Announcement Improvements

I agree, we really need a way to have internal announcements for the tech staff, and public announcements for our end users. 

Could I get an update on this please, any chance this is on the horizon as it would be very beneficial to us

Craig,

We are starting to work on enhancements to announcements, including control over announcement visbility to Agents only (specific groups/all), requestors only (specific groups/all) or both. Additionally, you will also be able to schedule announcements. Development on this has started, we'll continue to update you here.

Thanks,

Freshservice product team

Great news thanks :)

I am really looking forward to announcements per group/department. We are also really hoping that email notification to those groups/departments will also happen.

Jeff,

Yes, this is currently being worked on. We are looking to have the announcements improvements ready for customers in a couple weeks. Stay tuned here.

Thanks,

Freshservice Product Team

Will this include the ability to filter Announcements on a group or company basis for MSP mode? This would be very helpful, so we could show announcements tailored to particular customers.

The new Announcements improvements are now live. 

- Schedule an announcement to be visible to your users whenever you choose.  

  Have a scheduled outage this weekend ? Create your announcement earlier and schedule it to be posted on the helpdesk at    the right time. You can also leave announcements running for as long as you want and auto-archive them afterwards.

- Control whom the announcement is visible to.  

   Choose the specific groups/departments/companies (MSP mode) that are impacted by the announcement and let only them know. 

- Notify users over email. 

   

   Want to pro-actively notify your users rather than wait for them to see your announcement on the helpdesk portal ? Easy. Just   choose to send a created announcement by email . At the time when your announcement is posted on the helpdesk, it will also    be sent over email.

 We'd love to hear your thoughts on the new announcements. We'll be making a few more small tweaks in the coming days, but wanted to get this out to you for your feedback, so do let us know here.

Thanks,

Freshservice Product Team

The ability to use a canned response (that can include an image) for routine announcements would be helpful.  

 

Thank you! These are some awesome edits and will definitely help with communication. It would be even better if we could automatically email all members of a group when an announcement is added if we choose to. Right now looks like we have to enter every email address to send email notification which would be painful. Hopefully an option to email the groups specified can be considered. Everything else is exactly what we need.

Jeff, Thanks for your feedback. 

Actually, the email does work exactly like you describe it. When the 'Also Send this announcement by email' is checked, it does sent the announcement as an email, at the scheduled date/time to the chosen recipients (everyone or agents only or specific groups). The 'Add Email Recipients' is really for additional  recipients like external vendors etc that you may want to notify.

We'll make a couple tweaks to reflect this clearly in the UI.

Thanks,

Freshservice Product Team

Hi Venkat,

I'm so excited for the possibilities that the new Announcements bring! Here are a couple of related things we noticed: our Service Desk is trying to set up groups for each application we manage, so that we can target audiences appropriately. We noticed that any requester marked "can see all tickets from this department" is actually able to see all tickets from every department to which they belong.

So for example, our Customer Service Manager is a member of "Customer Service" as well as "Accounting Software". This means that she can see all tickets from anybody in Customer Service (good thing) as well as all tickets from any member of the Accounting Software team (not necessarily a good thing).

Another issue is that we have a header up on our user portal that shows the latest announcement with a subject, date, and "view all" link. Whenever an announcement is no longer relevant, we go to the portal customization section and comment out (<!--) the announcement container. Then whenever we want to display the announcements header, we remove the comment tags.

I played around with the announcement expiration time, but it doesn't exactly do what we would like - it just removes the announcement itself, rather than helping us get rid of the announcement header. Are there any plans to revamp the code for creating an announcement banner such that we could easily hide/display it whenever an announcement is active? In other words - we don't want to delete historical announcements. We want to retire the announcement after a certain time (not delete the announcement), then automatically have the banner go away once the message is retired; then when we create an announcement, we want the banner to come back up again.

These aren't huge issues, but I figured I would pass along the feedback. Again, thank you for working on announcements - it will allow us to keep relevant users in the loop so much more easily!

Regarding the header Dave mentioned - it's really nice being able to present an announcement in a banner on our freshservice portal. This helps to get important information out front for anyone who goes to the portal (if they didn't see or read an email) thus minimizing duplicate tickets and improving access to communication. It would be nice if there was a control in the announcement to display the announcement in the banner on the home page so we don't have to keep editing the html. 

We created a custom banner as Dave mentioned to allow us to display the "Active" announcement as we see fit (Major incident, Maintenance, Important System information, Etc..). We only display part of the announcement in the header and the user clicks the banner to read the entire announcement. I have attached our custom code in hopes that you can better understand what we are doing and in case others are interested in adding the same functionality to their portal. Hopefully you can add a control on announcements to automate the ability to display announcements on the freshservice portal.

This may also be helpful... Attached is a screenshot of what the custom banner looks like with a sample announcement.

This is great been after it for ages but I had to stumble across it rather then it being announced in the "Whats new" announcement in the agents portal. Think you should be making people aware of this as for us and I assume others this is a major improvement. One thing I think should be changed ASAP is by default the email option should be un-ticked as this could cause some major issues if the wrong group/company is selected or Agents decide to have a play as they do, could save some embarrassment? Also all email addresses are visible to the end user, for us and others using the MSP mode this isn't great and needs some work before it is truly usable for clients either by sending individual emails, grouping them so as personal emails are not visible to all or at the very least using the BCC field for the recipients?

Following on from Dan's message it would be great to be able to filer agents out or to send by agent groups as opposed to all agents due to some agent notifications not being relevant.

For example a member of the finance team here is an agent so that they can access the CMDB for asset information so it would to be able to edit the list receiving if need be.

Also agree on changing the default status to not email 100%

Is this new feature only for specific pricing plans? I don't see this option anywhere on a free account. And the news section doesn't state anything about restrictions to certain plans. Or perhaps this feature is broken at the moment?

 

John - When I go to announcements and create a new announcement the function to do group communication is still there. We are on a paid plan.

Jeff, that is why: you're on a paid plan. Freshdesk replied to my feedback on their new feature. It's only on the Garden plan and up. Unfortunately Freshdesk failed to indicate anywhere in their announcement as to which plans offer this new feature.

From Freshdesk: "Sorry for the inconvenience. Announcements feature is available only from Garden plan onwards."

 

Sorry to hear that John. 

To add to Dan and Craig's dialog. I also agree that it would be helpful to have email unchecked to prevent accidental email communication. It would also be nice to auto include all agents and have the option to uncheck an agent or two as for the most part all agents should know about what is being announced with some exceptions such as a developer and a topic not of interest to them.

Regarding Dan being an MSP and BCC field the email communication - for any company its best to use the To field so users and Managers can clearly see who knows about the important announcement. So please don't bcc the communication and instead maybe give the MSP users an option to BCC if/when needed? I believe this product is mostly being used by individual companies so the option should be to check bcc for the MSP users. Just my two cents so we can all get what we need! Thanks again for the continual improvement it is so very appreciated.

It would be better if the "email" option was not selected automatically. We use FreshService to cut down on email. Email should be an opt-in setting, not opt-out since it is more invasive than passive.

Second the option to use BCC. I have not tested the feature, but we cannot be sharing all email addresses within a Requester Group. We have to maintain privacy of end users, specifically students and parents who use our support desk in addition to staff.

First off, I'd like to start by saying that we are very happy with this new feature! 

The only thing that causes real concern for me at this time is that we have employees that occasionally like to reply to the emails we send out, just to say, "Thank you!" or maybe ask a question." The email, for us, goes out through the same email that we have users email to create a ticket, so any reply automatically opens a ticket for them. Then they get the email letting them know we received their request, and well, you know the rest. 

It would be nice to have the ability to send the announcements out from a different address! This way, any replies can just go to a group of us. Maybe even just a feature that would treat a reply to an announcement email similar to the way a ticket does, and just add a comment to it could be nice too!

Maybe I am pushing my luck here, but a Facebook-type "Like" button might not be the worst idea in the world either, for those users that view the announcement there!

Jess Rodier, I agree. We ran into the same issues. Freshdesk e-mail system isn't smart enough to prevent this (a different address or a special flag in the subject or body of the e-mail could prevent this). So what we do is use "Add note" and set it as "Visible to the customer" instead of the "Reply". This way any replies to the e-mail sent to customers (requesters) when a public note goes out will not open a new ticket. Hopefully that helps you.