Supporting multiple brands in Freshdesk - setting up ticket forms and agent groups

  • 10 August 2018
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In the previous post, we looked at how we set up the self-service portal for Freshservice and other Freshworks products. We were all set to launch the portal with knowledge base articles and forums but decided to give it some more time.


While we had good self-service content on the portal, we knew some of our customers would definitely want to reach out to our team for specific questions they had. We had to have a form using which customers can submit questions when they don’t find what they’re looking for, or needed additional information.


The missing piece: customized forms


We decided to enable the ticket form on our portal but there’s one challenge we had to deal with. Since we support multiple products with the same Freshdesk account, we had a lot of fields, each relevant for different product support teams. For example, we had multiple dropdowns that helped agents categorize the issues, when they work on them.


Our customers shouldn’t have to worry about these things - they should just be able to submit their question and move on. We decided to have a simple form across our product portals. We just chose to make the email, description, and the subject fields visible in the portals by using the ‘Display to customer’ option in Admin > Ticket fields


Here’s how the form appears in our product portals today: 



 


Freshdesk has an inbuilt ticket form that enables users to connect with support teams. You can customise your ticket form in the Admin -> Ticket Fields section 


If you’d like to customize the form for each of your product portals, you can go through this forum post to see how you can accomplish it. You can do this if you’re subscribed to the Estate or Forest plan.


Routing questions to the right agents


We had different groups handling support for different products, and we had to ensure questions reached the right group. Tickets coming in via the Freshservice support portal had the product set as ‘Freshservice’, and we routed these questions to the right group using Dispatch’r.


Once we launched our self-service portal, email channels, etc. for Freshservice customers, tickets started flowing in. 


You can create custom roles in your Freshdesk account in the Admin -> Roles section. The role and scope defines the agent’s access to different parts of the helpdesk like tickets, contacts, reports, admin settings, etc 


Beyond ticket forms: completing the loop

By handling multiple mailboxes, showing customized help content and ticket form in each product portal, we were able to provide a very tailored experience for different customers. 


With customer journey, our team is also able to see solution articles someone read when they raise tickets. This, along with direct feedback we receive in solution articles, helps us go back and improve content if it isn’t good enough. All of our agents have access to editing  the knowledge base - and whenever feedback comes in, we try and make the content better almost immediately. 


With incoming questions and teams organized by product, we’re able to efficiently report on trends and go back to the development team and work with them on prioritizing fixes and improving experiences. 


References:


  1. Customising the ticket form in Freshdesk
  2. Quick guide to setting up agents and groups
  3. Know your customer journey in Freshdesk


If you've got some interesting stories on how you're using Freshdesk in your organisation, share away.


Cheers!





1 reply

Our company offers multiple products/services, and we are utilizing FreshDesk in order to provide customer assistance.  Each product has its own specific sets of questions we need to ask customers when they submit a ticket.  The answers to these questions allow us to direct tickets to the right agents and the information gathered from the customer helps our PMs perform analytics. 


The bulk of our FreshDesk users do not create tickets by way of the user portal.  This is because a large percentage of our customers only need to request our assistance once or twice, so they are not interested in creating a user portal account in order to ask us questions. Therefore, we place a "Request Assistance" widget on each of our product pages where the user can ask their question to us. Once a ticket is submitted, the user receives an email confirming we have received their ticket.  In that email we also mention they have the option to create a user portal, which we recommend to anyone who frequently has dealings with our company.


The issue we are facing is that we offer 4, soon to be 6, specific products/services that we service with FreshDesk.  However, FreshDesk is designed to only allow 1 customer journey on the widget form -- the same widget has to cover all of our products.  Therefore, when a user is on our product page for "Product A," if they click the widget, the first question they are forced to answer is "What product are you inquiring about?" Asking that question is the only way we can direct the customer to the other ticket questions related to the product they are inquiring about. The better customer journey would realize the user is using the widget for "Product A" and thus is interested in asking questions related to Product A. After the system realized that, it could rely on the remainder of the ticket fields, which utilize dependent fields based on Product, to acquire the needed information from the customer.


This limitation has caused customer confusion and tickets often end up misdirected because the customer didn't pick the right product. Our agents are sharp and can usually figure out where the customer went wrong in entering data and redirect the ticket correctly.  However, this ends up being inefficient for our agents and slows down our response to customers. 


Having customized ticket forms on the portal is nice, but it doesn't meet the needs of customers whose first-line contact with customers is via widget.  Please consider this as a future product enhancement.

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