Are you using e-mail notifications already? Tried to, but didn’t understand them? Never even heard of them? For a small cross-section of the community, notifications are a popular subject; but for everybody else, not so much. However, these loyal users are constantly leaving us feedback on how to improve things, making it clear that notifications can be a more viable feature for the rest of us. Unfortunately, no matter how great notifications are they will never be widely adopted unless everyone understands why they’re useful. Today I’m going to resolve this problem by giving you the first lecture on E-mail Notifications.

The 101

Let’s go over what e-mail notifications are before we tackle anything else. When a worker signs up for notifications they are asking to receive copies of new helpdesk messages at an external e-mail address. Notifications give workers the power to “watch” the helpdesk for any new messages without being logged into Cerb4. But this goes beyond just reading new mail, as you can also use your preferred e-mail client to reply back to your customers directly without using the helpdesk interface. Don’t consider this “bypassing” Cerb4 though, as even when you use Gmail or Yahoo to answer e-mails, you’re still technically using the helpdesk. That’s because your replies are automatically routed back through the helpdesk before they’re sent to the customer. You still get all the benefits of using Cerb4:

• E-mail headers are “scrubbed” to protect individual worker addresses by replacing them with your organization’s public addresses. So instead of the customer getting a reply from joe@yahoo, it will be from support@mycompany.
• All messages in the conversation are 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 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.

Use Cases

You may be asking, “Why use the software at all if I can read and reply from my personal e-mail account?”. As I said before, you get the benefits of a helpdesk with the freedom to respond to e-mail from your favorite application.  Maybe your workers don’t have access to a web browser during certain parts of the day, or prefer answering e-mails on their mobile phones, or simply don’t like the helpdesk interface. The key point about e-mail notifications is that workers turn them on because they want to be notified when something new happens — and conventional e-mail clients are much better about this than the web browser. For some concrete examples, let’s go over a couple of scenarios where notifications can make life for your workers easier.

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 tickets, they can allow notifications to queue up in their normal inbox. If you combine Cerb4’s notifications with something like Gmail Notifier workers can be alerted to new tickets instantly. Off-site managers may find notifications useful too if they usually answer e-mail from their mobile phone.

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, and by that time you forget to check. Notifications can be a great tool for keeping tabs on things — you’ll be certain no mail sneaks by under the radar.

Setup

Let’s wrap things up by going over setup. Cerb4 gives each worker the freedom to configure e-mail notifications according to their needs; so e-mail notifications are configured from the worker’s My Account page. Setup is fairly straightforward and consists of two parts: choosing an e-mail address to receive notifications and specifying which events to watch. Click ‘my account’ in the top right corner from any page.

You can add new e-mail addresses from the ‘General’ tab. The ‘E-mail Notifications’ tab allows workers to choose which groups and buckets to monitor, and for which events (incoming, outgoing, etc).

That should help you decide when e-mail notifications may let you read and respond to conversations quicker without using the web-based interface.  In the next part we’ll use “watcher commands” to give the helpdesk remote instructions through e-mail.

-joegeck@wgm & Jeff@WGM