Getting Started

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Cerb4 Terminology

To avoid making any assumptions in our documentation it's best to introduce you to some of the Cerb4 terms we use frequently. You only need to understand a few concepts to get started.

  • A ticket is a specific e-mail conversation and all the related data about a question or issue. Each ticket has a unique identifier for future reference by anyone involved.
  • The people on the originating end of tickets are called requesters. A ticket can have multiple requesters.
  • The people on the answering end of tickets are called workers.
  • A watcher is a worker who receives copies of messages. For example, a supervisor may be a watcher to monitor the quality of the messages workers are writing back to requesters.
  • The helpdesk is a software hub for centrally managing and archiving tickets, and routing messages between workers and requesters. This allows several workers to receive and share e-mail without requesters writing to any of them individually.
  • A bucket is a container for storing similar tickets. Common buckets are: Leads, Receipts, Newsletters, Refunds and Spam.
  • A group is several workers who share responsibility for the same tickets and buckets. Common groups are: Sales, Support, Development, Billing and Corporate. These examples are departments, but groups can be related by anything.
  • A worker in a group is called a member. A member with the authority to modify the group is called a manager. Groups can have any number of managers.
  • Each group has an inbox where new tickets are delivered by default. These tickets are then moved into buckets either automatically by the helpdesk or by workers.

Getting Started Walkthrough

Alright! So you've installed Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 and you're staring at the Welcome screen. What now?

Let's walk through setting up a helpdesk using the team behind Cerberus Helpdesk as an example: WebGroup Media LLC. Feel free to follow along and simply substitute your organization and team members in the appropriate fields.

Personalizing (Logo/Title)

The first thing we want to do is personalize our helpdesk and start making ourselves at home.

Users & Groups

Adding Groups

It's time to add our groups to the helpdesk so we can start collecting mail.

  • Click the "Groups" tab from the Configuration menu.
  • Add a new "Support" group. We can ignore Members for now, since we're an Administrator we have access to every group's control panel by default. Non-Admins who need to configure a specific group should be made "Managers".

Adding Workers

Now it's time to add our colleagues.

  • Click the "Workers" tab and add:
    • Jeff Standen, Chief of R&D, jeff@webgroupmedia.com
    • Mike Fogg, Developer, mike@webgroupmedia.com
    • Dan Hildebrandt, Developer, dan@webgroupmedia.com
    • Darren Sugita, Operations, darren@webgroupmedia.com
    • Joe Geck, QA Lead, joe@webgroupmedia.com

(If you're limited to 3 workers because you're using the free version that's fine. In this case to make it easy to follow along with the rest of the walkthrough, go ahead and choose Joe Geck and Darren Sugita.)

Mail

Mail Servers

While the installation should have walked you through some of the setup of your mail servers, we'll go through it again here just in case.

  • Click the Mail Servers tab (in Helpdesk Setup).
  • The top section, Incoming Mail, is for adding / managing your incoming mail servers. To add an incoming mail server:
    • Give the server a nickname, like "Joe's Gmail account"
    • Select the protocol to use. For our gmail example, you'll want to use POP3-SSL
    • Enter the hostname or IP address (hostname preferred) of the mail server to connect to, e.g. "pop.gmail.com".
    • Enter the username ("joes_email@gmail.com")
    • and the password ("joespass").
    • Enter the correct port for that protocol / server (in this case, 995).
    • Click "Save Changes".
  • The next section contains some general incoming mail options
  • The final section, Outgoing Mail Preferences, contains the information on the outgoing mail (SMTP) server and default reply address and signature. To set up your outgoing mail server:
    • Enter the server name (e.g. "smtp.gmail.com")
    • Enter the port (default is 25, but gmail is on 465).
    • Select the encryption to be used, if any (for gmail, use TLS).
    • Select whether to use authentication (for gmail, yes).
    • Enter your username ("joes_email@gmail.com") and password ("joespass").
    • Click "Save Changes"

Signature

We'd like to establish a default e-mail signature so our messages from the helpdesk are consistent, and we *must* specify a default From address

  • In the "By default, reply to mail as: (E-mail Address)" field, you must enter a valid email address, e.g "support@cerberusweb.com".
  • In the "By default, reply to mail as: (Personal Name)" field, you may enter a name to be used, e.g. "Cerberus Helpdesk Support Team".
  • To add a signature, in the "Default E-mail Signature" field enter: 
____________________________________________________
#first_name# #last_name#, #title# :: WebGroup Media LLC.
Cerberus Helpdesk -- Take Control of your Company Inbox!
Combat Spam. Improve Response Times. Share Knowledge.
http://www.cerberusweb.com/
  • Click "Save Changes"

The tokens of #first_name#, #last_name# and #title# will be customized for each worker, and these defaults will be used for all mail sent where the Group Settings do not override them.

Routing

We're almost ready to start sending mail into our helpdesk. Since we've established our groups and our incoming mail servers, let's tell the helpdesk how to start delivering mail.

  • Click the "Mail Parser" tab.
  • Inside the Parser Mail Routing section we want to add a few routing rules (click "add another rule field" to do multiple entries at once):
    • support@* -> Support
    • sales@* -> Sales
    • billing@* -> Billing
    • (bugs|wishlist)@* -> Development
  • Click "Save Changes"

The asterisk (*) is acting as a wildcard, meaning these e-mail addresses may match any of our domains. We could have simply said support@webgroupmedia.com, but support@* will route mail for all our various products support@cerberusweb.com, support@portsensor.com, etc.

The special format on the Development rule is creating a set, saying mail to either bugs@* or wishlist@* should be routed to the Development team. We had to enter these alternatives inside parenthesis with a pipe (|) character between each possible partial address. We've also combined this with a wildcard domain.

Simulator

It's time to test receiving some mail! Conveniently Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 provides a plug-in called the "Simulator" which will automatically generate sample tickets for us.

  • Click the "Simulator" tab back at the top.
    • To: support@webgroupmedia.com
    • Sample Data Flavor: Web Hosting
    • How Many? 25
  • Click "Generate"

Overview / Group Managers

We've just sent ourselves 25 randomized test e-mails based on the web hosting industry. Let's take a look.

  • Click "mail" from the top navigation menu.
  • You should now be in the "Overview" section. Notice how the tickets are broken down by group in the left sidebar with (25) next to Support. This signifies we have 25 new messages for our Support group. Click "Support" to expand the group and click "- All -" to see all those tickets in the list to the right.
  • We'll need some help getting through these tickets, so let's add a few more people to the Support group.
    • Click "group config" in the upper right and then "configure" next to the Support group.
    • Click "members" from the control panel menu at the top.
    • Let's add "Darren Sugita" and "Brenan Cavish" as Support group managers and everyone else as group members. Managers are able to enter the control panel for this group to perform future administration so we don't have to. While group members are responsible for the tickets assigned to this group.
  • Click "mail" from the top navigation menu to return to the Overview section.

Buckets

Immediately we notice several of these tickets are similar and could be grouped together. Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 provides "buckets" as the primary method to create manageable piles of work. Groups and Buckets help us maintain context by working on similar tickets at the same time so we're not constantly switching tools and mindsets every time we take on a task.

Let's add a few buckets to organize our work:

  • To do this we need to once again go back to the group control panel, "group config"->"configure". But this time click "buckets".
  • With one item per line, enter:
    • Spam
    • Orders
    • News
    • Account Details
    • Training
    • Servers
  • Click "Save Changes"
  • Once again head back to the Overview section by clicking "mail".

At this point we could begin sorting our 25 tickets into buckets by hand, but there's a better way.

Piles

The "Pile Sorter" is one of the most helpful tools in our Cerberus 4.0 toolbox. It will help us find commonality between the tickets in any list by building piles of similar tickets however we would like. We can then perform an action on each of these piles.

Let's give it a shot!

  • Click "piles" from the right side of the blue bar at the top of our ticket list.
  • By default we're going to see tickets grouped by "Senders". This option groups tickets by sender address and domain (which in this case won't help very much since all our Simulator tickets come from @cerberusdemo.com). For this example let's change to sorting by headers. Click "Headers" just below the blue bar.
  • Our choice of headers is really limited since the Simulator only provides basic header information. Let's sort by subject by clicking "subject" under "Most Common Headers".
  • Since the Simulator generates randomized tickets we'll get different piles every time we do this. Let's sort a few piles into buckets using our best judgement. Occasionally we may want to send a ticket to an entirely different Group, such as "Sales" if someone seems interested in buying our hosting plans or "Billing" if someone is asking for a refund. We can also close, report spam or delete tickets as well using the small icons.

We don't have to choose an action for every pile. Usually it's best to sort the biggest piles first since that's where the Pile Sorter is saving us the most time.

  • Once we've chosen a couple actions to perform, press "Perform Selected Actions".
  • The Pile Sorter has done the tedious work of sorting our most common tickets through the list, just like a good software application should. Why should we be a human computer when we're sitting next to a non-human one! The Pile Sorter works best with large ticket lists. It will also adapt to any ticket list you generate, including custom searches, making this a really powerful time-saving feature.
  • To see the breakdown of our group's tickets by bucket, click any of the buckets under the "Support" group in the Overview sidebar (click "Support" to expand it if necessary). To continue sorting new messages click the "Inbox" bucket and repeat the sorting process. Now our list only contains tickets which haven't been sorted into a bucket. Any new mail our team receives will start out in the inbox.


Group Inbox Assistant

Let's go back to the Simulator and create some more sample tickets.

  • Click "helpdesk setup" followed by the "Simulator" tab. Then enter:
    • To: support@webgroupmedia.com
    • Sample Data Flavor: Web Hosting
    • How Many? 50
  • Click "Generate"

How about we mimic the real-world a bit more accurately and also create some fake spam messages:

  • To: support@webgroupmedia.com
  • Sample Data Flavor: Spam
  • How Many? 25
  • Click "Generate"

Let's return to Overview to view our updated ticket list. Click "mail" from the top navigation menu.

Our ticket list is now much longer but let's focus on the Web Hosting tickets first. Since "spam" is showing at the top of our list (as we simulated receiving it most recently) let's click on the "Updated" column heading so the sort arrow is pointing upwards. This means our column is now ordering tickets by their last updated date in ascending order (chronological with oldest first).

Creating Rules

You'll notice some subjects are similar to the tickets we've already sorted using the Pile Sorter. Let's explore how to instruct Cerberus to always sort the Support group's work for us in the future.

  • Once again click "group config" in the upper right, "configure" next to Support and finally "inbox mail rules" in the control panel menu.
  • Select "Subject" matches and type in "New Order: *".
  • From the Move to: drop-down select our "Orders" bucket under the "Support" heading.
  • Click "Save Changes".

We've now instructed Cerberus to find any incoming Support mail in the future with this wildcard subject and automatically sort it into the "Orders" bucket.

Anti-Spam

Now it's time to deal with that pesky spam problem! Let's click "mail" to head back to Overview and then sort our list in descending order by clicking the "Updated" column header so the arrow points down. We have several tools at our disposal.

Inline Report Spam

One option to delete spam is to remove it instantly from the list. A typical scenario goes like this:

  • Pick an ambiguous ticket subject out of the list and click the (peek) link to the right of it. This gives us a sneak peek at the latest message content. For our example spam the content will obviously be nonsense and we can easily confirm that with our preview. Click "close" or double-click in the content of the preview to quickly dismiss it.
  • Click the grayed out warning icon in either the "Spam Score" or "Spam Training" column in the same row as the ticket you just previewed. You'll notice the ticket disappears immediately and we have the ability to undo our last action. In the future this warning icon will light up when Cerberus believes a ticket is spam, making it much easier to clear any junk out of your way.

Using Pile Sorter

Another option to delete spam is by using the Pile Sorter:

  • Click "piles" in the blue bar above the list.
  • Choose "Headers" from the options below the blue bar. Click the "subject" header again.
  • Some of our subjects are obviously spam, though in normal helpdesk conditions spam will generally be too unique to use the "subject" header. However we can get creative and use various headers to quickly mop up the more obvious spam. The "to" header will let us find suspicious destinations that our helpdesk received mail for. We can even use the Pile Sorter to create piles on a header provided by an outside anti-spam tool (such as SpamAssassin).
  • For our example, let's still use the "subject" header. To the left of obvious spam subjects click the "Report Spam" icon.
  • When done, click "Perform Selected Actions" at the bottom of our piles.

Using Ticket List Actions

A third option to fighting spam is to select offending tickets and report them spam as a group:

  • First, let's give ourselves a little more room. Click the "search" option in the blue bar above our list. This will create a ticket search using the same criteria as our workspace, including all filters.
  • Now simply scroll down the list clicking the checkbox next to any junk tickets (or left-click the row itself without clicking a link). You can use a combination of the "(peek)" preview feature and simply hovering the mouse cursor over the warning icon in one of the "Spam" columns which provides a spam assessment. It's okay if you don't catch every single spam message, we can assume other workers are doing their part to help teach Cerberus how to recognize junk mail.
  • Once you reach the bottom of the list (or the end of your patience) click the "Spam" button below the ticket list. This example should have conveniently grouped spam tickets together making this process fairly painless.

Now let's configure our group so it will automatically help us remove spam from our legitimate ticket lists.

  • Click "group config" and "configure" next to Support.
  • In the "Anti-Spam" section, select:
    • Probability: 85% or higher
    • Move to bucket for review: Spam
  • Click the "Save Changes" button at the bottom of the section.

Now let's generate some more fake spam to test our training.

  • Click "helpdesk setup" then "Simulator".
    • To: support@webgroupmedia.com
    • Sample Data Flavor: Spam
    • How Many? 25
  • Click "Generate"

Now return to Overview by clicking "mail" then "overview" from the sub-menu.

If everything went according to plan, our "Spam" bucket should have caught some messages that Cerberus thinks is spam. You can observe the results in the sidebar by taking a quick glance at the "Spam" bucket under "Support" (click "Support" to expand it). Cerberus will watch which messages we throw away and which we reply to. Over time this built-up training will become incredibly accurate and eliminate the majority of our helpdesk spam. Spammers are always looking for ways to get around spam filters, but luckily the Cerberus Helpdesk team is always teaching Cerberus new ways to make you impervious to spammer's attempts to woo you with pills or easy money.

Assign Tickets

We've weeded out the spam and are down to the important tickets to work on for the day. There's quite a few tickets still in the Support inbox that we could probably answer and nothing screams urgent. Why don't we just grab a few to work on. It would be nice to let our co-workers know that we got these tickets covered too. After all it would be a bad idea for both of us to mistakenly reply with duplicate responses. "Assign" is the magic ingredient that makes everything work out.

  • From Overview go ahead and click "Support"->"Inbox" in the sidebar.
  • Click "assign" in the blue bar above the ticket list.
  • Let's start small—we don't want to bite off more than we can chew. Set "Take how many?" at "5" and leave "Assignment priority: Oldest Tickets".
  • Click "Assign to Me".

We should be immediately taken to the Ticket Display of the first of five of our newly assigned tickets. This singular view of one of our tickets lets us reply to the ticket among many other things. Notice in the far right of the page there is a small box where you can scroll through our tickets by clicking "Next".

By assigning tickets to ourselves we take those tickets out of the so-called work queue. Now anybody looking at Overview will see that the tickets have been moved out of Unassigned and placed under our name.

  • Click "mail" to go back to Overview. As you can see in the sidebar we do indeed have 5 tickets assigned to us.

And if a co-worker happens to try and reply to any of our tickets the Helpdesk displays a warning that it's assigned to someone already. This is simply a heads up and they can choose to go ahead and reply anyway. Makes it nice if a co-worker offers to lend us a hand without having to bother with extra clicks re-assigning the ticket temporarily.

Before we get to the long overdue reply tutorial, we want to cover one last topic that will make organizing the tickets you want to focus on even easier.

My Workspaces

So now we have all our tickets in front of us, neatly organized in the sidebar. But what if we want an even more personalized view of the ones we care about? Perhaps a co-worker responsible for any new orders is sick today and we're going to reply to his tickets as well as our own general Support tickets. Well we know we can look at one or the other but wouldn't it be great if we could see both at the same time to get a complete view of our workload for the day? That's where My Workspaces comes into play. This feature lets us create customized ticket lists that we can save to our own account and go back to at any time. You can even view more than one ticket list at once, something you definitely cannot do in Overview.

Adding ticket lists to your Workspaces can be done multiple ways. We'll cover two different ways as we go about creating two separate lists, one that shows any Support tickets assigned to us and one that shows my co-worker Brenan's sales tickets. Let's begin by adding our assigned tickets list to My Workspaces via the Copy Worklist function.

  • Start by clicking our name under Assigned in the Overview sidebar, i.e. the one you are signed in as. This should refresh the ticket list with all our tickets.
  • Click "copy" on the blue bar above the ticket list.
  • Type a Worklist Name such as "My tickets". A Worklist is what we have been passively referring to as a ticket list throughout this guide. More or less a list of tickets in rows similar to how your e-mail inbox looks.
  • Now type a name for a new Workspace, "My workload for today". A Workspace is a collection of Worklists all viewed at once as we'll see in a bit. We can create multiple collections and switch what ticket lists we see at any time.
  • Click "Save Changes" and we'll be instantly taken to the My Workspaces section.

As you can see we now have our "My tickets" worklist with all our assigned tickets. Above you can see that we are currently looking at the "My workload for today" Workspace. With that said let's go ahead and add another list of tickets.

  • Click "add worklist" located to the right of the Workspace drop-down.
  • For the List Title use "Brenan's sales tickets", leave the Workspace at the existing "My workload for today".
  • Click "Save Changes".

Voila! Notice that we now see two Worklists. However we still have some work to do as this list of tickets is just a view of all the tickets in the system. That is, it's a general list that we need to customize to show just Brenan's sales tickets. To do that were going to need to add some search criteria to filter out the tickets we don't care about.

  • In the second Worklist titled "Brenan's sales tickets" click "customize" in the blue bar above this list of tickets.
  • Near the bottom of the expanded area observe the Add Filter box. First let's limit the tickets to all those assigned to Brenan. To do that choose
    • Field:Next Worker
    • Operator:in list
    • Workers:Brenan Cavish
  • Click "Add Filter".

Now for step 2 we want to narrow the list down even further by sales tickets.

  • This time choose
    • Field:Group
    • Operator:in list
    • Groups:Support (this should expand to show the Support group's buckets)
    • Support->Orders
  • Click "Add Filter".

In the Filters box to the left we should see a summary of our choices. (Closed = 0) should be included by default and makes sense as we only want to concern ourselves with Brenan's open tickets.

  • Click "Save Changes".

The number of tickets we see should now be smaller with the criteria applied. Now we have two Worklists we can focus our attention on without fumbling around with unnecessary clicks in Overview.

Replying

Finally it's about time we reply to one of our tickets!

  • Click the subject of any ticket in the list. This will give us a detailed look at the ticket properties and conversation.
  • Click the "Reply" button beneath the latest e-mail message. This will provide us with a reply form. (For future reference messages are always displayed in reverse chronological order, newest on top.)
  • Let's write a brief message back to the sender. Feel free to be as helpful, witty or sarcastic as you want – any message sent to an @cerberusdemo.com e-mail address will be received by a robot. This robot will automatically reply to give you a feel for two-way communication in the helpdesk.
  • Once you're done concocting your masterpiece leave "Waiting for reply" checked and click the "Send Message" button. "Waiting for reply" means that the ticket will stay closed until the recipient(s) reply back.

This stashes the ticket away, removing it from our regular Worklists. Now we won't be distracted by it as we go through the rest of our open tickets.

Replying with Templates

Now that you've sent a reply manually let's explore sending a reply using a template. Since we don't have any templates yet we'll go ahead and create one. In the future this process is much quicker.

We could create a template to insert any kind of textual information, such as: directions to our office, the payment methods we accept, a welcome e-mail, an order confirmation, etc.

For simplicity, and to demonstrate placeholders, let's assume we want to add the ticket subject and mask to the top of all our replies.

  • Click "mail" in the top navigation menu.
  • Click the subject of any ticket in the list.
  • Click the "Reply" button at the bottom of the first e-mail message.
  • Click the "Email Templates" button above the textbox.
  • Click "Create Template" at the bottom of the popup.
  • Type the following:
    • Title: Default Status Update
    • Description: Adds the reference number and subject
    • Folder: Status Updates
    • Text: 
==========================================
Subject: #ticket_subject#
Reference: #ticket_mask#
==========================================
  • Click "Save Changes"
  • Position the text cursor at the bottom of the reply textbox.
  • Click "Email Templates"
  • Click the "Default Status Update" link.

You now have an e-mail template which will insert the current ticket subject and mask at the top of each reply.

Go ahead and click "Send Message".

Leaving Notes

You'll notice your reply appears at the top of the conversation and the previous message is now minimized. This helps you stay on top of busy tickets without losing your mind. But what if something important was said earlier that's still unresolved?

Why, we'll simply add a note about it.

  • Click the "maximize" link to the right of the bottom message on the page.
  • Click "Add Note" below the message content. Write a couple words explaining why this message is still important (or, seeing as how we're testing, feel free to jot down a few lines from your grocery shopping list or scribble a note to future generations to preserve your legacy).
  • When you're done thinking of something funny to say, click the "Add Note" button below.

Any messages with notes attached will always be auto-expanded when displaying a ticket. This helps call attention to anything important or unresolved. You can add a note below other notes to have a mini-conversation about how best to respond.

Address Book

Cerb4 has an Address Book just like your e-mail with a twist. The Helpdesk divides our customers into two groups, organizations (or company contacts) and addresses. Organizations contain what we'd expect: a street address, phone number, website, etc. While Addresses are the actual people we communicate with; the Helpdesk stores their full name and e-mail for us. These could be employees of an organization in our company contacts or just an unattached customer. Before we tackle importing, let's first try to edit existing data in our Helpdesk.

We're looking to create a Cerberus Demo organization with a corresponding person's e-mail address. This will ensure the ongoing example used in the walkthrough continues to work smoothly.

  • Click "address book" from the top navigation bar.
  • Click "addresses" from the sub-menu bar.
  • What we see are all the random addresses created by the Simulator earlier. Since there's no way to know the exact names in your list, click any one of the (@cerberusdemo.com) addresses.
  • Ideally we see at least "1 open ticket(s)", this will just make the Service Level example in the next section a little nicer. If not, no worries.
  • Type "Cerberus Demo" in the Organization text field.
  • Click "Save Changes".

By doing this we now have one new company in the Organizations list and one corresponding address (or employee) of that company in the Addresses list.

Importing Contacts from CSV

With that accomplished, let's move on to importing some more sample contacts to play with.

  • Right-click and save these files to your desktop:
  • Now we need to import them into the Helpdesk. Click "address book" from the top navigation bar.
  • Click "import" in the sub-menu bar.
  • First let's upload our company contacts. Leave the Record Type as "Organizations" and then click "Browse".
  • Open the (sample_contacts.csv) from your desktop folder.
  • Finish by clicking "Upload" back in the Helpdesk.

The first half of the import is complete and now we need to make a couple of important choices. We start by deciding what contact information from our imported CSV file we map to our Helpdesk, and to which fields.

  • For each row of the CSV file choose the following field to map to
    • ACCOUNT #: Acct #
    • COMPANY NAME: Organization
    • STREET ADDRESS: Street
    • CITY: City
    • STATE: State/Prov
    • ZIP: Postal
    • COUNTRY: Country
    • PHONE #: Phone
    • WEBSITE: Website
  • We can skip the other options for this example, so go ahead and finish by clicking "Upload".

After a successful upload, we can see a collection of Fortune 500 companies have been added to the Organizations list. That takes care of our company contacts now let's add some employees of those companies to the Addresses list. Importing addresses is virtually the same as before.

  • Click "import" from the sub-menu bar.
  • This time select "E-mail Addresses" for the Record Type and click "Browse".
  • Open the (sample_addresses.csv) from your desktop folder.
  • Click "Upload" back in the Helpdesk.
  • Unlike before not every row of the CSV file is applicable at the moment. So things just make sense, choose the following fields
    • LAST NAME: Last Name
    • FIRST NAME: First Name
    • EMAIL: Email
    • PHONE #: Phone
    • COMPANY NAME: Organization
  • Once again we can skip the rest of the options and simply click "Upload".
  • After the import is done and the screen changes, click "addresses" from the sub-menu bar to see the results.

450+ new addresses should now appear in our Addresses list!


Service Levels

It's no secret that certain customers need to get a response before everyone else. Whether they are paying for customer support or have a billing question, we need to identify their tickets quickly and easily. Service Levels give us the ability to assign specific organizations or individual contacts (adresses) a "level of priority". All of their tickets are then marked at the corresponding level and sorted accordingly in Overview. Start by adding new Service Levels.

  • Click "helpdesk setup" and then the "Service Levels" tab.
  • Let's add a couple of Service Levels, in the Add Service Level Name field type "VIPs".
    • Click "Save Changes".
  • Again type in "Paid Support".
    • Click "Save Changes".
  • And one more, type in "Regular Customers".
    • Click "Save Changes".

Notice that we now have three Service Levels, however they all have a priority of 1. Let's give them each a new priority to acknowledge different sets of customers get quicker responses from our company. This way our co-workers will know any VIPs' tickets should be dealt with before our Regular Customers and so on. Any arbitrary numbers will do, as long as VIPs > Paid Support > Regular Customers.

  • For VIPs "Priority" type in "100".
  • Type in "50" for Paid Support.
  • Leave Regular Customers at "1".
  • Click "Save Changes".

Our Service Levels are now defined. Let's continue by setting a few contacts in our Address Book to a couple of levels. First we're going to add an organization (or company) to our second tier Paid Support level.

  • Click "address book" and you should see a list of organizations.
  • To make it easy we'll use the Cerberus Demo organization we created earlier. Find "Cerberus Demo" then click "(peek)" next to it.
  • This brings up the Details tab. At the bottom choose "Paid Support" for the Service Level.
  • Click "Save Changes".

Now we've established that tickets from the Cerberus Demo organization should take priority over any Regular Customers. Let's take this one step forward and add one of the individual Cerberus Demo addresses to the higher VIPs level.

  • Click "addresses" in the sub-bar menu. And since the demo contacts are randomly generated simply click any (@cerberusdemo.com) e-mail from the list. If you don't see one keep clicking "Next>" to go to the next page until you find one.
  • In the pop-up window choose "VIPs" for the Service Level.
  • Click "Save Changes".
  • To see the fruits of our labor click "mail" from the top navigation bar to once again head back to Overview.

If all went well you should now see a new section in the sidebar titled Service Levels. It functions very similar to what you'd expect; the numbers next to each Service Level represent the number of open tickets to respond to. As you can see we have a ticket from our Cerberus Demo VIP to respond to first. After that's done we can move to the rest of his/her organization's Paid Support tickets.


Note: There is a small chance you may not see any open tickets for VIPs. This is due to the fact you may have replied to the only open ticket from that (@cerberusdemo.com) address earlier in the tutorial.

Fetch & Retrieve

To make this example simple we'll go ahead and create an external knowledge resource using the Cerberus Helpdesk documentation. You'll want to eventually link Fetch & Retrieve to your own content (forums, blogs, documentation, etc).

That takes care of the setup now it's time to use it.

  • Click "fetch & retrieve" in the top right of the Helpdesk, directly under "Signed in as [name]".
  • Enter the keyword "pop3" and click "go!".
  • You should see several results. Click a title to see a preview of the content along with a direct link.

You can use this content in your replies or any time you need a quick answer.


Scheduled Tasks

Since we just sent out a reply this is a good time to make sure our scheduled tasks are running. By default the helpdesk is configured to check POP3 accounts, parse new messages and run nightly maintenance as scheduled tasks.

  • Click "helpdesk setup" in the upper right.
  • Click the "Scheduler" tab.
  • We can choose to run any scheduled tasks right now by clicking the "automatically run jobs in a browser window" link. Since Cerberus Helpdesk is inactive when nobody is signed on, in the future we'll want to configure an external cron-job (Linux) or scheduled task (Windows) to ping this URL and make sure our scheduled tasks run without human prompting.
  • Observe the output of the tasks and close the new tab or browser window.

To be clear you have to run the Scheduled Tasks as described to get new real mail in the future. Either way is fine just don't forget!

Virtual Community Tools

We've just had a meeting (while you were zoned out there for a minute) and decided we should make it easy for our customers to contact us from our website. Luckily Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 provides just the tool for the job.

  • Click "helpdesk setup" in the upper right..
  • Click the "Plugins" tab.
  • Check "Cerberus Helpdesk: Community Tools".
  • Uncheck "Cerberus Helpdesk: Simulator"
  • Click the "Save Changes" button.

We now have a new tab titled "Community Tools". Communities are simply a way to group our customer-facing tools by anything we want: website, project, language, etc.

  • Click over to the "communities" tab.
  • Click "add community" on the left.
  • Type "Corporate Website" and click "Save Changes"

Contact Form

Now we're ready to build a contact form for our website in record-time.

  • Click "Corporate Website" under Communities.
  • Choose "Contact Form Builder" under "Add Community Tool".
  • Click the "Save Changes" button.
  • Click the "Contact Form Builder" link under "Corporate Website".

We're now presented with the contact form builder. Here we can provide our customers with a few simple options to route their message. If we need any follow-up information we can also collect it immediately rather than resorting to "e-mail tag" later.

  • In the "URL to Logo" field, enter the same URL to our Corporate logo (http://www.webgroupmedia.com/images/wgm_logo.jpg).
  • Change the "Page Title" to "Contact WebGroup Media LLC"
  • Leave the CAPTCHA option set to "Enabled" so we prevent most spammers from abusing our contact form.

Adding Contact Situations

Let's add our first contact situation written from the customer's perspective:

  • Reason for contacting: "I'd like someone to call me."
  • Deliver to: "sales@webgroupmedia.com"
  • Add the follow-up questions:
    • "What is your phone number?"
    • "What is the best time to reach you?"

Click "Save Changes"

Let's add our second contact situation:

  • "I can't connect to my website."
  • Deliver to: "support@webgroupmedia.com"
  • Add the follow-up question:
    • "What is your website URL?"

Click "Save Changes"

Installation

Scroll down to the "Installation" section. Copy the contents from these two files to a new directory on our corporate website. The directory can be named anything, such as: /contact or /support. Note: If you switch from using Apache's URL rewriting to not (or vice versa), you will need to regenerate these files.

Once you've copied the files to the webserver visit the URL in your browser.

Custom Fields

Similar to a survey we can create custom fields to draw out important information from our customers in a concise, unified way and store it inside a ticket. Not surprisingly these are crafted after the usual data entry forms people use all over the web: checkboxes to answer yes to a question, dropdowns for people to choose a pre-determined response, etc. For the Helpdesk team, these custom fields can be searched for and quickly sorted in "My Workspaces" ticket lists columns. But to actually use custom fields we have to create them first.

Creating Custom Fields

  • Back in the Helpdesk setup section click the "Custom Fields" tab.
  • There are a handful of custom fields we can make let's just pick a few.
    • In the "Add Field" box.
      • Type "Sales - Reason for Calling" for Field Name
      • Choose Field Type: "Dropdown".
      • Here we need to type in the choices that appear in the dropdown box. Type each of the following on their own line in the Field Options text area.
        • "Purchasing a license for an upgrade"
        • "Having a WebGroup Media employee do the installation for us"
        • "Canceling an order"
      • Click "Save Changes".
    • Add another Ticket Field,
      • Field Name: "Sales - Weekends Yes/No"
      • Choose Field Type: "Checkbox".
      • Click "Save Changes".
    • Almost done,
      • Field Name: "Sales - Phone Number"
      • Leave Field Type at "Text: Single Line".
      • Click "Save Changes".

Applying Custom Fields to Ticket

We've created the custom fields the next step is actually using them to collect and store data in the corresponding tickets. There are two ways we can go about acquiring customer responses and applying them to a ticket. The first requires a member of our Helpdesk team to fill in the fields themselves directly into the ticket without customer intervention. The idea is we're summarizing the important details of the customer's message in an easy-to-digest format, so our team can quickly grab what they need later.

  • Click "mail" from the top navigation bar.
  • Click any ticket in your Worklist.
  • On the ticket display page click the tab labeled "Custom Fields".
  • Since the sample ticket you picked can be anything, let's just fill in the custom fields with some generic arbitrary answers. Do the following.
    • "Sales - Phone Number" type "(714) 555 - 2698".
    • Toggle the "Sales - Weekends Yes/No" checkbox to ON
    • For "Sales - Reason for Calling" choose "Canceling an order".
    • Click "Save Changes".

The second way we can go about filling in custom fields relies on customers using the Support Center. We discuss the Support Center and How a Customer Opens Tickets (with Custom Fields) in the next section.

Support Center

The Support Center is a hub for our customers. Not only can they search through our growing documentation but they can open brand new tickets straight from the website without using e-mail. On top of that they can view their past tickets here, with the entire history of messages and it's current status including open or closed.

  • Go back to the window with the Helpdesk and click "helpdesk setup" followed by the "Community Tools" tab.
  • Click "Corporate Website" and choose "Support Center" from "Add Community Tool".
  • Click "Save Changes"
  • Click the new "Support Center" link.

At this point we should be taken to the Support Center configuration screen. A number of options are available including the same contact form builder we saw earlier. Let's start from the top and work our way down the list.

  • In the "URL to Logo" field, enter the same URL to our Corporate logo (http://www.webgroupmedia.com/images/wgm_logo.jpg).
  • Change Page Title to "WebGroup Media LLC Support Center".
  • Themes don't change functionality but feel free to change it.
  • As before leave the CAPTCHA option set to "Enabled" so we prevent most spammers from abusing our contact form.
  • On the Home Page any of our users can catch a glimpse of the latest announcements, FAQs and blog posts immediately when they visit the site. We use RSS feeds to make this work, so let's put the Cerb4 forum feed on our home page. For the Feed Display Title type "Cerberus Helpdesk Forums" and for the Feed URL copy & paste http://www.cerb4.com/forums/external.php?type=RSS2
  • The Footer is what you'd expect, it's useful among other things for posting our company's address. Go ahead and copy & paste the example listed to the right of the text area in the Helpdesk.
  • Click the checkbox to "Allow customer logins and registration (for viewing support history)". Our customers will appreciate this!
  • For Search (Fetch & Retrieve) click the "Cerberus Helpdesk Documentation" checkbox.
  • The last part we should be familiar with, it's very similar to the Contact Form Builder. But there's two glaring differences you may have noticed.
    • "Allow visitors to enter custom ticket subjects." Click the checkbox ON so our customers can create their own ticket subject, which we'll see in the Helpdesk.
    • Custom Fields we can choose to append to Follow-up Questions. Now a customer filling out the form can respond to each of those questions with something as simple as a checkbox or dropdown. Things they should already feel right at home using around the web! Let's go ahead and fill in our Contact Situation applying the custom fields we created before.
      • Reason for contacting, type "I'd like someone to call me."
      • Deliver to, type "sales@webgroupmedia.com"
      • Follow-up Questions, type "What is your phone number?"
        • To the right, choose "Sales - Phone Number"
      • Follow-up Questions, type "Are you available on weekends?"
        • Choose "Sales - Weekends Yes/No"
      • Follow-up Questions, "I need to talk to someone about..."
        • Choose "Sales - Reason for Calling"
    • Click "Save Changes".

Installation

Under "Installation" copy the contents from these two files to a new directory on your corporate website. The directory can be named anything, such as: /support-center.

Once you've copied the files to the webserver visit the URL in your browser.

How a Customer Opens Tickets (with Custom Fields)

The topic of custom fields has been spread out over a couple of sections possibly leading to some confusion. Let's use this section to finally see the big picture of how useful they can be when customers open new tickets from the Support Center. We're going to pretend just for a moment that we are a customer and see how the process works from their eyes.

  • From the Support Center home page click "Open a Ticket" in the main menu sidebar on the top left.
  • We should see the first step ("reason for contacting") in the contact form we created before. Click the "I'd like someone to call me" radio button to continue.
  • In the "What e-mail address should we reply to?" box, type an e-mail address you can get mail from. Use one that isn't registered with the Helpdesk already.
  • In "Subject" you can create your own original ticket subject. For now go ahead and leave it as "I'd like someone to call me".
  • Time to fill in our custom fields with some data.
    • Phone Number, type in "(714) 555-6767"
    • "Are you available on weekends?", click the Yes checkbox.
    • "I need to talk to someone about...", choose "Canceling an order".
  • For the Message, type "I have changed my mind and would like my payment refunded."
  • Fill in the letters you see in the image to bypass the automated bot checker.
  • Click "Send Message".
  • You should receive a reference number. Copy (CTRL+C) it, minus the #, to your computer's clipboard.
  • Click "OK".

And that's it! We, as the customer, have successfully opened a ticket in the Helpdesk with a message and filled in a few custom fields. If you've been following through the guide, this is indeed the second way to acquire customer information and apply them to custom fields. The last part is checking on the ticket in the Helpdesk. Let's take off the customer mask and once again be part of the company's Helpdesk team.

  • Let's go back to our Helpdesk, type the original Helpdesk URL in your browser if necessary.
  • Click "mail" to see the Overview section.
  • Remember that reference number we copied earlier. Let's do a search for it. In the Search Mail boxes on the right side.
    • Choose "Ticket ID".
    • In the next box, paste (CTRL+V) the number from the clipboard.
    • Click "go!".
  • The search results will reveal the customer ticket we created. Click the ticket in the ticket list.

And there it is, all the information we filled in earlier is front and center in the message. If we click the "Custom Fields" tab we see the custom field data nicely formatted.

Congratulations!

You are now equipped with a solid understanding of the fundamental concepts in Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0. Now get out there and get back to what you do best. Cerberus has you covered!

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