Love Freshdesk, but one problem I run into often is the inability to save a draft reply to a ticket. Often I and my team will work at night to clean up tasks that we could not complete that day, but then if we write back to a client in the evening, they know we are working late and will likely reply, thus defeating the purpose of working late to clear out a backlog.
A solution would be to add the ability to save a reply as a draft, and/or the ability to schedule a reply. So if you are replying to a client, you could either save the draft to manually send it later (like in the morning during business hours) or to schedule it so it goes out automatically at the assigned time. This would really help make the system more useful for people who want to structure business hours.
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Schedule and Draft Replies
@Aravind I don't mean to be rude, as Freshdesk is an excellent platform, but "definitely not in the scheme of things for now" is a bit disappointing, as scheduling of replies has been a topic of discussion for the past six years. :)
In the past I even offered my assistance to your colleagues to help implementing and testing it. Now I don't have that much time, but I would have a few suggestions at how such feature could be implemented, to add it to the existing system without having to make radical changes in the architecture.
Thanks Aravind, Diego. To my mind it would be very simple to implement access to draft replies via API. Currently I can't find a way to access them, as the conversations endpoint only contains sent/received replies and, I believe, saved notes. Let me know if I've missed something. I don't like the idea of having to save something as a note and set a custom value across the whole ticket just to get a reply scheduled, but I appreciate that can be done, either with Supervisor or via the API.
With access to drafts via API, you could at least set a ticket-wide custom value (counter-intuitive though that is) and then have a listener send all drafts with value=scheduled at a set time, e.g. start of local business hours, which for me would be during the night where I'm currently located. As per your workaround, the value would then be reset. I'm not even a huge fan of the email client I'm using, but I use it mainly for its ability to schedule my outgoing messages. I previously toyed with Mailgun, which can also do this via SMTP by setting a custom header, and I know you use Sendgrid, which has the same functionality via its API.
Either way, I much prefer drafts to saved notes, as it isn't a note, and we start to use the system in ways it's not designed for, which requires a counter-intuitive workflow and results in certain terms becoming inadvertent misnomers. This leaves the whole workflow open to human error. Maybe I could live with it if it was free, but not at the Estate price point, which is where we unlock certain necessary features.
So let's review, we have some solutions that could be implemented:
- Implement a scheduling field in the UI and pass this to Sendgrid. Ridiculously easy for your dev team, as the feature is well-documented, but who knows when it would make it onto the roadmap. Perfect, but likely slow. You should still consider it, as people have been asking for this for years now.
- Allow access to drafts via API. This opens up other customisation possibilities as discussed. Not sure how difficult that would be. Sounds easy from a dev perspective, as there is no UX element, so it stays with a single team. E.g. .../api/v2/tickets/[id]/drafts or within tickets/[id]/conversations with "draft": true, or similar.
- Allow conversation-item-level custom fields. Again, opens up other possibilities like labelling a note as a scheduled reply, which gets around the semantics issue.
- Your workaround.
Incidentally, they're in order of preference from best to 'worst', though that doesn't mean your workaround is bad, as it's a creative solution that makes use of existing functionality.
I'd be interested to hear any feedback from the teams that would be responsible for implementing something like this.
I also would like to have the ability to schedule replies for a specified date and time.
Among other reasons this would be helpful when we expect the client to be available but we will not be open, eg. on a Saturday.
Just to add, the scheduling a reply function would be gold-dust to our business. Our clients are educational establishments (schools etc) and so they have big chunks of time away for holidays. If we could write emails to be scheduled to arrive on the day or the second day they return from holidays, our emails would be at the top of their pile, rather than the bottom.
PLEASE get this built in ASAP. It's been on your users' agenda for at least 7 years, given this thread, which is a crazy amount of time to have not implemented such a small but brilliant feature!
I know this thread has been open for a while, but I too have been looking for this solution. As was mentioned by the OP, I too try and catch up outside of work hours and would like to schedule a response to send at the start of the next business day.
I currently use 'Right Inbox' with my G-Suite email account to schedule emails for the next day, so something similar for my helpdesk would make life so much easier.
So another +1 for this feature in the future from me.
+1
It seems to be an industry standard to schedule emails.
Gmail already started with email scheduling. It would be great to start scheduling emails at Freshdesk as well.
This feature is critical for us and is, unfortunately, a dealbreaker if we don't have a workaround :/
+1 for this feature request. Our use case for this would be to send out a reminder email to a customer the day before a scheduled install (ISP).
It was mentioned earlier here but I would also like to advocate for a manual Save Draft button. The auto-save-draft failed for me after composing a very long and detailed response to a ticket in the web UI. I believed I had Sent that reply, but it did not show up as Sent in the ticket history nor was it available as a Draft when I checked later. Support ticket with FD let me know that Drafts, even if saved, are only available for 24 hours, which I was also not aware of. I think it should somehow alert the agent that their draft would only be available for 24 hours - other than being told in the support ticket that this is the time period for drafts, I couldn't find any documentation regarding that.
Thank you.
Folks!
The auto-saving of draft is made more reliable and better now and any draft is expected to be auto-saved and stay on the ticket for 24 hours.
Our product team is exploring the use cases and feasibilities of bringing in scheduled replies, however the same is not on our immediate roadmap.
We shall keep you posted here as and when there is an update to this request.
For now, you could use time trigger rules as an alternate to send out emails at specific time intervals.
Thanks!
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