Basics:Sticky Notes vs Comments
From Cerberus Helpdesk Wiki
Regardless of their distinct appearance, sticky notes and comments serve the same general purpose — to leave notes behind for yourself or other workers. Either one can be used for a variety of purposes, whether it’s telling another worker to send an invoice right away or to simply jot down a phone number for later. So when do you use comments over sticky notes and vice versa?
Sticky notes should be used when you want to highlight, or “respond” in context, to a specific message (e-mail) in the conversation. Conversely a comment is for ticket-wide feedback that isn’t dependent on a particular message. Now keep in mind these are not hard & fast rules, but the few functional differences in behavior do complement my suggestions, and generally speaking it’ll make sense to use them appropriately.
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Sticky Notes
To see how they work in practice, pick a sample ticket with multiple messages. By default (“read all” turned off), only the latest message will be expanded and the remaining ones will be collapsed with only the From:, To:, and Subject: showing.
Find a collapsed message, click ‘maximize’,
then click the ‘Sticky Note’ button to create a note.
Fill in the text field and save changes (we’ll discuss ‘Notify workers’ at the end).
As you can see, the sticky note is appended to the bottom of the message. Now try refreshing the ticket page. Notice how the sticky note expanded the message it’s attached to, so it “sticks out” from the crowd immediately.
I’ll give you an analogy for how to take advantage of sticky notes — sticky notes are very akin to Post-its®. A college student litters their textbook with Post-its® to bookmark certain pages with study notes. When it comes time for midterms, they can skip through the book and review just those pages. Cerb4’s sticky notes work the same way, allowing you to jump past irrelevant messages and review just the important messages.
Example Scenario
Here’s an obvious use case for sticky notes. Let’s say after a long and grueling sales pitch that lasted several e-mails, the customer finally writes in with all his information and wants the sales guy to call him and finish the deal, but he also has a few more general questions that anyone can answer. Ironically your sales guy just left for the rest of the afternoon and you don’t want to leave the customer’s other concerns hanging. What you can do is post a sticky note on the message as a heads-up to Tim in sales, “Call Mike @ 555-1212″, and then continue the conversation yourself. By the end of the day, after so many back & forth replies, the original sales e-mail has gotten buried near the bottom. However because you forced the message to stay expanded it will be instantly recognizable to your sales guy the next morning, and he can finish up closing the sale right away.
It’s worth highlighting that the disposable nature of scenarios like this are perfect for sticky notes. Now that the order is done, the sales team can delete the “call customer” note and the attached message will no longer be auto-expanded.
Comments
Comments are created in the dedicated ‘Comments’ tab, seen to the right of the ‘Conversation’ tab. Much like sticky notes, jot down whatever information you want and save. All comments will appear in this tab in reverse chronological order, but are also shown in the ticket ‘Conversation’ tab as well. They will filter in chronologically with the appropriate flow of the surrounding messages, whether it’s newest to oldest or oldest to newest (“read all”).
Unlike sticky notes, comments are not attached to individual messages and will not expand any messages. So it’s usually a good idea to write comments when the information you’re recording does not pertain to a specific e-mail’s contents.
Example Scenario
An obvious use case for comments would be storing a customer’s order number for quick reference, just in case another worker assigned to the ticket needs it down the road long after the original sales e-mail is no longer important. That way if workers don’t want to scroll through an extended ticket conversation, they can hop over to the ‘Comments’ tab and find the order number immediately.
Not that comments can’t be deleted, but I personally like to think they’re useful for storing more permanent information that lasts the life of the ticket. “Call Mike @ 555-1212″ is a temporary task well suited for sticky notes, but “Order #996″ makes a good comment since it’s for reference after the purchase has been completed.
Additional Notes
Sticky notes and comments touch a couple different areas of the Helpdesk and can be utilized in a number of ways.
My Account
- These two ‘Mail’ options are available in the ‘my account’, ‘General’ tab. As mentioned before comments are shown in the ‘Conversation’ tab. This is the default option, but can be turned off for each worker through “Show comments in the conversation”.
- The “read all” option sorts the conversation oldest to newest and auto-expands all messages, regardless of whether or not sticky notes are in use. While reading a ticket you can flip this option on temporarily with the ‘Read All’ button, or make it the preferred reading method on a per-worker basis via “Always use ‘read all’ mode (expand messages and sort chronologically)”.
Inside tickets
- Sticky notes can be deleted by anybody. Comments can only be deleted by who wrote it or the administrator.
- If you delete a worker, the Helpdesk will delete his or her name from all their sticky notes. Comments will not be affected. e.g. (Deleted Worker) vs. john@example.com .
- Adding multiple sticky notes to a message stacks them in chronological order, allowing you to read them in the order they were written.
- Time Tracking entries are shown via comments -- if you don’t see the comment right away, try refreshing the page. Note deleting the comment in the ticket does not delete the actual time tracking data.
Watchers
- Comments, but not sticky notes, can be monitored through watchers using the "Comment" event. Every time a new comment is attached to a ticket matching your criteria, you will be alerted by your choice of either an e-mail or home (worker) notification.
Notify workers (home notifications)
- In place of or in addition to watchers, you can also “private message” another worker inside the Helpdesk. Unlike watchers (e-mail notifications) these are strictly home notifications and can be applied to both comments and sticky notes. To use these click the ’Notify workers’ toggle and select one or more Helpdesk workers. The notification they received will appear in their ‘home’ area and consists of a copy of the message and a link back to the ticket.
These can be great because you don’t have to actually assign workers a ticket you're handling already -- simply use a "notify worker" to get their attention, have them assist you, and keep the ticket for yourself to finish up.
Adapted from a Cerb4 blog post
