Ticketing Workflow

Your freshdesk account has a primary focus on a ticketing system which brings in the emails coming to your support mailbox into the freshdesk portal. 

When a customer writes to your support email address - configured under Admin-->Emails, using the forwarding rule set-up in your support mailbox, the email would come into Freshdesk as a "new ticket."

The Subject of the Email would be made the Ticket Subject and the content of the email would be converted to Ticket Description. The email address from which this email was sent (Customer Email Address) would be made the Requester Email Address of that particular ticket.

You can create a view from the Tickets tab, where you have to filter out the fields that is required and at the top of the page you would see the Save as option. 

Once that is clicked you can save the new view under a different name.

In Freshdesk, agents can converse via replies and/or public notes. Replies are standard emails, similar to the emails you send from your mailbox.

Notes, on the other hand, can be either public or private. When an agent adds a public note to a ticket, the customer does not receive the note as a separate email. They would receive a notification if the 'Agent adds comment to ticket' notification is enabled under Admin > Email Notification > Requester notification tab. Customers can view the note only if they log into the support portal and check the progress on the ticket.

A private note cannot be seen by the requester. Agents can use it to appraise each other of tickets and brainstorm on a solution to the problem. It's meant only for internal communications.

After filtering the tickets that you need to export from the Tickets List view page, you would be able to click on the Export icon at the top of the page. In the popup that appears you would be able to enter the date range for which you want to export the tickets. 

The Forward option for a ticket will be inside the Ticket details page as shown below:

Freshdesk lets you send and receive emails with an attachment size limit of 20 MB/conversation for accounts on the Blossom and above plans. For Sprout and trial accounts, the attachment size limit is 15 MB. 

By default, the content of the email (excluding attachments) has a 15 MB limit per conversation.

However, if you are looking to attach bigger files, you can use Dropbox as a workaround. Once you integrate Freshdesk with Dropbox, you can hotlink any file from your Dropbox account (with unlimited file size), and use it as an attachment inside Freshdesk. This file can be directly opened from Dropbox whenever someone clicks on it, and will not be stored anywhere on our end. Another alternative is OneDrive which could also help you add files with a greater MB value.

Note: We do not recommend that you use heavy HTML content inside your tickets. Instead, you can attach them as separate files inside the ticket just like any other attachment. 

You will only be able to attach a maximum size of 20MB when receiving an email and for replies sent out of Freshdesk.

As an agent when you are working on tickets or accessing articles, characterizing them by adding a tag would help to track and segregate them with respect to issues or requests. 

Go to Admin > Tags > Add new tag and add the required tags for the helpdesk. Each tag has a character limit of 32. 

Once a tag is created, you can associate it with Tickets, Contact, and Articles. You can merge two tags by editing one of the tags and giving it the same name as the other.

Upon adding a tag:

You can attach multiple files from your system while replying to a ticket. However, for trial accounts and accounts that are on the Sprout plan, the total file size of all the attachments together should not exceed 15 MB. For accounts that are on the Blossom and above plans, the attachment size limit is 20 MB.

The attachment size limit in Freshdesk is 20 MB per email for accounts on the Blossom and above plans and 15 MB for Sprout and accounts that are on Trial. 

This can be extended by making use of third party integration tools such as Dropbox and OneDrive.

You can insert footers into all the ticket replies going out of your helpdesk, by adding it in the Agent Reply Template. This template is automatically included in all agent replies, whenever they respond to tickets. To do this

• Please log into your Freshdesk account as an Administrator
• Go to Admin > Helpdesk Productivity > Email Notifications
• Click on the Templates tab > Agent Reply Template and add the footer message to the content of the template

When you are working on tickets, we extend an option to close the ticket without an email notification sent out for this.

This can be achieved by clicking on the "closed" button inside a ticket (details page) or on the list view which is basically "shift+close" and a notification would not be sent in this case. 

When you are completely affirmative that you do not want to send this out at all for any of the tickets, kindly navigate to 

Admin >> Email Notifications >> Requester Notifications >> Turn OFF "Agent Closes the Ticket."

Yes, you could either setup a new rule under Admin -> Helpdesk productivity -> Dispatchr to add a CC whenever a new ticket is created or you could add the user's email address under Admin-> Email-> Add Bcc. 

This email address would be automatically included in all helpdesk communications.

You have a workflow set up where tickets are assigned to a particular agent depending upon the job description, the group this concerned agent belongs to and the expertise as well. Sometimes an agent would need another agent to look into something in the thread or receive notifications to go through the discussion. 

In this case, an agent could be added as a "watcher" who would receive all the notifications about the thread from the time when the agent is added as a watcher. You could have multiple agents added to a ticket as watchers.

Only the one added as a watcher could remove oneself from the thread. An occasional agent without a day pass could still follow the ticket in the email thread when added as a watcher on tickets.

When an agent is looking into the same ticket, you could be notified regarding this within the ticket. This would help in preventing multiple agents working on the same ticket and to improve internal communication, using Freshdesk. 

At the top-left, within a ticket, you would find an "Eye" icon. While hovering upon it, the number of agents viewing the ticket would be displayed. You could also click on the icon to view a list of Agent Names of those agents currently viewing the ticket.

This functionality is called as Agent Collision and is available from the Estate Plan onwards in Freshdesk.

If there are multiple agents replying to a ticket, you could be notified regarding that within the ticket as well. There would be a "Pen" icon on the top-left side within a ticket. If the symbol displays a number, it would mean that those many agents are currently replying to the ticket and you could click on the icon to view the agents' names.

After clicking on a ticket, please click on the Activities option to the top-right of the ticket details page. This would display the list of activities performed on the ticket in chronological order, which would contain information on updates made by each of these activities.

The view for both the Admin and Agents would be different. When Activities is toggled 'ON', Admins would be able to view the automation along with the name of the rule and a hyperlink redirecting to it. However, Agents and Supervisors can only view the name of the automation rule which was executed.

When you are replying to a customer from inside a ticket, you can remove the quoted text manually and the customer will not receive the whole thread. Also, you can make use of the Marketplace app to have the quoted text removed when the reply is added in Freshdesk. 

Requester Widget is a part of the ticket details page. This section would contain Requester Information such as Requester Name, Email Address, Company Name and any custom field which could be associated with this section.

The Requester Widget gives more context about the requester to any agent working on the ticket. This functionality is available only from the Blossom plan onwards in Freshdesk.

There is no limit on the number of tickets that can be present inside your Freshdesk Account, under any plan. 

You can add or remove the fields being displayed as part of the requester widget, from under Admin > Customer Fields >

Customize Requester Widget option. You can also add company fields to be displayed within the Requester Widget.

For more details, please refer to this article on setting up the Requester Widget.

Except the Email, all the requester details can directly be edited from the widget. To edit the contact field values from within the Requester Widget, click on the "Edit" option within the Requester Info section. This would open a pop-up with the fields on the Requester Widget, from where you could edit the values of those Contact/Company Fields.

Inside the Ticket details page, click on the More button -> choose Edit to find the option to edit the requester's email address. 

The Edit option would not be available for the tickets with Source as Outbound email. To edit the requester of an Outbound email ticket, you would have to change the Source of the ticket first under ticket properties. 

If you are using Freshdesk on Mint, you will find the 'More' option against the subject of the ticket. Clicking here will give you an option to 'Edit' the details of the ticket.

No, there is no option to change a public note that is already added into a private note. However, you would be able to delete the public note and add a private note from inside the ticket.

The upper limit to number of fields that could be added to the requester widget is 15. So, it would not be currently possible to add more than 15 fields to the Requester Widget.

In Freshdesk, you could view the most recent tickets raised by a requester, from within any of the the requester's tickets. To view this list, please click on the Recent Tickets option present within the requester widget. This would bring up all the past tickets from a particular customer.

Once you start working with the product and develop a workflow where you are assigned tickets on a regular basis, you require an organized queue of the ones that need your attention. This is called a "view" - when you get tickets assigned to you, a filter can be applied by choosing "me" in the agent field and other properties could be changed to see your prioritized list. 

Say, for instance, you are an agent who works on social tickets on a high priority - please choose this in the filters on the left of your ticket queue. Once this is done, you could see the header of the queue changing with a tick mark followed by three small dots which could be clicked upon and save it as "Alex's social tickets."

A ticket will remain in the trash folder inside Freshdesk for 30 days and post which it will be permanently deleted automatically from the database. Once a ticket is deleted from the trash folder manually or automatically there is no option to restore the ticket.

We have a 'Tickets' section represented by a ticket icon and this presents all the tickets in your helpdesk. All these tickets from various 'sources' like phone, chat, social, feedback form and such (internally these channels are called sources) are all available on this list within the tickets section and we generally address it as the tickets list view. 

To achieve an organized structure for accessing tickets, we have filters such as date created, last modified, due by time and other ticket properties such as status or priority. Please refer to this article on how efficiently the filters could be used. 

Further, they can be sorted as well in an ascending or descending order. This can be seen when you click on the header of the tickets queue (for example, it would say 'All tickets'). You can use the available sorting options that is depicted in the image below.

You can add the agents as watchers to the ticket so that all the members will receive email notifications about all the activities happening on a ticket. 

You have a good volume of tickets to handle on a daily basis and according to you, the tickets that have been sitting in the queue for a greater period of time would need your immediate attention. In this case, please explore the option of sorting in the tickets list view where the option that needs to be chosen is "date created" and in order to have the oldest tickets on top - please choose "ascending" along with this in the dropdown. 

Please note that this has many other options such as last modified, status, priority and due by date. Within that, you could choose ascending or descending. 

There are three ways in which a ticket can end up in the Spam folder -

            1. Manually marked as Spam by an Agent.

            2. Ticket marked as Spam by an Automation rule such as the Dispatch'r or the Observer.

            3. Any ticket raised from a deleted user in Freshdesk would go to Spam automatically.

Yes, we do have an Agent specific Freshdesk Mobile app for IOS and Android. You can download the App from the App store/ Play store respectively.

To access the deleted tickets on the helpdesk, navigate to the Tickets section and click on the hamburger icon and in there, Choose Trash (under the "List View Names" dropdown). You can also find the conversations from a deleted user in the Spam folder. 

You can Restore, Not spam or Delete Forever those listed tickets, under these ticket views.

Also, tickets in the trash folder for more than 30 days will be permanently removed from the portal.

Any closed ticket with no updates for the past 120 days would be marked as Archived. These tickets would be part of the archived tickets list on your helpdesk. 

Please go to the Tickets tab and click on the view list > choose Archive (under the 'List View Names' dropdown) to see all the archived tickets in the portal. 

Alternatively, you can access the archived tickets by performing a search in your helpdesk or by directly hitting the ticket ID in the URL.

If you are using Freshdesk on Mint, clicking on the Archive view will take you to a page where you can apply the required filters and then export the file to your agent mailbox.

Archived tickets are the ones which have been inactive in your helpdesk for a time period of 120 days. Please go to the 'Archive' view under the Tickets tab.

Clicking on this view will take you to a page where you can apply the required filters. 

Hit 'Next' once you're set. Choose the fields you need the values for and hit 'Export' to export the file.

If you face any difficulties with receiving this export email, feel free to write to us at support@freshdesk.com.

You can filter tickets on the date that they are created on, using the "Select Time Period" option under "Created" field from the Filter Tickets section.

Please note that the tickets can not be filtered using a custom date field.

Since we map the 'To' address based on the requester of the ticket and because there can only be one requester for a ticket, you will not be able to add more than one email address in the 'To' field. You can however add the email addresses in the CC field. 

To export the tickets from your helpdesk, please navigate to the Tickets tab and choose the pre-existing 'All tickets' view from the ticket list page. You can then choose and apply all the necessary filters such as the created time, agents, groups etc on the right and then click on Export in the top right corner. 

Once clicked on Export, another window pops-up and in here you can choose the format of the file along with desired ticket fields that should be included in the ticket export.

Note: 

1) Please make sure that the time frame set on the ticket list page is greater than the time frame set in the Export window. It is recommended to set the Created time field as 'Any' in the list page and apply the desired time in the export window.

2) The description and other multi-line text fields can also be included in the Export by clicking on 'Show multiline text fields'.

You can make use of the 'Bulk Actions' from the Ticket list view page and add send out bulk emails (30 tickets on the page). Or you can make use of Canned Responses from inside each ticket by logging the Canned Response from Admin > Canned Response.

When you are familiar with the tickets tab, sometimes there will be requirements to alter the arrangement of fields in "The Tickets list view" page. Unfortunately, it is not customizable as the design of the page is set by default and is common for all accounts.

Please note that the custom ticket fields within Admin -> ticket fields could be altered in terms of the values and label. These changes would reflect within the filters on the left of the tickets list. 

You can associate upto 300 tickets to a single tracker.

Third party tools such as Salesforce.com or Zoho CRM can be integrated into Freshdesk, using which contact information from those CRM tools could be brought into Freshdesk. This contact information would be made visible as part of the Requester Info section as well.

Merging is an irreversible process. Once two tickets are merged it cannot be split.

Your support hours are extremely important to you and you want a time tracking solution in the helpdesk. In order to do so, please navigate to the ticket details page of the tickets for which you would want to track time. 

You can track the time your agents spend on solving each ticket and this, in turn, will help you prepare accurate monthly invoices

• Click on an individual ticket to open it.
• On the right pane, you can see the Time Tracked section. 
• You can click on Start Timer to start the clock and then click on the Stop Timer link to stop it.
• You can click on Edit to manually edit a time entry.
• You can delete the time entry by clicking on Delete. 
• To add a new time entry, click on Add Time.
• In the pop-up that appears, you can enter the Agent name and the time you wish to log. You can choose whether the hours logged are billable to the client or not, by checking Billable. 
• You can also add a note on the time entry for future reference. 

The time tracker would automatically stop under the following instances:

• When the status of the ticket is moved to Resolved/Closed.
• When the agent starts replying on another ticket.
• When the agent does an update to another ticket.

The timers are based on the Helpdesk time zone that can be configured according to your location. Please navigate to Admin -> General settings -> click on Helpdesk to change the timezone. 

The Single line text fields, Multi line text fields, Number fields and check boxes will not be available in the filters of the ticket list view page. 

If your customers respond with a new or an unrelated query on an existing ticket, you can choose to deal with it separately by using the Split Ticket option. You can split only a customer response into a new ticket.

This would facilitate better tracking metrics and will also help to regulate your SLA compliance. The Split Ticket feature is available only from the Blossom Plan on Freshdesk.

You can make sure that the whole ticket thread is visible to the person you forward it to by enabling the 'Public ticket URL' option under Admin > Portals > Settings > Who can view tickets. 

Once this is enabled move to Admin > Email notifications > Templates > Forward Template and edit it so that the 'Public ticket URL' Placeholder is inserted to the Template. 

Once done, when clicking on 'Forward', the public ticket URL will be visible to the person who you forward it to and the whole ticket thread can be viewed by them. 

Please navigate to the tickets tab and open the ticket that you would like to work on. Kindly click on reply button within the "tickets details page" which would allow you to type out your contents. Among the various formatting options, you would find a "book" symbol that would lead you to the solution articles. You could either search the relevant article or choose among the ones listed here. 

Please make sure the article is visible in the customer portal if you are sharing a link to the article. Internal articles can also be inserted into the responses by choosing the "content" option within the article suggestion. 

When you are hosted on an online e-commerce store and would like the customer queries from those stores to create tickets within your Freshdesk account, you can make use of the E-commerce channel. You will have the option to integrate with your eBay account and tickets will get created inside Freshdesk via your eBay shops.

In the ticket details page, above the subject of the ticket, there is an option to manually edit the 'Due Date' of the ticket as shown below :

You can also change the SLA applied on this ticket under Admin > SLA. Once the changes are done, you can update some properties for that ticket so that the new SLA will get applied and the due by date will be changed accordingly.

Each customer query - be it an email, phone call or tweet that comes into your account is a ticket. The agent would then be able to click on the ticket to respond to the customer about their query.

Tickets raised on your account could be viewed under the Tickets tab, from where you could access them.

Flags are default labels in Freshdesk that appear in the ticket list view and inside ticket details page when any of the activities below occur:

New: This flag appears on the ticket , when a response from the agent is still not sent to the customer.

Customer Responded: This flag appears when a customer responds to a ticket.

Overdue: This happens when the ticket has gone past its resolution time and yet not resolved.

Response due: This appears when the First Response by the agent is not sent in that ticket within a specific time according to the SLA.

These are default and hardcoded flags and cannot be removed or edited. Also , there is no option to filter tickets using these flags.

An Outbound email in Freshdesk is to be used for pro-active external communication directed at the customer. Only when the customer replies, the ticket created from this Outbound email would be considered as an active ticket and set to Open Status. In the meanwhile, the ticket created from this Outbound email would be marked Closed.

In Freshdesk, the Ticket details page would automatically refresh when there is a property update within the ticket or when there is a reply/note added to the ticket.

We’ve brought in the 'Email Delivery Failure Notification' feature to notify agents when the email sent by them is not delivered to the customer. The failure could be because of various reasons. Clicking on the error link will give you an option to write to us regarding this failure. 

You can refer to this article for a more detailed explanation of the feature. 

Freshdesk will allow tickets to be created even when the attachments are exceeding the limit - from the email service, we now allow tickets which have attachments upto 50MB to come in, however, all attachments above 20 MB limit will be dropped and this alert will be shown in the ticket - 'Attachment(s) that exceed 20 MB limit have been dropped. Please reach out to the sender.'

This way, the tickets get created and the agents are also notified about the status of the attachment(s).

Note: The limit is 20 MB for Blossom and above accounts. For Sprout and trial accounts, the threshold is 15 MB.

While replying, you can use the drop-down arrow mark to choose the 'From' email address as shown in the image below:

If you want to have a common email from which the replies are sent out, you can make use of the App 'Common From email address'

No, there isn't an option to send out bulk emails to customers from inside Freshdesk. However, an integration with MailChimp can help you perform this action. 

Please refer to this article on how you can integrate MailChimp with Freshdesk.

You can add up to a maximum of 10 child tickets to a parent ticket.

In order to delete an archived ticket, please go to the corresponding ticket page (either by performing a Search or hitting the ticket ID directly in the URL). Here, you will find the 'Delete forever' button. Clicking on this button will permanently delete the ticket from the helpdesk. 

This option is only available on Freshdesk Mint.

Go to the ticket details page, and click on the edit button near the description as shown below to edit the subject of the ticket:

When fetching the tickets export, you will apply the filters with a required date range. After clicking on Export option, the 'Export tickets' page will open. You have to apply the same filters again under 'Filter tickets by' and then fetch the export.

                                             

Yes, You can filter tickets based on a particular tag or on a set of tags and these tickets can be exported as well, if required.

Under the Filters section in the right side of the Ticket List page, the desired tag(s) can be added in the Tags field and the tickets associated with that tag are then filtered.

Please check if the ticket has a private note/ Forward (Check for a lock symbol next to the note) or if it has a public note/ reply. If the reply is private then it would not be considered as a response by Freshdesk, because it is not displayed to the customer.

In the Tickets tab you will be able to filter the tickets based on the Requester email address and then you can use bulk actions to delete the tickets (30 tickets at a time)

To remove the CC from a ticket you need click on the Reply option > select the addresses in the cc bar and click on the 'x' mark next to it and send the reply. Once removed, the CC address would not appear in the next replies unless added again by the requester or one of the agents manually. 

                                   

When you remove an item or option from the Dropdown field, this would automatically remove the value from the tickets and reports as well. The same happens when you rename or make any changes to the values of the field.

The process that needs to be followed would be to create a new value in the same Dropdown field and Bulk change the values in all the tickets that you need. Once this is done, you can remove the value from Admin > Ticket fields.

You can make use of the Auto Start Timer App to calculate the time spent on tickets based on the statuses you set. To know more about this check out the link.

No, you will not be able to change the status or reopen an Archived ticket.

Make use of the merge feature in Freshdesk to merge the conversations from a secondary ticket to the primary ticket. If once split, you can merge the reply into the original ticket using this feature.

If a ticket is assigned to you, then when you access that ticket you will be taken to the latest response automatically. However, this would not be the case when you are viewing a different agent's ticket.

Please follow the steps below so that we could identify the reason for the same.

• Try accessing the account in the 'Incognito' window of your browser. If this works clear the cache and cookies of the browser and that should do the trick. 
• Try in different browsers. This will help us identify if this is a browser specific issue. 
• If both the above steps do not work then check the issue on a different network and let us know if that helps (A mobile hotspot should help with this).
• Check out our status page which is https://updates.freshdesk.com/ to know if there are currently any issues. 

If none of the above works, please raise a ticket with us so that we could have this checked for you. 

The Spam folder is in the Tickets list view page where you can click on the name of the view at the top and then click on Spam.

Given below are the ways in which a ticket gets spammed :

1) An agent can mark the ticket as spam manually. 

2) An automation rule would have acted upon the ticket. 

3) The contact of the ticket would have been deleted or blocked. Restore the ticket > click on the Activities at the top right corner and check as to why the ticket has been spammed. Once you restore the contact, all future emails from the contact will come through as tickets.

If none of these were the reasons when checking the Activities please reach out to support@freshdesk.com and we would be glad to help you out.

We do not have an option to bulk email all your customers at once. You can make use of Mailchimp to send out these emails. 

However, if you are wanting to notify customers who have raised tickets then you can make use of the Bulk Actions present in the Ticket list view and send out the emails to 30 tickets at a time. 

You can print the ticket and save the ticket as a PDF in your system or the Account Admin will also be able to export all the data inside of a your account (Tickets, solution articles etc) from Admin > Accounts. However, the data exported would be in the XML format and you will be able to convert it into the format you prefer.

When the ticket has an association such as Parent/Child, you will not be able to add another association to it such as linking the ticket to a tracker or merging. 

The primary step that needs to be taken in such a case would be to assign the ticket to the agent working on the ticket or he/she can pick it up from the list view itself. Each of your agents can have filters to view the tickets that are their names. The Agent collision feature would notify anyone if a different agent is view or replying to that ticket currently.

Once the ticket is archived you will not be able to make any changes to the ticket. The archiving with take place only on tickets that has been in the Closed status for more than 120 days with no activity on the ticket. If you have tickets that need to be reopened in future then set them in a different status other than Closed.

It would not be possible to unlink a child ticket or link it with another parent. Child tickets are created with the association to the parent ticket and the only option would be to have it closed once it is done. You would have to create a new child ticket to be associated with the other parent ticket.

The draft feature is for each agent and the draft saved by one of the agents cannot be viewed by another. However, if an agent is online and viewing/ replying to a ticket this can be viewed by an agent (Agent collision feature).

You will not be able to filter the tickets using the Customer fields. However, if you want to view the Contact details in the Ticket details page you can make use of the Requester widget available under Admin > Customer fields > Requester widget. This is a feature available from the Estate plan.

No, resolving the tracker ticket would not resolve the linked tickets by default. You have to manually resolve this as you might need to update your customers before resolving the tickets.

Freshdesk, by default, classifies tickets with 4 specific flags. These flags help agents quickly take notice of the ticket in question and perform necessary actions.

Flag	Description
	Represents all new tickets created on the helpdesk
	Represents tickets the customer has responded to
	Represents tickets for which the first response SLA has been violated
	Represents tickets for which the resolution SLA has been violated

Note: These flag values are hardcoded and cannot be edited. You will not be able to filter tickets based on these flags.

In Freshdesk, we provide few options to protect your Helpdesk from any possible spam tickets coming from sources like Portal and Email.

For spam tickets created via Portal,  enable CAPTCHA on your customer support portal. Navigate to Admin > Support Channels > Portals > Settings and select the 'Enable CAPTCHA to help avoid spam' option available under User Permissions for Portal. 

For spam tickets coming via Email, we enable Proactive Spam Filter from the backend. This spam filter will check all the tickets coming through the Email channel and based on certain pre-defined conditions, a spam score will be associated to each incoming email ticket. If the spam score of the email is 6 and above, the tickets will be marked as spam automatically. 

The purpose of this feature is to ensure that you have optimum spam deflection. However, please note that there are chances that some valid emails can be marked as spam, if in case these emails arrive via a Spam reporting IP or with a high spam score. You could keep track of those tickets in the Spam folder inside Tickets tab in Freshdesk and restore them if you deem that they are valid.

If you would like this feature to be enabled for your account, please drop an email to support@freshdesk.com. We'd be glad to assist.

For Russian spam tickets, you can set up automation rules like Dispatch'r and Supervisor to purge the Spam Tickets from your helpdesk. 

You can set up a Dispatch'r rule to automatically mark such tickets as Spam using the following steps:

3) Under Action, select the action 'Delete the ticket' and 'Skip New ticket email Notifications'

You can set up a similar rule under Admin > Supervisor > New rule to clear out the existing Russian tickets with conditions as 'Subject' contains using the above mentioned Russian characters.

Please make sure that the rule is re-ordered to the top so that this is the first rule that gets executed on these spam tickets.