Quick Start

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The official version of this information is available in the Cerb5 User Guide:
http://www.cerberusweb.com/book/#getting-started

Contents

Creating an On-Demand Trial

If you'd rather use an On-Demand trial than a downloaded copy of Cerb5:

Log in using the information from the welcome e-mail.

Making yourself at home

Now that you have a fresh helpdesk it's time to start personalizing it.

Workers

The people who answer helpdesk issues are called "workers". This term is much less ambiguous than "users", which may also describe the people writing in to the helpdesk.

Cerb5 can be used to great effect by a single person, but it's built for group collaboration; so you'll probably want to add a few fellow workers. The evaluation is limited to one logged in worker at a time (a seat), but you can create as many workers as you want for others to try later. You can also customize the default 'Superuser' account with your own information (just remember if you change a worker's primary email address it becomes their new login).

To add workers:

Click the first or last name (not the e-mail address) to edit an existing worker.

Groups

Workers are organized into "groups". Groups are a flexible concept and can be based on anything: brand, product, department, timezone, language, etc. By default your helpdesk will contain three groups based on common departments: Dispatch, Support, and Sales. The defaults were chosen because they're common departments across most industries, not because they're all-encompassing. You are free to modify these groups to suit your needs.

If you stick with the defaults, this is the initial workflow:

The workers inside groups can be either managers or members. Groups are designed to be autonomous, meaning their managers have the power to make most configuration changes related to the group without requiring help from an administrator. Managers can add new workers to the group, as well as create buckets and inbox filters -- both of which we'll cover next.

The common practice is to use groups for building a roster of fairly interchangeable workers; meaning work can be given to the group from the outside with the confidence that any member knows what to do with it. Groups share an organization system using buckets, but workers outside the group aren't expected to know how other groups organize their work (it shouldn't matter to them). Instead, new work is given to groups through their inbox, and the group's own filters will decide how work is routed or assigned from there.

To add groups:

The rest of group configuration is handled by managers:

Only managers and administrators have access to this area.

The sections of group management are:

Buckets

Buckets are flexible containers used by groups to organize their workload. Buckets may be based on any commonality between their contents, though they're primarily used to divide up work within a group. Buckets are also useful to move piles of work out of the way if they shouldn't be handled immediately (newsletters, survey responses, feature requests). Work can queue up in buckets, making it more efficient to handle similar issues at the same time (processing orders, issuing refunds, sending out beta information).

With department-themed groups, your buckets might look like:

Or if you had product-related groups, you could do:

Buckets aren't the only way to organize work, since they are often only concerned with a single shared characteristic, but they're a useful building block for more involved workflows.

Custom Fields

We've tried to make as few assumptions about your new helpdesk as possible, and instead we've made it easy for you to track the information you're interested in. You can add 'custom fields' to the major objects in the helpdesk, including organizations, contacts, tickets, tasks, feedback entries, time tracking, and opportunities. Custom fields aren't an afterthought, they'll be given the same benefits as our defaults; you can use custom fields as columns in lists, as search criteria, and as criteria or actions in group inbox filters. This flexibility makes Cerb5 more of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) toolkit than a specific approach to dealing with e-mail.

To add global custom fields:

More source objects will be added to the list when their respective plugin is enabled in 'Features & Plugins'.

Routing

Even though workers could distribute work between groups by hand (from Dispatch), you likely have several e-mail addresses that you want to deliver directly to specific groups. Routing is far more flexible in Cerb5 than previous versions.

You can route based on mailbox names:

You can also route by brands or products:

Or perhaps by regions:

To route incoming mail to specific groups:

Let's go ahead and define two routing rules to make it easier to demonstrate the next section:

You can route incoming e-mail based on patterns in the mailbox or domain name.

Remember, these global routing rules will deliver matching messages to the specified group's inbox. Group inbox filters take over from there. (Mail Routing vs Inbox Routing)

Let's pretend...

Simulating incoming e-mail

Now that you have some basic mail routing in place, let's see what happens when new e-mail comes in. An evaluation helpdesk won't send live e-mail, but you're about to see why that's not a big deal.

You can create an unlimited supply of simulated inbound e-mail with Cerb5's Simulator system. You can aim this simulated e-mail at any group to test your mail routing and group inbox filters.

To simulate inbound e-mail:

Data flavors will generate mail based on a theme, such as Retail or Spam. The Spam dataset is very useful to test the anti-spam functionality of the helpdesk.

To continue our example above, send 25 messages (using whatever data flavor you want) to the following addresses:

The simulator allows you to create an unlimited supply of realistic-looking mail during your evaluation. Note how Simulator is italicized, tabs enabled by plugins usually are.

A day in the life of a helpdesk worker

Finding the work

Now we're going to switch gears and look at the helpdesk from the perspective of a worker going about their daily duties. In the step above we simulated receiving 50 new messages split between the Sales and Support groups. We'll assume this was the mail waiting for us when our shift started.

Workflow's 'Available' list only shows a subset of the 'Open' sidebar found in Overview. It will not have a 'Waiting' or 'Assigned' list.

These are the main sections of Mail:

Doing the work

The new peek icon in 5.x replaces the literal (peek) text from prior versions. It still opens a pop-up window like you would expect.
We formally refer to this screen as "ticket display" throughout our documentation.

There are three main activities on tickets:

The most common activity in your helpdesk will likely be replying to new messages. Here's the basic processs:

The reply button.
Drafts are automatically saved based on the 'Mail Queue' settings in 'Scheduler'; inside the ticket you can manually save drafts with the dedicated button. If you want to revisit this another time before sending, use the 'Continue Later' button.

When finished, you have a few options listed under "Next:"

Dealing with Spam

Cerb5 has an adaptive anti-spam system; which essentially means your helpdesk will learn about the type of mail you normally receive to help spot junk mail, and it will adapt to many of the tricks spammers try to use to get through normal filtering. The anti-spam functionality will work best once you've handled a few hundred messages. Any message replied to by a worker will automatically be trained as not spam, so you only need to take action to report the junk mail you come across.

Reporting spam is easy:

The 'Report Spam' button.

Tasks

Sometimes you'll have some work, like a ticket, that requires more than a single person to complete it. This is where tasks come in. The worker responsible for an issue can delegate tasks to other workers and monitor their progress; which is especially helpful since tasks can span group boundaries without needing to share specific issues.

To add and manage tasks:

Tasks are usually tied to tickets and created from inside the ticket's dedicated 'Tasks' tab. If you want to create a new standalone task, you can do so from here in the 'activity' area.

You can also add and link tasks quickly from:

Notifications

Notifications are how you know when something in particular needs your personal attention. By default, notifications will be the first thing you see when you log in. You will also be alerted to any unread notifications next to your sign in name (click the red banner).

John sent me a sticky note notification.

To read your current notifications at any time:

Currently notifications are generated when:

Workspaces

Cerb5 has a lot of functionality, and workspaces allow you to create private work areas with lists of exactly the information you want without requiring you to click all over the place.

Workspaces have many uses:

To create new worklists on workspaces:

The default workspace (mail and tasks assigned to me) created by the system for each worker.

TIP: You can also create new worklists from almost any list in the helpdesk by clicking 'copy'. This is especially useful when combined with search results.

Tying it all together to build your own workflow

Now you can use the building blocks of Cerb5 we've just covered to automate much of your workflow. Most of the configurations you can develop will involve some combination of Custom Fields, Workspaces, and Inbox filters. Here's some examples:

Remember, Cerb5 is a toolkit. Now it's your toolkit. Enjoy!


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