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Welcome to Zoho Desk's Ask the Experts session! This is a monthly discussion on our  forums, wherein a panel of experts will take on questions about topics related to Zoho Desk. The panel will be available for a 5 hour period and will answer any questions posted here.
 
Let's face it, the world is battling a pandemic and businesses across sectors have been hit. Many, perhaps even yours, have made it mandatory for employees to work from home. This week's ATE is dedicated to all those support teams who continue to offer top-notch support to customers from the safety of their homes. 
 
We understand that working from home is not easy. In a customer support role, it can be even more stressful because businesses aren't functioning at their best. You may have more people calling in than usual, and if you're a support manager, then managing a team remotely can be a challenge as well. 
 
At Zoho, we've been working remotely for over three weeks now, and have learnt immensely from this experience! For this ATE, our panelists are ready to share their insights and expertise on helping you supporting your customers remotely. Feel free to ask us questions related to any of the following topics:
  • Team Collaboration
  • SLA Management
  • Admin Management
  • Self-Service
We're looking forward to some interesting conversations. Stay safe and keep providing excellent support! :)
 
Start posting your questions right away and our experts will answer them in real time on 2 April, 2020 from 6:30 - 11:30 AM PST.  We are also excited to have Troy Titus, from Scale-tec as a panelist for this session. Troy is a Zoho Desk customer and an active participant in our community, who is here to share his knowledge!

Note: This is NOT a webinar. This event is a text-based discussion on the Zoho Desk community where our experts will answer your questions for five hours straight. Start posting your questions as comments below. 

P.S. Unable to view the comment box? Use the Sign in option above to view the comment section and start posting your questions. 

We're always looking for customers to share their insights with the rest of the community. If you'd like to be a panelist on our next ATE session, email me at chinmayee.ma@zohocorp.com to show interest.



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I have Desk integrated with Books for billing. When I select all timers from a ticket (or account with several contacts) and "add to invoice" that works fine, but if I have to adjust (round up or consolidate) the time on the invoice and save it, the timers in the ticket are not all switched to "invoiced". Is there a way to manually change "billable" to "invoiced" to avoid duplication?

@Jennifer,

I am wondering about the second part of the question where you've mentioned about adjusting the time on the invoice. In general, the editing of time in the invoice would be locked and/or set to read-only. You can actually edit and itemize each line item in the time entry to be billable/invoiced.

If I am unclear of the requirement, please do send me an email to "support@zohodesk.com" as a follow up to this session and we'll have a call to discuss it.

If I have both Round Robin assignment rules and Direct assignment rules created, which one takes priority? Also, how does the backlog rule work with Round Robin? I turned it on a while ago and any of the tickets that were assigned to a different team already but had no owner yet on that team were re-routed based on the round robin rules.

  • 4 years ago

@Dawn Stressman,

If I have both Round Robin assignment rules and Direct assignment rules created, which one takes priority?

This is a good question. "Direct Assignment Rules" (Top priority) and will be executed first, and "Round Robin Rules" will be applied next. Cos, the former should allocate ticket(s) directly to agents/teams, but the later is to assign tickets in a round-robin-fashioned way.

how does the backlog rule work with Round Robin?

Backlogs in "Round Robin Ticket Assignment" is the excess of tickets that gets accumulated as UNASSIGNED if the agent threshold is reached, or if there's no agent/teams available. Once turned ON, these backlogs are assigned to agents/teams only when they come online. You can refer the "Round Robin Glossary" section to know more about Threshold, Backlogs & Backlog Limit. Also, refer this thread for additional details.

Thanks & Regards
Rahul JR, Zoho Desk Team

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How is ticket following supposed to work? We have not been able to get it to work successfully. When we turn it on ALL agents get updates about ALL tickets which defeats the purpose of following a specific ticket.

  • 4 years ago

@Dawn Stressman,

Please read through this doc to know how "Ticket Following" works in Zoho Desk. In contrary, if you follow the contact, then updates for all the tickets of that contact (their email conversations, comments and other events) will populate in your "Notification Center".

BTW, there's an extension that is available in our Zoho Desk Marketplace which can help you view only the tickets that you follow. Install the extension and check if that's helpful for you and your team:

Thanks & Regards
Rahul JR, Zoho Desk Team

  • 4 years ago

We would like to know beforehand how Zoho Lens integration will behave on tickets. When are you going to release some KB articles about this feature?

I have some questions such as,
  1. Will the Lens remote session recordings be automatically attached to the related tickets?
  2. Will we be able to access the related ticket record from the Lens logs?
  3. Will we be able to utilize Lens session recordings as Help Center articles?
  4. Will the customers be able to access their former Lens session recordings from the Help Center?

  • 4 years ago

@Deniz,

Zoho Lens and Zoho Desk integration is underway and we will update you once the integration is ready. The help articles will be released along with the integration.

Though the session details will be attached to the relevant tickets, recording of the sessions will not be available in the first phase. We will validate your requirements along with the subsequent phases.

Thanks & Regards
Rahul JR, Zoho Desk Team

I posted a question last time about automating the process of closing all open tasks/activities/calls when a ticket is closed.
Also the reverse if an activity/task/call comes due then change ticket status from hold to open.

I was told this could be done. The person working on it e-mailed with me several times then suddenly stopped responding. Now still no solution has been found.

@Jeff,

I believe you are referring to the ticket "37776293". Looks like there were delays due to a few complexities in the custom function code and our expert is working on it. I have just escalated it on your behalf and we will be able to get you some updated code for this requirement by today. I apologize for letting your ticket astray without an update.

I need to be able to see which tickets my team is working on so I can see who is working and who is not and how long they're currently on a ticket. Working remotely I must be able to better keep track of my team's performance.

Jeff, I have the same challenge. I have been able to track this using 3 different tools Zoho provides that each give me a different perspective on the work of our agents.
First, is the live report that shows me when agents interact with the Desk app. Go to your zohoone home page (https://accounts.zoho.com/) and then click on 'reports' at the bottom of the list on the left column, in the next window, click on 'most application log in by apps', then click on the app you want to watch the activity in, in this case the Desk app. make sure you have selected 'today' in the top right of the screen. This will give you good idea when your agents are interacting with the app
Second, I keep a window open on the ticks window with 'all tickets' selected so I can watch new tickets as they are created
Third is a call report that comes with Desk. In Desk, click on 'reports' at the top of the screen, then 'calls dashboard' on the lefthand column. You will be taken to a live report that shows incoming/outgoing calls and whether they were answered or missed. You can select in upper right hand corner a specific agent.
There are a couple caveats to this: first, you have to have your telephony service integrated with desk. if not, obviously the desk reports won't tell you anything. second, you can also use the desk reporting capability to give you an idea of the time spent on tickets, but you have to have timing on tickets enabled in settings. This may not be a perfect answer, but it is what I am using currently. I have found it easier to check work at the end of the day, then follow up with agents where needed. If you have further questions about how to set up timing for tickets, feel free to ask.

Thank you for the suggestions. I don't think #2 and #3 will work. We work on a call back system because we have more calls than agents. So we've tried keeping everything in our queue and its assigned now round robin so that each person has a set of their own calls to work. We used to just do a get next ticket method but there is nothing built in for that and agents would then cherry pick the calls they wanted, skipping order.

Now that we're remote, I have to really monitor agent productivity somehow so I can expedite calls and make sure our customers aren't waiting too long. And of course some tickets take multiple calls before they're resolved.

You've now integrated with zoho subscriptions. Is there any way to AUTOMATICALLY utilize that to see who is paying for an active SLA vs who is not? We want to automatically route tickets to sales team if the customer has no active subscription vs assigning to a support person queue.

I understand that you are maintaining your active subscription details of customers in your Zoho Subscriptions. You can actually use that data from Zoho Subscriptions to an extension in Zoho Desk. The extension can serve data to identify active and inactive subscription. Based on this you can write a custom function to automatically move tickets to the respective department. This could be a complex workaround to create, but could be effective with the right implementation. 

The functionality you've mentioned definitely works as a potential enhancement to the current integration we have with Zoho Subscriptions, we will definitely check the possibility on the same. If you need more inputs on the custom function workaround, do write to us at support@zohodesk and we'll certainly look into it. 

We added a date field on the zoho desk account form. However, none of these fields are free form. So, if I want to enter the date 12/31/2050, I have to tap arrows 31 times to get to 2051, then backwards until I get to 12/2050, finally click the 31. Why can't I just type 12/31/2050 like other date fields throughout Zoho?

This certainly could be a cumbersome activity when it comes to adding custom dates or to modify it. We are already working on updating this date/time component across the entire product. This might probably be updated at a later time once we have our next user interface update. We will provide more news on that later when we have detailed information about the future changes.

We have integrated Desk with Books to be able to bill customers for Tickets, but I need to do it based on an Event or Service, rather than on Time.
For instance, a customer may submit a ticket with a single work "event" in it, and we would bill them a flat fee. Or they may submit a single ticket with multiple work "events" in it, where I would need to bill them either a quantity of that flat fee...or a new line item for each of those "events". It's a bit cumbersome doing it as a time-based billing feature the way we currently understand the integration to work.

The current integration setup is tied with the time-entry and the billing is calculated based on the time recorded against the ticket via time entry. Changing this structure might require some time. However, our product team is looking at the possibility of using the categories in the field "Ticket Charge Type" in the time entry layout to behave dynamically for Events and Service based needs.

We'll analyze this use case for future enhancement.

We want to segment out which agents/teams can see KB's in a single Department. The only way I see segment at all is to create another Department and segment the KB's that way.

Any updates on an Audit system for Admins?

Any updates on having Contacts being linked to more than one Account?

  • 4 years ago

@Colin Ostrom,

We want to segment out which agents/teams can see KB's in a single Department
I'm afraid, this is not possible now and we don't have it in our plans either. It would be great if you could write to us in detail with your requirements, so that we will be able to consider it in our future roadmap.

Any updates on an Audit system for Admins?
We are working on an extensive "Audit Logs" feature in Zoho Desk. It should help the administrators and managers with a complete auditing control over their account and team. However, we cannot commit a time-frame on this for now.

Any updates on having Contacts being linked to more than one Account?
There's some good news for you! We've already supported this feature in Desk and is under closed Beta now. The good news is that we've enabled the feature for your Zoho Desk account.

Please get into "Setup > General Settings > Contacts" where you can turn ON this feature (PFA). Once done, you can associate multiple accounts to a single contact from the contact edit/create page. You can also associate multiple accounts from the contact's detail view page (via "Accounts" sub-tab). I hope this helps you!

Thanks & Regards
Rahul JR, Zoho Desk Team

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