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.

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.

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. 

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. 

Please navigate to Admin -> tags -> Add new tag which would be available to add in the tags filter within the tickets details page. Once the tag is created, you could associate tags with Tickets, Contact, and Articles. Tags can be managed from the same window as well.

You can also merge two tags by editing one of the tags and making the name of one tag same as the other.

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 could insert footers into all the ticket replies going out of your helpdesk, by adding it in the Agent Reply Template. The Reply Template is automatically included in all agent replies, whenever they're responding to tickets. To do this

• Please log into your Freshdesk Account as an administrator.
• Navigate to Admin > Helpdesk Productivity > Email Notifications. 
• Click on the Reply Templates tab and add the footer message to the Content of the Reply 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.

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.

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.

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."

We have a "Tickets" tab next to the dashboard on the global header which presents all the new tickets created in your system. Apart from email, you could also get tickets from various platforms like phone, chat, social, feedback form and such depending on what are the channels you are using to reach out to your customers. 

All these tickets from various "sources" (internally these channels are called sources) are all available on this list within the tickets tab and we generally address it as tickets list view. 

For improving the efficiency of an agent working on it and to achieve an organized structure, we have filters such as date created, last modified, due by time and other ticket properties such as status or priority. Within this, there can be 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 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.

Please navigate to the Tickets tab in the global header and click on the heading of the list --> choose spam or trash (under the "List View Names" dropdown) which are present as the last two options in this. Kindly note that you would be able to find the conversations from a deleted user in the spam folder. 

You could "Restore" or "Delete Forever" those listed tickets, from under this page. Tickets in the trash folder for more than 30 days would 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 navigate to Archived Tickets List, available as one of the drop-down values in the tickets list view options under Tickets-->Archive present before the spam and trash options. 

You could export the Archived Tickets by clicking on "Export" (blue option present on the right top corner of the tickets list.)

If you face any difficulties with receiving this export email, feel free to write to us at support@freshdesk.com. One of our agents would get in contact with you to assist you further.

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 created using a custom date field.

On the Tickets tab, choose the 'All tickets' view. Once that's done, you can click on the Export option and apply the necessary date range filters and export the tickets with the fields you want.

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. 

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.

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. 

If your customers respond with a new query in an existing ticket, you could deal with it separately by using the Split option. You would find Split(Fork icon at the top-right of the customer response), using which you could split that response into a new ticket.

This would facilitate in tracking metrics based on each customer query and regulating your SLA compliance. The Split Tickets feature is available only from the Blossom Plan on Freshdesk.

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 could make use of the E-commerce channel. You would have the option to integrate with your eBay account and tickets would get created on Freshdesk via your eBay shops.

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.

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. This feature is available only from the Estate Plan of Freshdesk.

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.

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.

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.

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.