Tickets Categorizing Responses

[smartohana]

It would seem a basic requirement of any Support organization is to report on the types of problems customers/users are experiencing. How else can you fix what's broken if you can't track and report on the exact type of problems people are experiencing???

To be clear, I'm not talking about what user's believe the problem is, but rather what support has determined the problem type to be, and then responded to the customer with the appropriate response. A support agent has to have the ability to classify his responses, and then quantify those category responses within a report.

With that said, I can not figure out how I can best achieve this within SS. I've got a number of ideas of how this could be implemented very simply for SS, but first, I'd like to know what other people think. Does anyone else feel this is essential, and if so, how are you accomplishing this right now?

[Jamie Edwards]

Hi there,

I suppose that labels are you best option here - you can create a label for each category, assign multiple labels to a ticket, and have their counts displayed in the department tree / when clicked, will show all tickets with that label.

[smartohana]

Jamie - thanks for the suggestion. I've tried using Labels... but their current implementation makes them unusable for this purpose:

1. There is no ability to set the label when on the "Post Reply" tab. This would logically be the most appropriate time to categorize your response.
2. Because labels are implemented as checkboxes on the General tab, if you have a bunch of labels (say... 10 different labels), it really messes up the display when you click on the properties for the ticket on the General tab.
3. The list view combines labels with flags within a dropdown list. This means you have to choose between one or the other.

IMHO - At the very least, SS could provide a basic functional "Category" field very easily.

- The "Category" field would be on the Post Reply tab along side the other Ticket properties (Assigned to, Department, etc...). It could also appear on the General Tab and be apart of the List view.
- The field could be a dropdown, though I would think a text field would be more flexible and easier to implement since a text field would require no additional configuration.
- There should be the ability to enter in a keyword into the field, which would be used as the categorization tag.
- The keyword should also be able to be mapped back to a predefined reply, meaning entering in a matching keyword, would autoload a predefined reply into the Reply message box.
- Similarly, selecting a predefined reply should also fill the Category field with the appropriate keyword.
- Each reply should have it's own category.

As far as I can tell, this is simply one additional field to be included in the swticketposts table (ie: category field). The logic already exists to fill in a field when selecting a predefined reply, so that shouldn't be too difficult to do as well. The additional effort would be to figure out how to map a keyword to a predefined response.

There are certainly more sophisticated ways to implement such functionality, but I'd take a basic implementation, unless someone has a better way of doing this right now. Don't people feel this should be a core requirement of any CS response management application, like SS?

[smartohana]

Agent should be able to add a keyword to a ticket that can be tracked and reported on in order to categorize the response. This categorization is based on the agents response, rather than the user's determined pre-categorization. Often times, user think the problem may be one thing, but it really is a separate category.

By allowing agents to tag responses, it is possible to track and identify specific issues that may be occurring based upon the response categories used by agents.

The category tag should be tied to predefined responses. In other words, if selecting a pre-defined response, this should automatically add an appropriate category tag to the ticket response. Similarly, if the agent manually adds the category tag to a ticket (while on the Post Reply tab), this should automatically insert the associated predefined response.

See http://forums.kayako.com/f62/basic-r...sponses-14869/
for additional discussion.