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Ask the Expert ft. Ramya ā“ | Your Freshdesk blueprint for the holiday break | Ask our in-house expert

  • 8 December 2021
  • 36 replies
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Ask the Expert ft. Ramya ā“ | Your Freshdesk blueprint for the holiday break | Ask our in-house expert
Userlevel 7
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Hey folks,

Introducing Ramya, Technical Account Manager at Freshworks - Freshdesk Support Desk. I will let her take over in the comments, but to give a short introduction, she has been with Freshworks for over 2 years, solving product and technical issues, building meaningful and lasting relationships with customers along the way.Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā Ā 

Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā -N_Kn1O1-BPGVNT5-_7LJVAdyzU0pgKGNu1Ljo-dNagIPQRR3AlCJIgQqMoblWbgS7bXHAPSGfTPRTz4Ta8nY5USYtRrLa5-Blb3GbR8UIJgDCpAg4pj62DWtACCZcKP3CsEaEym


And, as the holiday season is upon us, we thought of no better time than now to help you get the most out of your Freshdesk experience during this time in the first of many Ask the Expert sessions.Ā 

Ā 

Topic: Your Freshdesk blueprint for the holiday break

We want you to be prepared for the holiday rush - share your questions and challenges, learn a few tips and tricks, and get festive ready with Freshdesk. Ramya is available until December 17, answering your burning questions. So, fire away in the comments belowā€¦Ā 

A few cues to get your started:

  • How can I customize email notifications during the holiday season?Ā 

  • What changes can be made to SLAā€™s and business during OOO periods?Ā 

  • With the onset of the holiday rush, which processes can be automated with Freshdesk

Ā 

PS: This is a text based conversation open till December 17. Add your questions down below, and Ramya will respond with a solution at the earliest.

#12DaysOfRefreshCommunity


This topic has been closed for comments

36 replies

Userlevel 5
Badge +9

Good day, folks!Ā 

Shoot your questions here and I would be happy to help! :D

Ā 

Cheers,

Badge +5

Hey Ramya,

Freshdesk users have been requesting scheduled/recurring tickets for over five years (https://support.freshdesk.com/support/discussions/topics/312856/page/1?url_locale=), is it ever going to happen?

I appreciate thereā€™s overlap with Freshservice, but there are many Freshdesk customers that would massively benefit from this feature too. The need for tickets to be raised automatically on a recurring/scheduled basis is a helpdesk function as well as an ITSM function.

Trying to make our own functionality through APIs or third party tools like Power Automate is painful and time consuming at best. :(

Regards,

Chris

Userlevel 2
Badge +5

i would like logo with christmas!Ā 

Userlevel 5
Badge +9

HeyĀ @chris.barker,

Nice to e-meet you. Hope you are good! :)

We totally understand itā€™s been some time since the scheduled/recurring tickets request has been raised with us. This is truly a valid feedback and you can be assured this is in our product teamā€™s bucket. Weā€™ll make sure to notifyĀ the team once again and keep you updated in this community when the feature is out.Ā 

Ā 

Have a wonderful day. Cheers!

Userlevel 5
Badge +9

i would like logo with christmas!Ā 

The Christmas theme is on the way,Ā @caygri. ItĀ should be liveĀ by mid-december! :)

Cheers!Ā 

Hi Ramya,

Does Freshdesk have wildcard searching or partial searching for data within tickets or other fields? If so, how do you turn that on or what characters do you need to use? If not, how is that not a thing and when will it be implemented?

Thanks!

-Alec

Apologies if this is a noob question, but we just started with Freshdesk this week.

One issue we ran into this past weekend was a brief power outage over the weekend -- Monday morning I returned to two emails from every UPS and Switch saying they had an issue and then saying they were back onlineā€¦ hundreds of messages to merge and close.Ā  I like getting the alerts when itā€™s a single unit acting up, but even a brief power drop is a real mess.Ā  Our old helpdesk allowed us to merge or close in one search, but I find myself dealing with the cases 30 at a time.

Any suggestions on how to handle this?Ā  All come from the same address (e.g. notifications@domainname.com), but I havenā€™t figured out how to automate what to do with themā€¦Ā I donā€™t want to toss them out or close them, and assigning them all to one agent seems cruel.Ā  Is this where youā€™d assign to a group?Ā Ā 

Thanks for any suggestions.

Is there a better, working, updated Freshdesk theme for the knowledgebase? Donā€™t you think we deserve it from the #1 company?Ā :wink:

Thanks,

Userlevel 5
Badge +9

Hi Ramya,

Does Freshdesk have wildcard searching or partial searching for data within tickets or other fields? If so, how do you turn that on or what characters do you need to use? If not, how is that not a thing and when will it be implemented?

Thanks!

-Alec

Ā 

Hey Alec,

At the moment, theĀ Search functionalityĀ in FreshdeskĀ works in such a way every time you enter a search query, Freshdesk will search across tickets, solution articles, forum posts, and customers (contacts and companies), and in the following items within theĀ broader categories:

  • TicketsĀ - subject lines, descriptions, notes, replies, ticket fields, tags, attachment names
  • Contacts/companiesĀ - names, emails, phone numbers, contact fields
  • Solution articlesĀ - Titles, descriptions, tags, attachment names
  • ForumsĀ - Titles, posts

You can absolutelyĀ make use of any keywords/charactersĀ you want to search and toggle onĀ variousĀ search preference optionsĀ that we have to get the required search results (as in the screenshot below).Ā 

Ā 

Cheers,

Userlevel 5
Badge +9

Apologies if this is a noob question, but we just started with Freshdesk this week.

One issue we ran into this past weekend was a brief power outage over the weekend -- Monday morning I returned to two emails from every UPS and Switch saying they had an issue and then saying they were back onlineā€¦ hundreds of messages to merge and close.Ā  I like getting the alerts when itā€™s a single unit acting up, but even a brief power drop is a real mess.Ā  Our old helpdesk allowed us to merge or close in one search, but I find myself dealing with the cases 30 at a time.

Any suggestions on how to handle this?Ā  All come from the same address (e.g. notifications@domainname.com), but I havenā€™t figured out how to automate what to do with themā€¦Ā I donā€™t want to toss them out or close them, and assigning them all to one agent seems cruel.Ā  Is this where youā€™d assign to a group?Ā Ā 

Thanks for any suggestions.

Ā 

Hello @Opado,

For your requirements,Ā if multipleĀ emails are received from the same requestor within a short time span, you can try theĀ ā€œAuto ticket mergerā€Ā app whichĀ automatically mergesĀ the incoming tickets to the primary oneĀ based on the ticket requestor. Please refer to this link for more details. You can also check out theĀ ā€œAutoMergeā€Ā app for your requirements.

Ā 

Cheers!

Userlevel 5
Badge +9

Is there a better, working, updated Freshdesk theme for the knowledgebase? Donā€™t you think we deserve it from the #1 company?Ā :wink:

Thanks,

Ā 

Definitely, @Tharinda. :)Ā 

It would be great if you can share more insights on how you would like to set up knowledge base for your business.Ā Thank you!

Howdy, we are looking to set up call automation for our team. We want to have the ability to easily direct the calls coming into our support line straight to our mobile phones. We are a team of 3, would this be easy to setup before the holidays?

Ā 

Thanks!

Badge +1

Dark mode pleaseā€¦...

Userlevel 5
Badge +9

Dark mode pleaseā€¦...

The dark mode for FreshdeskĀ is in progress, Grant. We will keep you posted in our community once this is out live! :)

Ā 

Cheers!

Badge +1

Hello Ramya,

Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Few things.Ā  Iā€™ve been using Freshdesk longer then you have been there.Ā  We were one of the first adopters and we use it for 15 plus countries.Ā Ā 

Ā 

  1. Ā Can you make tie in fields into the form or at least make it more customizable?Ā  Its really basic and it needs expansion.Ā  I just would love it if you sent a customer a form and when they responded it auto populated the database into what you requested.Ā  Its a simple request.Ā  Any good programmer could do it in a week.Ā Ā 
  2. More automation needs to happen between Freshdesk Contact Center and Freshdesk.Ā  Do you have any plans on having more options between two platforms?Ā Ā 
  3. The ability to add more agents should be much easier.Ā  Its incredibly difficult to go from 10 to 13 agents when you are on a yearly or special plan.Ā  It literally takes months to change (which should be a few clicks).Ā  Any plans to make this better?
  4. Just a quick comment to the service team at Freshdesk.Ā  They are getting much better over time and I really appreciate it.Ā Ā 
Userlevel 5
Badge +9

Hello Ramya,

Ā  Ā  Ā  Ā  Few things.Ā  Iā€™ve been using Freshdesk longer then you have been there.Ā  We were one of the first adopters and we use it for 15 plus countries.Ā Ā 

Ā 

  1. Ā Can you make tie in fields into the form or at least make it more customizable?Ā  Its really basic and it needs expansion.Ā  I just would love it if you sent a customer a form and when they responded it auto populated the database into what you requested.Ā  Its a simple request.Ā  Any good programmer could do it in a week.Ā Ā 
  2. More automation needs to happen between Freshdesk Contact Center and Freshdesk.Ā  Do you have any plans on having more options between two platforms?Ā Ā 
  3. The ability to add more agents should be much easier.Ā  Its incredibly difficult to go from 10 to 13 agents when you are on a yearly or special plan.Ā  It literally takes months to change (which should be a few clicks).Ā  Any plans to make this better?
  4. Just a quick comment to the service team at Freshdesk.Ā  They are getting much better over time and I really appreciate it.Ā Ā 

Amazing to know you have been with us from the start, @Travis S.! :D

Ā To address your questions,Ā 

  1. Indeed customization on ticket fields would work but your suggestion is definitely valid. We would love to take this back to our product team and work on such ideas. :)
  2. We always enhance how our products work on regular intervals. Can you share some scenarios where automation between Freshdesk Contact Center and Freshdesk Support Desk would help?Ā 
  3. Absolutely true. Subscribing for more agent seats should be made easier, weā€™ll have this passed on to your point of contacts who can take this up further.Ā 
  4. Appreciate your feedback on us. Glad to hear your positive thoughts and we always intend to give you the best customer service experience.Ā 

Cheers!

Is there a way to allow for clients to pick out a time for support to call them to work on an issue? We are seeing with many taking time off for the holidays we are having to chase down clients to provide support and I want to make sure we are providing support as timely as possible.

Userlevel 2
Badge +4

My question is more of where to start guidance.Ā  We have been on this platform for a year now.Ā  It was built out from following the documentation Freshworks has available online.Ā  While building out any new system, there is usually some ā€œOnboardingā€ itself with that. This experience was much different with just read and figure it out. At times, I questioned if I was setting it up correctly, or if how it was being set up was the ā€œBest Practiceā€ with other groups who utilize it as an IT Help Desk.Ā  Iā€™m interested to know what is the best practice for building out the help desk? Do most have the selections in the Service Catalog for the requestors to scroll through and pin point what to open their issue/ticket on, or do they have the standard open ticket form that becomes more open format?

Hello!Ā 

I was curious if there was a way to email trackā€¦Ā as in be able to see when a customer has read the email/ticket? If not, is there a forum that we can request such features in the future? Thank you!Ā 

Userlevel 5
Badge +9

Is there a way to allow for clients to pick out a time for support to call them to work on an issue? We are seeing with many taking time off for the holidays we are having to chase down clients to provide support and I want to make sure we are providing support as timely as possible.

Ā 

To make sure you are giving timely support to customers, you can use the Out of Office feature in Freshdesk which allows agents to schedule the days during which they aren't available, @SuzanneCagleMorgan. By this, you can ensure tickets are not assigned to agents on leave and customer responses are re-routed to available agents.Ā 

Is there a way to allow for clients to pick out a time for support to call them to work on an issue? ā†’Ā How do your clients reach out for support? It would be great if you can share some insights on the major ticket sources for your business to help you accordingly.Ā 

Ā 

Cheers!

Userlevel 5
Badge +9

My question is more of where to start guidance.Ā  We have been on this platform for a year now.Ā  It was built out from following the documentation Freshworks has available online.Ā  While building out any new system, there is usually some ā€œOnboardingā€ itself with that. This experience was much different with just read and figure it out. At times, I questioned if I was setting it up correctly, or if how it was being set up was the ā€œBest Practiceā€ with other groups who utilize it as an IT Help Desk.Ā Iā€™m interested to know what is the best practice for building out the help desk? Do most have the selections in the Service Catalog for the requestors to scroll through and pin point what to open their issue/ticket on, or do they have the standard open ticket form that becomes more open format?

Ā 

Thanks for sharing your experience with us,Ā @Denise.S.P. Definitely onboarding will help in making the best use of aĀ productĀ for specific business usecases and requirements. Just FYI, we too have various onboarding programs to support our customers, let us know in case you need assistance. :)

Iā€™m interested to know what is the best practice for building out the help desk? Do most have the selections in the Service Catalog for the requestors to scroll through and pin point what to open their issue/ticket on, or do they have the standard open ticket form that becomes more open format?Ā  ā†’ We recommend making use of a ticket form which gathers as much as information from the customers when they raise issues/queries initially. For example, you can add multiple custom ticket fields to take in inputs; and also customize and add additional ticket fields based on values chosenĀ on specificĀ fields. The latter is achievable with the help of dynamic sections feature in Freshdesk.Ā Do explore and feel free to add a note for further questions!Ā 

Ā 

Cheers!

Userlevel 5
Badge +9

Hello!Ā 

I was curious if there was a way to email trackā€¦Ā as in be able to see when a customer has read the email/ticket? If not, is there a forum that we can request such features in the future? Thank you!Ā 

You can make use of Email tracking for Freshdesk integration to suffice your requirements,Ā @p.photos_sports. :)Ā 

Ā 

Cheers!

Howdy, we are looking to set up call automation for our team. We want to have the ability to easily direct the calls coming into our support line straight to our mobile phones. We are a team of 3, would this be easy to setup before the holidays?

Ā 

Thanks!

HiĀ @gavingĀ 

Yes it is possible, please navigate to Admin Settings > Numbers
Under Call Actions section, currently you would have mapped Call queue/IVR, Please click on that particular action and if it is going into a call queue, please Edit thatĀ particular Call flow/Call queueĀ where in the Call will be attended by.. section add your desired mobile number and thatā€™s it, Calls will be forwarded to your mobile phones.
Please note you will need to have Forward to phone, External number routeĀ features enabled, contact FDCC support team regarding the same.

Thanks!

Userlevel 5
Badge +9

Hey, is it possible to take it off the Christmas theme?Ā 
the movement bothers me a lot to workĀ :disappointed_relieved:

Ah, we understand @moniqueortiz!Ā :disappointed:

You wouldĀ be able to disable the Christmas theme from underĀ Admin > Helpdesk settings > Agent portal > Edit branding > Disable the theme. You may refer to this article for detailed help.

Ā 

Thank you!Ā 

Hi @gaving,
Apart from the above given solution,
You can also mark agent status as Forward_to_phone and add your mobile number through Freshworks profile.Ā Calls will be directed to your mobile phones directly.Ā