Hopefully this is the last one for a while, but once again I’ve retooled some older documentation on the wiki.

Running multiple independent companies through a single Helpdesk

There wasn’t a whole to change here, the screenshots were the only real thing dated, but I did change the example around to hopefully make it easier to digest (no more companies Alpha & Beta).

As usual ignore the old blog post, new Cerb4 users!

-joegeck@wgm

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.

Let’s start with 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.

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 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.

Next up… 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.

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.

Tips, Tricks, Gotchas, and Options

Please refer to the following screenshot for the next two bullet points.

• 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)”.

Please refer to the following screenshot for the next four bullet points.

• 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. Most people new to Cerb4 don’t get this, but remember a time tracking comment is like a picture of what was saved; they are a static piece of text separate from the actual time entry. In other words, deleting the comment in the ticket does not delete the actual time tracking data. Similarly, modifying a time entry in the ‘activity’ menu does not edit the ticket comment itself. If you plan to delete a time entry in ‘activity’ you probably want to go back to the ticket first and delete the comment.

Last screenshot and bullet point!

• Every ticket in Cerb4 has the option to “private message” another worker through either comments or sticky notes. So what you can do is leave a note on a ticket, and then choose to notify another worker. This is great because you don’t have to actually assign them the ticket — simply use it to get their attention, have them assist you, and keep the ticket for yourself to finish up. To use these “home” notifications when writing your message, click the ’Notify workers’ toggle, and select one or more Helpdesk workers. The notification they receive will appear in their ‘home’ area and consists of a copy of the message and a link back to the ticket.

-joegeck@wgm

In the ‘Workers’ tab of ‘helpdesk setup’, you’ll find that each worker has a ‘Disabled’ option. Is there any difference between disable and delete? Yes, a couple of which are very important to understand. This guide will help break it down for new Cerb4 users.

Disabled

• Time Tracking -> A worker. The description in the ‘Time Tracking’ tab of ‘activity’ is changed to a generic “A worker tracked # mins on activity Z”.

• Opportunities, Organizations, Tasks -> anonymous. Here I’m referring to the ‘Notes’ tab you see when clicking into an Organization or Opportunity. Task notes were added in 4.3.1 .

• Worker data is removed from reports. You can no longer see his or her statistics in reports like ‘Time Spent Per Worker’.

When to use

Deleting a worker is a good way to clean house in one swoop. Like I said there are a couple of exceptions where data integrity may be lost but generally speaking the actual content of past messages, comments, tasks, and notes, is kept. If you don’t care about keeping performance reports and don’t mind losing a couple of “who made this or that change”, then deleting a worker may be something to consider.

With that said, why delete workers at all and just disable them to be safe? Normally you would be right, go for the disable lever first. But you may need to go with delete in one important situation…

Disabled workers take up a license slot (upgrade your license or delete your workers)

Most people rightfully want to err on the cautious side and never delete a worker out of the system. However there is one scenario where you might want to take that route against your better judgement. Our worker-based licensing is priced around how many total workers you have registered in your Helpdesk, and unfortunately the total includes “disabled” workers. Thus it’s very easy to run out of free slots and the only way to effectively fix the problem is to go ahead and delete the worker OR to buy more workers for your license. If you can’t afford the upgrade cost than you will need to delete workers…sorry.

Note that if you can afford an Unlimited license, you will be able to disable workers and add new ones as often as you like.

-joegeck@wgm

I guess it’s spring cleaning on the wiki, because I fixed up yet another piece of documentation that was aging a bit. In fact it’s one of the oldest articles on the wiki:

• Automatically filter and sort your mail in 3 steps

So once again I brought this one up to speed for 4.3 — I changed some of the language, added new screenshots, and created more linkouts. Not as major of a revamp as the Knowledgebase or Fetch & Retrieve resources but still significant nonetheless.

As usual ignore the old blog post and for those new to Cerb4, I hope this helps.

-joegeck@wgm

Much like our Knowledgebase documentation, the Fetch & Retrieve resources were aging quite a bit and needed a face lift. So this afternoon I went ahead and overhauled the entire wiki page with updated screenshots and references. I believe there are really only two noteworthy changes since we talked about F&R last time:

1. The removal of the ‘Fetch & Retrieve’ button (i.e. search) from the reply window. Now it can only be accessed separately from the ‘research’ top-level menu.
2. A dedicated ‘Fetch & Retrieve’ module was added to the Support Center. That means you can put your search on the public site too if you’d like.

Now I will say that we have made it clear in other places that the Google Custom Search Engine (GSE) is the recommended alternative, and Fetch & Retrieve has been spiritually “demoted” and pushed to an optional plugin. The feature is not completely abandoned by any means, so hopefully the new documentation works for those still wanting to use it.

So again I just wanted to post that I’ve updated the wiki to be current with 4.3 and should be much more helpful for those new to Cerb4. Please refer to this for all your Fetch & Retrieve questions and ignore the old blog post. Here’s the new permanent URL.

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Search_your_organization%27s_resources_using_Fetch_%26_Retrieve

-joegeck@wgm