistent junk senders.
We've now added new, smart trigger critera that detect bounce notifications and automated responses.
Because these are new criteria within DeskPRO's existing trigger system, you have full control over what happens to these potentially annoying tickets. You can label them, decrease their urgency, assign them to a specific agent team for triage, or just delete them.
We'll be rolling out smarter triggers to Cloud accounts soon. (DeskPRO On-Premise admins: update your helpdesk to version #407 or greater to get the new criteria now).
Managing separate account details for each app your organization uses can be a huge drain on your time. If you ask each of your staff to juggle 37 different passwords, the chances are that most of them will end up being '123456', or, at the very best, 'letmein'.
That's why Deskpro supports external authentication sources, so your agents and users can log in with their existing credentials from another system. It's one less password to remember.
If you're reading this, you're probably already aware that Deskpro can fetch account details from Active Directory, LDAP and 6 leading databases. That's not the news.
The news is that we've now added Auto Sync for those sources.
Your helpdesk can automatically update user or agent records, regularly syncing to make sure your account credentials are all up to date (you can sync manually at any time, too).
Enabling Auto Sync for sources you've already installed is as easy as ticking a box and clicking Save.
If want to set this up from scratch, see our documentation for Active Directory or LDAP.
We'll be rolling out Auto Sync to Cloud accounts soon. (Deskpro On-Premise admins: update your helpdesk to version #407 or greater to begin auto syncing straight away).
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #406.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
We've revamped the DeskPRO website, with a fresh design to reflect the fact that DeskPRO is the cutting-edge helpdesk platform for 21st century organizations.
There's now a lot more detailed information about DeskPRO's features, and how our platform helps deliver excellent customer service for organizations of all sizes. If you're trying to convince your workplace to adopt a modern helpdesk, or you just want to spread the word about us, be sure to take a look, and send a link to the new site to anyone who could benefit from DeskPRO.
We've updated our customer testimonials page to include more of the big names who rely on DeskPRO every day. If you've been happy with your DeskPRO experience and you'd like to help us out by writing a brief recommendation, please drop us a line at hello@deskpro.com.
We'd also like to hear from you if you notice any teething troubles with the new site, like broken links or missing images, or if it doesn't display well in your browser.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #405.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO On-Premise, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #404.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update is being rolled out to Cloud customers now.
If you are using DeskPRO Download, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #403.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update is being rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO Download, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
Do you ever need a user to give you information about their organization before you can help?
You might need to know a site license code, or whether they work for a charity, or maybe you're trying to collect information about the size of each organization you support.
You can store all this information by adding fields to each organization's record in DeskPRO - but on a busy helpdesk, sometimes this important data ends up in ticket messages, or spread across the records of several users from the same organization.
Now you can make it easier to put information in the right place by adding organization fields to your ticket forms.
That means that when you're updating a ticket, you don't need to click away to the org record to add extra information. You just enter the information and it's added to the relevant org's record.
Even better, when users submit a ticket from the portal, they can add or update an org field (if they're logged in).
This feature is available in the latest DeskPRO update. If you're a Cloud customer, we'll be rolling it out to you over the next few days. Download administrators, you can get it now by updating your helpdesk as usual.
We're excited to announce a much-requested improvement for our customers who use Deskpro's round robin feature.
(If you're not using round robins yet, they're an automatic way to assign incoming tickets evenly to a list of agents. That way, each ticket is assigned to an agent as soon as it comes in, and there's no temptation to 'cherrypick' the easy tickets.)
As a lot of you have pointed out, round robins would be better if they only assigned tickets to agents on the list who are logged in. So that's exactly what we've done:
Of course, if you want round robins to work as they did before, you don't have to enable this option. You can even set it independently for each round robin list you have.
You'll find this option in Tickets > Round Robin once your helpdesk has been updated to the latest version. On Deskpro Download, you'll need to update from the admin interface as usual. Cloud customers, we'll roll this out to you soon.
DeskPRO can already track user satisfaction by asking users to rate agent replies. We've now added some powerful new features to help you get the most out of satisfaction surveys.
Now you can improve the user response rate with a custom survey request email, and act on those responses instantly with special triggers.
Your users are prompted to fill in the survey when they receive an agent reply by email or view it on the portal; but they may be more focused on getting their problem fixed than on rating your support. We've created a new option to send out a final survey after the ticket has been resolved for a while.
You can change the wording of the email to encourage your users to fill in the survey by letting them know their rating is important to you.
Of course, to deliver great support, it's not enough to collect ratings: you have to act on them too. Now you can use special satisfaction triggers to carry out automatic actions in response to user ratings.
Label positive ratings for your marketing team to use, or follow up on negative ratings before you lose a customer.
These features are available in the latest DeskPRO update. If you're a Cloud customer, we'll be rolling them out to you over the next few days. Download administrators, you can get them now by updating your helpdesk as usual.
If you're asking your users to pick from a large number of possible values for a ticket field, a good way to make it easier for them to find the right option is to use nested choices.
Deskpro already supports one level of nesting on some fields. Now we've added multi-level nesting for custom choice fields, so you can nest options as deep as you like.
Let's see how that looks on the user portal:
Just as before, you have to select a bottom-level option that doesn't have any suboptions below it before you submit the ticket form. So in this example, you can't select 'Refrigerator' - you have to select one of the subchoices under Refrigerator.
Of course, your agents can view and edit these multi-level fields as well. You can nest options as deep as you like to organize any of your custom fields with predefined choices (select-box, multiple select-box, radio button or checkbox).
To use these new fields, just create a custom choice field as usual, or edit your existing choice fields.
Let's say you'd love to switch to multi-level custom fields, but you already have the same information stored in the built-in Category or Product field for thousands of existing tickets.
We've got you covered. You'll find a new option to convert any of the built-in fields into a custom field.
Deskpro will explain the conversion process before you confirm, but in brief, you'll keep the values of the field for all your existing tickets, and all your triggers and filters that used the old Category will keep working.
We'll be rolling out this powerful new feature to Cloud users over the next couple of days. If you're a Deskpro Download admin, you can get it by updating your helpdesk now.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #402.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update is being rolled out to Cloud customers now.
If you are using DeskPRO Download, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #401.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update is being rolled out to Cloud customers now.
If you are using DeskPRO Download, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #400.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO Download, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #399.
This release contains minor bug fixes.
This build has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO Download, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #398.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO Download, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the DeskPRO helpdesk platform, build #397.
The following is an automatically generated list of changes in this release:
This update has been rolled out to all Cloud customers.
If you are using DeskPRO Download, you can update your installation from the admin interface.
