Service Desk Productivity
Workflow Automator
Workflow Automator allows you to automate all the repetitive tasks and manual processes that you perform on a daily basis. This includes processes like assigning tickets to the right agent or team, following up on approval, and so on. With the Workflow Automator, you can create a workflow using simple drag and drop actions.
Components of a workflow
A workflow is made up of three components:
Event - defines when a workflow has to be triggered
Condition - defines the parameter(s) that needs to be validated during the execution of a workflow
Action - The outcome of the workflow
It is not necessary that a workflow should have only one condition or an action. You can add multiple conditions and actions to a workflow. (We’ll be seeing this later with a detailed example).
Creating a workflow
To create a workflow,
Head to Settings > Workflow Automator
Click on the New Automator button on the top right corner and choose the module for which you wish to create a workflow. For example, if you wish to create a new ticket workflow, click on the New Automator drop down and click on Ticket.
Provide a name and description for your workflow. A description would be helpful for other admins to understand why the workflow was created.
The next step is to set up an event. This is where you set up when the workflow has to be triggered.
Choose the conditions to trigger the workflow and click Done.
The next step is to add a condition. This is where you provide a set of parameters to the workflow. The workflow, after being triggered, will check for the parameters. Upon the validation of the parameters, the workflow will perform the defined action.
To add a condition, click on the condition icon, drag and place it next to the event.
Choose the parameters for validation and click Done. If you wish to add additional parameters, click on Add New condition present at the bottom of the dialog box.
The next and final step in creating a workflow is to add an action. Click on the Action icon, drag and place it next to the condition.
Choose the action that you want your workflow to perform and click Done.
Now, the workflow is complete. As you keep adding conditions and actions, the automator will automatically save the workflow as a draft. If you wish to activate the workflow, you can click on Activate.
The above mentioned steps will help you in creating a workflow. But, in order to understand the level of flexibility offered by the Workflow Automator, take a look at our solution article.
Supervisor
The Supervisor performs actions on tickets that you specify based on time and event driven triggers. Use the Supervisor to periodically check recent tickets and perform actions like sending reminders to customers for pending tickets, or escalating overdue tickets to the right person in your team.
The Supervisor will run every hour and process tickets that have been updated within the past 30 days. Supervisor rules are processed sequentially, so the order of the rules is important. A rule may cause certain actions that trigger subsequent rules.
To create a new rule under Supervisor,
Head to Admin > Supervisor and click on New Rule
Provide a name and description for your supervisor rule.
Setup conditions and actions for your rule. Click on + New Condition or + New Action if you to add additional conditions or actions.
Once done, click Save.
Scenario Automations
Scenario Automations let you perform actions on tickets with a single click. Here you can create ‘automations’ for frequently occurring scenarios and define what the automation does when executed. For example, you could create a scenario to “Mark a Ticket as an incident", “Assign to the Incident Management team”.
Creating a scenario
To create a scenario,
- Head to Admin > Scenario Automations and click on New Rule
- Provide a name and description for the automation
- Choose the action you want the automation to perform
- Once done, click Save.
Executing a scenario
Let’s say you’ve created a scenario automation to convert an incident to a service request and you’ve named it as “convert to service request”. Now, to execute the scenario automation,
- Click on the incident ticket which you wish to convert to a service request
- Click on the More dropdown and click on Scenarios
- You will see a popup with all the scenario automations
- Scroll till you reach “convert to service request”.
- Once you reach the scenario, click on the Execute button present right next to the scenario. This will convert the incident ticket to a service request.
Email Commands
When replying to notification emails from your mailbox, you can include "Email Commands" to instruct Freshservice to perform certain actions on a ticket. The Email Command text will be stripped by Freshservice and will not be seen by the requestor, while the rest of the text will become a part of the conversation.
Email commands must follow the correct syntax and must be placed within the pre-configured delimiter text. For example the command - "@simonsays agent : John Roberts Status:Resolved @simonsays" will assign the ticket to the agent John Roberts and mark the Ticket as Resolved. The rest of your email content will be added as a conversation to Freshservice and also sent to
the Requester via email.
Available commands
Status : Pending
Priority : Medium
Agent: John Robert
Group: Sales
Source: Email
Type: Incident
Urgency : Low
Impact : Low
Category : Hardware
Subcategory : Computer
Item : Macbook
Associate_ci: {Serial_no=>123, User=>andrea@freshservice.com, Name=>Andrea's Laptop}
Action: note
Issue Type: [Custom Field Value]
Issue classification: [Custom Field Value]
Test date: [Custom Field Value]
Type: [Custom Field Value]
Approval Stage: [Custom Field Value]
Location: [Custom Field Value]
Apps
The Apps section allows you to connect your Freshservice account with other third party applications. We’ve developed a new app marketplace from where you can choose and integrate with different applications.
For example, if you’re using Slack for internal communication, you can send ticket information and notifications to specific Slack channels.
Adding a new app
To add a new app,
Go to Admin > Apps and click on Get More Apps
You’ll be taken to the app marketplace where you can browse for the app you wish to integrate with your Freshservice account. You can either search for the app using the search bar or browse for the app by under the respective category.
Once you’ve found the app, you can integrate it with your Freshservice account.
Adding a custom app
Apart from choosing from a library of apps from the marketplace, you can also create and upload custom applications on to your account. To create a custom app, you’ll have to log into our developer portal, and build custom apps using our Marketplace SDK. Once done, you can upload the custom app to your account and can later integrate them to your Freshservice account.
Canned Responses
Canned Responses are predefined reply templates which can be used to quickly send out replies to tickets. You can use placeholders in your canned responses to fill in dynamic content like the requestor’s name, ticket ID and URL inside the response.
Customer Satisfaction
Satisfaction Surveys let you add a link to your response emails and directly collect customer feedback and satisfaction.
The following steps let you collect feedback from your customers through a link in your response emails:
Enable the Customer Satisfaction Surveys checkbox
Specify the Satisfaction Link Text. The default text goes as “Please tell us what you think of your support experience.” But, you can customize this content as per your requirement.
Choose how and when you want the survey link to be sent.
Once done, click Save.
Arcade
This section allows you create challenges and award points to your agents.
Points are awarded to agents based on how fast they resolve the tickets assigned to them. There are also bonus points for first call resolution and satisfied customers. Agents also lose points for late resolution of tickets and for unhappy customers.
An agent can reach higher levels as he keeps getting more and more points, the set points to be achieved will be set by the Admin.
The section also allows you to create quests, which represent performance goals that you set for agents, completing which they will be awarded badges of honour.
Scheduler
Freshservice lets you schedule tickets at periodic intervals to remind the service desk of important tasks. For example, you can schedule tickets once every month to remind you to check disk space in your data centre.
Priority Matrix
A Priority Matrix (also known as the Impact-Urgency matrix) is used to automatically assign a priority to an incident. The priority for an incident is set based on the Impact and Urgency of the event.
Impact refers to the effect an incident has on service levels.
Urgency refers to how soon an incident should be resolved.
Asset Impact
Asset impact is used for automatically passing impact from list of associated assets to "impact" field of Incident. Priority matrix logic on Incident will be applied according to updated Incident impact field.
It compares the existing "impact" field in Incident details page against respective impacts of all associated assets and updates the value to whichever is the highest among the two.
For example, if the existing Incident impact field value is "Medium" and when a "High" impact asset is associated with Incident, Incident impact field value will be updated to "High" from "Medium". This change is always from a lower value to higher and not the other way to ensure that system doesn’t downgrade existing higher impact. So, the value can change from "Low" to "Medium" or from "Medium" to "High" but not from "High" to "Low".
Team Huddle
Team Huddle allows you to chat with your fellow agents, add multiple agents to a conversation and even share files related to a particular ticket.
Note: As of now, you can start conversations only from the Tickets module.
Starting a conversation
To start a conversation,
Head to the Tickets module from the left sidebar and select the ticket regarding which you wish to discuss with your fellow agents.
Click on the Discuss button on the top right corner.
Add your fellow agents using ‘@’. The autocomplete feature will help you quickly find the fellow agent you are looking for.
Once you find the agent, select him/her and hit Enter.
Now, the agent you added to the conversation will be notified through in-app and email notifications.
Similarly, you can use ‘@’ to add multiple agents (not more than 20) to a single conversation.
Conversations related to a ticket cannot be viewed when you move out of the ticket. However, when you get back to the ticket and if you have unread messages from other agents, you will be notified using a red dot. You can click on the Discuss button and view the unread messages.
To know more about what else you could do with Team Huddle, kindly visit the solution article.
