If you’re brand new to Cerb4, one of the first Helpdesk concepts you must become familiar with is the requester. Generally speaking a requester is anybody who wishes to be part of the ticket conversation, in other words they want to receive replies from the Helpdesk. So when a customer writes you a new e-mail, the Helpdesk assumes this person wants to get a reply and the message’s “from” address becomes a ticket requester. Therefore, when you click reply the original sender will be listed in the “to” field as a requester.

Most of the time you don’t need to worry about the actual address in the requester field. Your workers simply reply back to any new messages and the customer gets the response. However, there are plenty of scenarios where you may need to change up the recipients a bit by adding or dropping addresses off the requesters list. Reasons include everything from a client’s supervisor wanting a copy of the follow-ups, to a worker forwarding a personal message on the client’s behalf (the worker address should be removed, and the client’s added).

In these cases there are two spots you can modify the list of ticket requesters. The first one is while composing your reply, just click the ‘(edit)’ link next to the current requester.

Secondly, you can also change requesters without sending a reply by using the ‘Properties’ tab. The next reply will take those changes into account.

Warning! You might assume changing requesters works on a per-reply basis, especially if you use the (edit) option for your reply in place of the Properties tab. But be careful as both options will last for the rest of the conversation unless modified again. So once you adjust the list, remember that any further messages will be sent to the new set of requesters. If you need to go back to the original addresses, you must change it back manually.

As you can tell my example is very simplified, with the assumption that your clients sent an e-mail strictly to your Helpdesk only. This scenario of course creates one requester on the ticket, nothing too complicated. Now if the customer puts other people in the “to” or “cc” field, or even includes the Helpdesk on the “cc” and not the “to” field, does this create multiple requesters? Yes it can, given the right configuration. For more information on that subject and why we made special accommodations for it, please read about the reply to all feature.

-joegeck@wgm