Wouldn’t it be nice to introduce new users to the most important concepts in Cerb4 right away? Yeah our developers thought so too. To answer that need they put together a comprehensive list of bullet points giving definitions to concepts old & new, explaining how they are intertwined.

You’ve no doubt already seen what I’m about to show you — after all it’s the first thing you see on the cerb4.com homepage. But perhaps by the time you finally saw the “Welcome to Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0!” ticket on your new install, you had forgotten about our little introduction. Here it is again, the Foundation of Cerb4 (a name I coined, not the official WGM name):

• 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.

Did you find it informative? We think it’s a good read for the rest of your staff who may be learning the software too, which is why we included it as part of the built-in help feature. We call it Assist Mode and it can be turned on and off by each worker at anytime.

So here’s how I propose you get your new workers integrated into the Cerb4 system ASAP.

First, create a worker profile for each employee like you normally would. But instead of having Cerb4 automatically e-mail them a random password, create a simple “1234″ login that they can change later. Then log in as each worker one-by-one and turn on “Assist Mode”; click ‘my account’ and enable it from the ‘General’ tab.

That’s it! Now when your workers login to the Helpdesk they’ll be greeted with a Welcome page and our “Foundation of Cerb4″ document. They’re also going to see a magic blue box at the top of the screen — as they click around the application the Helpdesk Assistant explains what’s on screen.

The beauty of the help feature is that once they feel comfortable, all they have to do is click ‘close assistant’ and turn it off. The box disappears and the Welcome screen will no longer come up when they sign on.

As easy as it is to send your staff-in-training directly to the full Cerb4 documentation, it may be a tad overwhelming. So turn on Assist Mode and let them get some hands on experience right away.

After that then send them to the instruction manual.

-joegeck@wgm