Basics:Watchers
From Cerberus Helpdesk Wiki
When used properly watchers and "subject line commands" can be an absolute godsend for your organization. Workers who only need to respond to tickets every so often will appreciate the flexibility -- they can do all the Helpdesk basics from their regular mail program and avoid logging into Cerb4 unless absolutely necessary.
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Watchers: Getting notified of new messages
Let’s go over what exactly watchers are before we tackle anything else. Watchers are often referred to as "e-mail notifications"; when a worker signs up they are asking to receive copies of new messages or Helpdesk events at an external e-mail address.
Oftentimes workers use this to monitor Cerb4 activity remotely and conventional e-mail clients are much better about this than a web browser. While there are plenty of superficial reasons for using watchers, like "I prefer answering e-mails on my mobile phone", there are also plenty of other scenarios where it's not just about personal preferences.
- Managers/Project Leads: Notifications are the perfect fit for your higher-ups that need to supervise all mail entering and leaving the Helpdesk. Instead of forcing managers to constantly check the ‘Overview’ sidebar for new activity, they can allow notifications to queue up in their normal inbox. For real-time monitoring you can combine Cerb4’s notifications with an e-mail client that updates you instantly with "new message" alerts.
- Low volume mail: Every organization probably has a couple of groups or buckets in Cerb4 that just don’t get a lot of mail. Sometimes they can go weeks or even months before you see any new messages, so notifications are a great way to make sure no mail sneaks by under the radar.
Reply like normal
Watchers are much more than a "simpler" way to read tickets in your preferred e-mail client -- you can also reply back to your customers directly from there as well. Don’t consider this bypassing Cerb4 though, even when you use something like joe@gmail.com as your watcher address and reply back from Gmail, you’re still technically using the Helpdesk. That’s because your replies are automatically routed through the Helpdesk before they’re sent to the customer.
So what can you expect from Cerb4 when you don't actually use it's interface to respond to customers? A reply to a watcher still nets you all the benefits of using Cerb4:
- E-mail headers are still “scrubbed” to protect individual worker addresses by replacing them with your organization’s public addresses. Instead of the customer getting a reply from joe@gmail.com, it will be from support@example.com .
- All messages in the conversation are still self-contained within a ticket. You can continue to keep tabs on a customer with all the meta-data that tickets offer: comments, tasks, custom fields, etc.
- All your mail is still shared by the entire organization, encouraging your staff to distribute the workload when dealing with e-mail. Anyone can reply to a ticket, everyone can see the reply, and anybody can search the history.
Setup & Configuration
To start double check that the watchers plugin is enabled, 'helpdesk setup', 'Features & Plugins'.
Cerb4 gives each worker the freedom to configure watchers according to their own needs; these e-mail notifications can be created personally by each worker through their 'my account' page, or by an administrator in 'helpdesk setup'. The 'Watchers' tab also gives you a list of all your notifications along with how many times they were sent out thanks to the '# Hits' column.
Setup itself is fairly straightforward and consists of two parts: choosing an e-mail address to receive notifications and specifying which events to watch. Each watcher filter also includes several criteria to further narrow down the notification to only the types of tickets you need. These options should look familiar to the ones you see in the mail routing tools.
After you pick and choose what you want to watch, make sure you scroll down and select your address(es) in "Forward e-mail to". (Send a worker notification?)
- If you don't want to use your login e-mail, you can add an alternate address in the ‘General’ tab of 'my account'.
Unique Samples
Even though the criteria in front of you can be used to build a ton of different variations, the watchers most people need fit a consistent pattern and require just a couple of options. I'll give you the basic foundation for capturing "key" messages and events and then let you add any additional criteria on top of it for your specific situations.
Watch multiple groups or buckets for tickets
By default all groups will be monitored, but you can select one or more groups and buckets by expanding the ‘Ticket’ criteria and clicking ‘Group/Bucket’. 'All' will be selected, uncheck it to choose individual buckets.
See all replies to me
Or better stated see replies where I'm the 'Next Worker'. Check the 'Incoming message' event, select 'Ticket' criteria and choose 'Assigned to: (me)'.
Notify me when I'm assigned a ticket
The logic behind this one can be a little deceiving. All you need to do is select the 'Assigned to self' event, no 'Assigned to' criteria is necessary. In fact you might try to do something creative, and have Joe notified when John is assigned a ticket with Assigned to: John (plus Assigned to self). Unfortunately this is not how things work at the moment, see CHD-1201.
- Note: You will not be notified when you assign a ticket to yourself.
Monitor new comments even when they aren't for you
The 'New Comment' event sends you any ticket comment left by a worker. Ironically because most of the criteria is message-based, your criteria selections should be centered less around the comment and more about the ticket itself. In other words, the 'Message', 'From' criteria is who wrote the e-mail not which worker wrote the comment.
Furthermore don't assume a watcher e-mail notification requires a worker to use the 'Notify workers' option when writing a comment. The 'Notify workers' option actually sends a helpdesk notification to your ‘home’ page, just like the other watcher toggle, "Send a worker notification", does.
- Note: Again, you will not be sent notifications for comments you yourself left.
Catching tickets with a particular From: or Subject:
Both 'Message' criteria fields accept wildcards (*) for matching any word or phrase. So if you want to catch all e-mails from a certain domain, try "*@example.com", or if you want to catch all e-mails of a certain type, try something like "newsletter@*".
For subject matching it's usually best to slap a * to the front and back of the keywords you want to watch. That way "*call me*" matches "I have a problem please call me" and "Call me I need assistance". Generally speaking all these fields are not case-sensitive either, so odd capitalization won't be an issue.
The golden rule here is criteria is of the AND variety and not OR. By AND we mean Cerb4 expects ALL criteria to match before firing off a notification. Therefore it's best to try and simplify any rules into only as much criteria as needed to generate an expected match.
- From: tim@example.com
- Subject: *call me*
This rule will not fire unless the ticket is from Tim and he's requesting a phone call. If you need to be notified in the off-chance a message comes from Tim about something else, or instead Mike wants a call, you're out of luck. Splitting that rule into two will help.
Per Ticket Watchers
By filtering on the ticket mask you can effectively create a “per ticket” watcher, extremely useful for any workers who need to monitor every aspect of an important conversation over its lifespan. This means you are not forced to watch an entire bucket of tickets just to catch the few you care about, or required to assign yourself the ticket just to see the follow-up reply -- you will be notified of whatever events you want on whichever ticket(s) you want. This is a good alternative for 3.x users, who felt assigning multiple workers to the same ticket was the only way their team could remotely track a conversation, but never got comfortable defining a single “Next Worker” in Cerb4.
So the next time there’s an important ticket you need to follow to completion, first determine the ticket mask.
Then configure a new watcher notification and copy that mask to the ticket criteria. Invested workers should subscribe to all four events so they can be notified of every new comment, reply, or when the ticket is assigned directly to them.
Monitoring workers on the weekend
If you manage an organization operating 7 days a week, you’re probably only needed at the office Monday through Friday but still want to keep an eye on Saturday’s and Sunday’s workload. With the “time of day” criteria you can limit notifications to only forward on weekends, or any other days and times of your choosing. Now you can login and work with the Helpdesk during your regular work hours, while casually monitoring any Helpdesk activity on your days off.
Click ‘Current Date/Time’, ‘Day of Week’, and pick Saturday and Sunday.
Working remotely with "subject line commands"
Watcher notifications can fit nicely into your daily work habits -- you get an e-mail when an important message hits the Helpdesk and you reply back. But what if I told you, you can do things like close the ticket in the process? Now you can't do everything from the outside but by replying to the message with a subject line command (or watcher command), you can communicate back to the Helpdesk and trigger one of three possible actions on a ticket: close, take, and comment. All are equivalent to the corresponding buttons in the Helpdesk.
- [close]: Simply closes the ticket like normal.
- [take]: Assigns the ticket to yourself for later.
- [comment]: Turns the body of your reply into a ticket comment instead of sending it to the customer.
This should be enough for your staff to comfortably work on tickets on the go, if you need to do more than that, unfortunately you will have to log in to Cerb4.
Howto: [close] / [take]
First off, there is no configuration you have to do in the Helpdesk beforehand. Assuming you are currently getting watcher notifications sent to your e-mail client, you are good to go. All you have to do is start a reply in your mail program and then edit the subject; you have two options on how you modify it, either:
- Replace the entire subject with the command, e.g. “Can you close this ticket for me?” would become “[close]“.
- Append the command to the end of the subject, e.g. “Assign this ticket to Joe” would become “Assign this ticket to Joe [take]“.
- Note: Adding a subject line command does NOT change the ticket’s original subject in Cerb4 (or for the customer).
Once you click send, the reply will be routed to the customer and the ticket will be closed (1) or assigned (2) respectively.
Howto: [comment]
[comment] turns your reply into a private worker comment that your customers will NOT see. Observe the following pair of screenshots.
Notice the ticket comment appears in the Helpdesk just like if I had created it from the ‘Comments’ tab.
Home (worker) notifications
As mentioned before, the Cerb4 team generally means e-mail notifications when we throw the term watchers around, because intuitively you are "watching" the Helpdesk remotely for new events. However, watchers also have a second method of keeping you informed through internal home notifications. To enable this feature, make sure you select "Send a worker notification" in your watcher filter (positioned right above the "Forward e-mail to" checkbox we used earlier).
You can use these in addition to, or in place of, the e-mail notifications to be alerted of the same events (outgoing, incoming, assigned, and comment) inside the Helpdesk's 'home' area. Each worker has their own 'home', 'Notifications' tab to deposit any new alerts; notice the red colored "unread notifications" message in the upper right corner. Clicking this will immediately take you to the 'home' tab from any page.
Watcher home notifications behave similarly to the 'Notify workers' checkbox in sticky notes or comments, but there's a couple of differences. One is you can manually update whatever workers you want with the "notify workers" option, even if they aren't using watchers. Secondly, you can leave a personalized message with a sticky note or comment notification (watcher "comment" events being the exception of course). In some cases this can be much more useful in explaining something a watcher event doesn't effectively capture without space for a message.
- As an administrator you might want to create (copy) a notifications workspace and customize it to show all of your workers' individual alerts. It's a good way to keep tabs on what's happening throughout the day at your office.
