Mission 1: Automate with Freshdesk | Challenge

Mission 1: Automate with Freshdesk | Challenge
Userlevel 7
Badge +9

Hello super agents - it’s time for your first mission - a special operation drafted for your eyes only.

As a customer support agent using Freshdesk, we want to hear from you! Search through your bank of resources and expertise to divulge product secrets with the community.

 

Challenge brief: How do you use Freshdesk to automate tasks?
 

Automating mundane and repetitive tasks is a norm today. Freshdesk provides a number of ways businesses can automate workflows and processes, making it easy for agents, and increasing productivity.

🚀 Theme: Using Freshdesk to automate tasks.

🕛 Timing: Accepting intelligence till September 16.

🎉 Prizes

  • Get recognized as a top operative in the community
  • Your key to a covert badge
  • Get spoiled with Freshworks goodies
     

✅ How can you get involved?

  • 👉 Do you have a creative  automation use-case? Share it with the community in the comments section below.
     
  • 🧾 To help craft your own statements, here are a few triggers -

    Problem statement you were facing

    How did you solve for it

    Short overview - Get creative <screenshot, pen, illustrations emojis>

    Insights and experiences that you can share with the community
     

  • ✍️ There is no limit to the length of your post!
     
  • 💡  If you want to share more than one amazing idea, we’d recommend you share each separately within this thread.


Don’t miss Handler, Hemanth Ramya’s (Technical Account Manager, Freshdesk) own hacks in the comments section.


22 replies

Userlevel 3
Badge +3

Automation has been a life saver

Below would be a brief about how automation was implemented to decrease volume trends

It was becoming two challenging to handle a flow of tickets where we just had to provide a similar response and bulk response was not an option as there were multiple projects. While trying to find a solution to differentiate tickets and address them efficiently. I have explored the tool and came across automations (For open projects without any sources for the customers to reach out to us where we provide only the email id) and widgets (For our online platforms). 

However, automation was the ultimate solution. Firstly, an automation was set to auto tag the tickets using multiple keywords. Later, another automation was set to execute which contains a set of FAQ’s (email draft) that address the general concerns like; how much time it will take to process the order, can the order be modified and so on..

Automation was set while the ticket is created has helped reduce ticket flow drastically. Basically, a ticket was made to resolve automatically after executing the automation and if in case the customer is not satisfied with the information sent through automation or has any other concern, he can reopen the ticket for an agent to address his concern. 

Userlevel 7
Badge +7

Automation has been a life saver

Below would be a brief about how automation was implemented to decrease volume trends

It was becoming two challenging to handle a flow of tickets where we just had to provide a similar response and bulk response was not an option as there were multiple projects. While trying to find a solution to differentiate tickets and address them efficiently. I have explored the tool and came across automations (For open projects without any sources for the customers to reach out to us where we provide only the email id) and widgets (For our online platforms). 

However, automation was the ultimate solution. Firstly, an automation was set to auto tag the tickets using multiple keywords. Later, another automation was set to execute which contains a set of FAQ’s (email draft) that address the general concerns like; how much time it will take to process the order, can the order be modified and so on..

Automation was set while the ticket is created has helped reduce ticket flow drastically. Basically, a ticket was made to resolve automatically after executing the automation and if in case the customer is not satisfied with the information sent through automation or has any other concern, he can reopen the ticket for an agent to address his concern. 

 

Thank you @Krishozky for kick-starting the mission and sharing your brief! Look forward to reading more! 😎

Userlevel 1
Badge

Automation and its positive impact on workflows and Agent productivity

 

We were facing the some of the following challenges prior to implimenting automations:

  1. Work load distrubution amongst our customer service agents.
  2. Agent Perfomances were affetced.
  3. Response times to our customers breached SLA’s in place.

With Freshdesk automations, we have 1 solution for for muiltple requirements, automations allow us to pre-define the type of ticket received using tagging and types. Based on these set fields we are able to automatically distribute the work load (by rules set on ticket creation, time triggers or ticket updated) to the correct sub teams within our customer service department.

Enabling us to have each team productively attend to their tickets without having to sort through all types of queries before knowing what they have to work on for the day, to achieve this we have groups and parent groups set up for each section of our team), in turn this has drastically improved our response and resolution time frame and the team is no longer breaching SLA periods and keeping on target.

Due to our agents working off of multiple communication platforms, automations has also allowed us to remove simple administrative tasks, which takes uneccesary time from our agents when working across the platforms, as an example an agent would have a ticket created from a  Whatsapp chat on Freshchat due to needing to expadite the clients query to the relevant department, based on the automation and rule linked to labelling the agent wont need to go onto Freshdesk to assign the ticket to the relevant group / agent, this is done automatically, in the end saving time for our agents. 

Userlevel 7
Badge +7

Automation and its positive impact on workflows and Agent productivity

 

We were facing the some of the following challenges prior to implimenting automations:

  1. Work load distrubution amongst our customer service agents.
  2. Agent Perfomances were affetced.
  3. Response times to our customers breached SLA’s in place.

With Freshdesk automations, we have 1 solution for for muiltple requirements, automations allow us to pre-define the type of ticket received using tagging and types. Based on these set fields we are able to automatically distribute the work load (by rules set on ticket creation, time triggers or ticket updated) to the correct sub teams within our customer service department.

Enabling us to have each team productively attend to their tickets without having to sort through all types of queries before knowing what they have to work on for the day, to achieve this we have groups and parent groups set up for each section of our team), in turn this has drastically improved our response and resolution time frame and the team is no longer breaching SLA periods and keeping on target.

Due to our agents working off of multiple communication platforms, automations has also allowed us to remove simple administrative tasks, which takes uneccesary time from our agents when working across the platforms, as an example an agent would have a ticket created from a  Whatsapp chat on Freshchat due to needing to expadite the clients query to the relevant department, based on the automation and rule linked to labelling the agent wont need to go onto Freshdesk to assign the ticket to the relevant group / agent, this is done automatically, in the end saving time for our agents. 

 

Thank you for sharing @H.Coetzee  - these are some valuable insights!

Badge

I had frequent problem of my agents closing out tickets without attending them , i was on the basic plan as well to i didn’t have much option to setup in settings to restrict this happening , I had to rely on automation , 
I was still stuck in the start every time i failed , at a point i had no option than to comeup with a solution to prevent such events.
I Finally solved this issue of closure of tickets without resolution by using two automation rules
1.Every Notes added to a ticket was tagged at Notes added
 

2.Any ticket without 1 Notes tag or reply to client with change status to open itself with a warning note displayed as “Unauthorised action detected”
 

This Solved my Issue of false closure of unattended tickets! 
 

#MissionAgentCX #CustServ #freshdesk #helpdesk #automation
 

Userlevel 7
Badge +7

I had frequent problem of my agents closing out tickets without attending them , i was on the basic plan as well to i didn’t have much option to setup in settings to restrict this happening , I had to rely on automation , 
I was still stuck in the start every time i failed , at a point i had no option than to comeup with a solution to prevent such events.
I Finally solved this issue of closure of tickets without resolution by using two automation rules
1.Every Notes added to a ticket was tagged at Notes added
 

2.Any ticket without 1 Notes tag or reply to client with change status to open itself with a warning note displayed as “Unauthorised action detected”
 

This Solved my Issue of false closure of unattended tickets! 
 

#MissionAgentCX #CustServ #freshdesk #helpdesk #automation
 

 

This is very helpful @RejoyKRoy - thank you for sharing! 

Userlevel 1
Badge

Our Help Desk / Knowledge Base is focused on supporting systems for the fleet program.  As with all other support systems, once the word got out that we have a Help Desk, people immediately began to submit tickets for all kinds of fleet processes, processes that are unrelated to system support.  I had not anticipated this at first and for a brief time, my team did our best to support the end user.  This took a lot of extra time since we also had to reach out to the appropriate personnel to get the needed information and then answer/respond to the tickets ourselves.

Since then, I’ve created custom ticket types for specific areas of the fleet.  I then created an automatic response for Ticket Types that my team does not support that include the support that my team does provide as well as the correct contact information for the issue they have.  This way, the end user can get immediate support for their issue and they will also have the contact information of the approriate team or team member moving forward.  Once sent, the ticket automatically closes and my team no longer has to interact with tickets that are associated with processes that we do not support

 

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +16

Though I build a significant more amount of automations in freshservice, we do have a department that uses freshdesk...and we wanted to automate some of their process as well. So what did we do…

Automate Email Notifications with Ticket Routing and Automatic Forwards

The process was designed to alleviate the chance of spamming contacts with email. Also we wanted to make sure that an email notification contained relevant ticket information. Secondly, we made sure to tailor the emails by which agent group the ticket was being auto-routed to. From there we could also initiate a forwarding email to management staff that would keep all stakeholders informed throughout the ticket lifecycle.

As the ticket lifecycle advances additional workflow has been put in place to automate the mundane processes of closing tickets, adding notes, and updating agents. 

All of this is triggered by what support email address the inquiry is originally sent too.

 

It isn't anything fancy but it is effective and that is what our goal is...find a solution that is easy to implement but effective and efficient. 💪

Loving all the other submissions so far!!! Keep them coming :)

 

Userlevel 1
Badge

We were having multiple issues in creating an automation for the tickets that get’s created on a customer portal. Based on the Issue and Sub-Issue type to be assigned to the respective departments within the company. With the help of automation we were able to achieve it and solved all the problem.

 

We were able to create 100s of automations successfully in our freshdesk account as it is easily and basis on the priority the SLAs should be driven and to achieve this we had to ensure that the tickets getting assigned to the teams based on the issues & sub-issues and each of them had a different priorities derived.

 

Here are few example of the automation that we have created:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

#CustomerSuccess#FreshDesk#Automations#CustServ 

Badge

We’re using the Data Layer for the chat-bot so that we know the customer’s name and what they are doing when they start a chat. It saves time having to ask for their details and it helps us focus on helping customers rather than having to get them to tell us.
It was very easy to implement - our app publishes a set of data that we want then we use Google Tag Manager to pass the data between the app and the chatbot.
It’s also a great experience for customers becuuse we can address them by name as soon as they contact us.

Badge

Through Freshdesk automation our workload decreases as most of the tickets get resolved through automation. As we are working on multiple projects it is easy to filter the tickets by entering the project name with auto tags automation implemented.

In Automation, we have set few FAQs where most of the customer's queries get sorted and helps us to receive fewer ticket.

 

Userlevel 5
Badge +9

Hello Everyone,

 

Firstly, thank you all for taking time and participating in the Automate with Freshdesk | Challenge. These valuable insights and ideas from you is definitely going to help our user community in implementing and automating daily redundant business workflows in Freshdesk. :)


Businesses these days are looking to automate mundane, repetitive tasks/workflows that systems can perform better and more efficiently so that the workforce can further focus on sophisticated creative challenges. Being an active Freshdesk user, I have always looked at automating a lot of our complicated use cases using the automation feature our product provides, making it easy for agents and improving their productivity. Let me share a few scenarios here:

 

Case 1: Working with third-party

 

Sometimes you might need to involve a third-party vendor or someone from outside your team on a ticket. In such cases, we can make use of the Forward functionality to forward tickets/conversations to any email address right from within the tickets and take up conversations further. Now when the third party team replies back to such forwarded emails, agents might tend to miss out such tickets. To make sure the assigned agent/group is notified about this, we can configure a ticket update automation rule (Admin > Automation > Ticket updates) such that the ticket status is moved to open and the agent/group is notified. Adding a sample rule screenshot for reference:

 

 

 

Case 2: Customised customer satisfaction email notifications


In our day-to-day support tasks/processes, we handle and support a vast type of customers, be it premium or regular/external or internal users, etc. Not always we would want to trigger customer satisfaction to all users and you might have specific requirements to get customer feedback from specific customer types. In such cases, ticket updates automation rule/s can be configured such that if those requirements (conditions) meet, then trigger a customized satisfaction survey to such requesters (users) of the tickets. A sample rule screenshot for reference:

 

 

Please note that the automationrule conditions and actions can be tweaked based on your requirements. Feel free to drop a comment if you have similar scenarios and business workflows! :)

 

Cheers,

Badge

We use the automation to manage ticket distribution between the groups and some other cases:

 

1 - Deny ticket from unknown senders

Base on email address the automation close the ticket and reply to sender asking to open from the professional email.

 

2 - Send a remember notice

We send a after 24 hours and 48 hours an email to remember client to reply the tiket.

 

3 - Ticket distribution

Se have some different emails address to open a ticket, and based on this ticket we distribute between the groups and set the category and ticket type.

 

Best 

Userlevel 7
Badge +7

Our Help Desk / Knowledge Base is focused on supporting systems for the fleet program.  As with all other support systems, once the word got out that we have a Help Desk, people immediately began to submit tickets for all kinds of fleet processes, processes that are unrelated to system support.  I had not anticipated this at first and for a brief time, my team did our best to support the end user.  This took a lot of extra time since we also had to reach out to the appropriate personnel to get the needed information and then answer/respond to the tickets ourselves.

Since then, I’ve created custom ticket types for specific areas of the fleet.  I then created an automatic response for Ticket Types that my team does not support that include the support that my team does provide as well as the correct contact information for the issue they have.  This way, the end user can get immediate support for their issue and they will also have the contact information of the approriate team or team member moving forward.  Once sent, the ticket automatically closes and my team no longer has to interact with tickets that are associated with processes that we do not support

 

 

 

Hi @rmccrckn - thank you for sharing! This is such a helpful tip, one I’m sure our other members will benefit from! Keep them coming :)

Userlevel 7
Badge +7

Though I build a significant more amount of automations in freshservice, we do have a department that uses freshdesk...and we wanted to automate some of their process as well. So what did we do…

Automate Email Notifications with Ticket Routing and Automatic Forwards

The process was designed to alleviate the chance of spamming contacts with email. Also we wanted to make sure that an email notification contained relevant ticket information. Secondly, we made sure to tailor the emails by which agent group the ticket was being auto-routed to. From there we could also initiate a forwarding email to management staff that would keep all stakeholders informed throughout the ticket lifecycle.

As the ticket lifecycle advances additional workflow has been put in place to automate the mundane processes of closing tickets, adding notes, and updating agents. 

All of this is triggered by what support email address the inquiry is originally sent too.

 

It isn't anything fancy but it is effective and that is what our goal is...find a solution that is easy to implement but effective and efficient. 💪

Loving all the other submissions so far!!! Keep them coming :)

 

 

Thanks so much for sharing @zachary.king ! Less is always more - as long as its effective and efficient, we’re here for it! 👊🏻 

Userlevel 7
Badge +7

We were having multiple issues in creating an automation for the tickets that get’s created on a customer portal. Based on the Issue and Sub-Issue type to be assigned to the respective departments within the company. With the help of automation we were able to achieve it and solved all the problem.

 

We were able to create 100s of automations successfully in our freshdesk account as it is easily and basis on the priority the SLAs should be driven and to achieve this we had to ensure that the tickets getting assigned to the teams based on the issues & sub-issues and each of them had a different priorities derived.

 

Here are few example of the automation that we have created:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

#CustomerSuccess#FreshDesk#Automations#CustServ 

 

Thank you for sharing @Sathyanarayan.km! It’s really impressive that you were able to scale these! We’d love to hear more 🙂!

Userlevel 7
Badge +7

We’re using the Data Layer for the chat-bot so that we know the customer’s name and what they are doing when they start a chat. It saves time having to ask for their details and it helps us focus on helping customers rather than having to get them to tell us.
It was very easy to implement - our app publishes a set of data that we want then we use Google Tag Manager to pass the data between the app and the chatbot.
It’s also a great experience for customers becuuse we can address them by name as soon as they contact us.

Thank you for sharing @matchd-rb ! This is helpful! :)

Userlevel 7
Badge +7

Hello Everyone,

 

Firstly, thank you all for taking time and participating in the Automate with Freshdesk | Challenge. These valuable insights and ideas from you is definitely going to help our user community in implementing and automating daily redundant business workflows in Freshdesk. :)


Businesses these days are looking to automate mundane, repetitive tasks/workflows that systems can perform better and more efficiently so that the workforce can further focus on sophisticated creative challenges. Being an active Freshdesk user, I have always looked at automating a lot of our complicated use cases using the automation feature our product provides, making it easy for agents and improving their productivity. Let me share a few scenarios here:

 

Case 1: Working with third-party

 

Sometimes you might need to involve a third-party vendor or someone from outside your team on a ticket. In such cases, we can make use of the Forward functionality to forward tickets/conversations to any email address right from within the tickets and take up conversations further. Now when the third party team replies back to such forwarded emails, agents might tend to miss out such tickets. To make sure the assigned agent/group is notified about this, we can configure a ticket update automation rule (Admin > Automation > Ticket updates) such that the ticket status is moved to open and the agent/group is notified. Adding a sample rule screenshot for reference:

 

 

 

Case 2: Customised customer satisfaction email notifications


In our day-to-day support tasks/processes, we handle and support a vast type of customers, be it premium or regular/external or internal users, etc. Not always we would want to trigger customer satisfaction to all users and you might have specific requirements to get customer feedback from specific customer types. In such cases, ticket updates automation rule/s can be configured such that if those requirements (conditions) meet, then trigger a customized satisfaction survey to such requesters (users) of the tickets. A sample rule screenshot for reference:

 

 

Please note that the automationrule conditions and actions can be tweaked based on your requirements. Feel free to drop a comment if you have similar scenarios and business workflows! :)

 

Cheers,

Love these @hemanth.ramya ! I’m sure our members will really benefit from them! Keep them coming, there’s so much to learn 💪🏻 🤓!

Userlevel 7
Badge +7

We use the automation to manage ticket distribution between the groups and some other cases:

 

1 - Deny ticket from unknown senders

Base on email address the automation close the ticket and reply to sender asking to open from the professional email.

 

2 - Send a remember notice

We send a after 24 hours and 48 hours an email to remember client to reply the tiket.

 

3 - Ticket distribution

Se have some different emails address to open a ticket, and based on this ticket we distribute between the groups and set the category and ticket type.

 

Best 

Thank you for sharing @brtome - these are some helpful tips!

Userlevel 4
Badge +6

Note from the Feedback widget 

 

We use the feedback widget as a webform, but all the information except the message is stored on the ticket field sidebar which can become cluttered. 

 

I convert this info into a private note so all the details are clear for the agents in the ticket thread.

 

 

 

Userlevel 4
Badge +6

Spam keywords

We get a lot of spam emails that take up time for the agents and create a messy inbox.

I set up a rule for emails marked as spam to be emailed to me with the content of the email. 

Ak7kqVnAN5BnFsK8JoaxPqlysuur02-XYfI2uAndR9POm0Be2gHL6-sZE0O631NGOIeICgpACxn8qyIuEVtZkPYRdgpdokCxw6yJfX_BvEiptkjpW0GXi7EiSd_TnBYBM93brtbckZrOI353dYK2apGYj4zzY5cLhJ21pIRKIhfj5_EdnRqBOJ1Jfg 

 

I was then able to review the emails for keywords/phrases within those spam emails that our customers wouldn’t ever say.

I use this to mark tickets as spam if they include those keywords/phrases. It requires some time but it now reduces our weekly emails created by 15%

afAKCoghGoa-twJX-bshr72_01OxYiGcq3XVxdAeMoqfPzn7YgRu93IjPKC7iPki3fs5ZBbN6fABbykBBCGPyfV0w3c0ETtHALX3Mw8bC4nZHNbpTd44WAeoOUd9roEJHt-B8xmF6u1KKAHgfy96FqT3LWrimknrZdbG6iyy8mL8oPL2tmXpkLC3kQ


 

Userlevel 2
Badge +2

We were having multiple issues in creating an automation for the tickets that get’s created on a customer portal. Based on the Issue and Sub-Issue type to be assigned to the respective departments within the company. With the help of automation we were able to achieve it and solved all the problem.

 

We were able to create 100s of automations successfully in our freshdesk account as it is easily and basis on the priority the SLAs should be driven and to achieve this we had to ensure that the tickets getting assigned to the teams based on the issues & sub-issues and each of them had a different priorities derived.

 

Here are few example of the automation that we have created:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

#CustomerSuccess#FreshDesk#Automations#CustServ 

Nice work !

Reply