Account Integration

[orcon]

Hi all -

I've had a scour through the forums, but have not found a complete answer to my questions. I'm trying to work out the best way to integrate with SupportSuite, with the following objectives.

1. We have our own customer management database (who doesn't), and we want to be able to link all ticket posts from existing customers with their billing account.

2. We want to be able to pull up ticket lists from within the billing system, so that if we get a call from a customer we can quickly identify if they have an existing open ticket, and be able to close that query at the same time (to avoid double-handling), and to look at support history to save going over old ground.

3. We want to encourage as many people to go via the Support Center, so that they're encouraged to seek answers from the knowledgebase, but don't necessarily want to prohibit people emailing us, especially if they are a corporate customers, etc -- but ideally want a way to automatically link this to the billing system username.

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Now I have had a good look around the v3 interface (we're a new customer as of a few days ago), and the manual when it finally arrived, but this hasn't answered my questions.

We've tried the following:

a) Created a new LoginShare module which I got working, and this allowed users to login to the Support Center. Inspection of the database is that it does this by creating a new account, with a "reference" (loginapi_userid) to the imported account's foreign key. The code appears to import the email address from the foreign system, but then if the user changes their email address in the billing system, this doesn't automatically update, etc. {there's obviously pros and cons about this behaviour}.

b) I can't seem to find any option to link an auto-created supportcenter account (e.g. from an inbound email, verified or otherwise) with an external system. So it seems that the only way to force every inbound email to be bound to a trackable user would be to block emails, and force users via the website -- where the LoginShare system would manage the creation at least.

c) Next, we looked at using Custom fields and requiring users to enter their username into the online system as an easier way to bind this. I managed to analyse the "search" POST query and could pull up a list of results based on this username if entered. However there seems to be some discrepancies regarding custom fields too:

The applicable Group Types available are:
- User Ticket Creation
- Staff Ticket Creation
However there doesn't seem to be a way to set the fields to be available under both Types, which means you end up having to search two different custom fields, which isn't ideal. There also doesn't seem to be a way to add the custom fields _after_ ticket creation (e.g. an email comes in, the "user ticket creation" fields weren't added (as blank perhaps), and there's no Group Type i can see other than "time tracking".


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OPTIONS?

I'd love to hear from anyone who has tried to do something similar, and come up with a creative solution for our problem.

For the "external system foreign key" issue, i suspect the following would do the job:
- make the "loginapi_userid" field editable within the "Edit User" screen
- provide searchability of the "loginapi_userid" field within the advanced search component
- When browsing a ticket for a user with an empty loginapi_userid field, the UI should encourage the operator to fill this in, so that it's bound to the correct external account id, etc

Merge Accounts?
Is there any way to merge two accounts together? e.g. if someone emails you from myname@mydomain.com and name@isp.com and they are the same person, it would be good to group chats and tickets together.

Custom Fields
Some suggestions for the developers. I suspect it would be better to define custom fields independent of Group Types, and then bind any field to one or _more_ field types. So you could define "username" and then add this to the "user ticket creation", "staff ticket creation" and "staff edit ticket" (New suggested type) groups, potentially with visibility, required flags dependent on which Group it was part of.


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ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS
- Is there an API for pulling back search results, etc from SupportSuite for display within external systems? e.g. show all tickets associated with accounts with this loginapi_userid value.

[orcon]

Anyone? What about someone from Kayako? Please?

[gwhisenant]

I can't believe no one from Kayako has ever responded to this well formulated and well documented request. We are looking for a similar solution, did you ever get any traction? Specifically, we would like to route incoming tickets to specific hidden (private) departments based on their email address.

Thanks,
Greg

[fyjpm]

Its almost sad that you don't get discussion on this....especially from the developers. I love esupport and understand they are busy but still.....G/L and post any finding you come up with orcon - One suggestion I have is the mod discussed here: Turn off user registration / username and password sender

it doesn't solve all your concerns, but might help you out with a few - I'm getting it installed in a few days and will let you know how it goes and how I deal with some of these issues (I'm new too with Kayako).

Best,

John

[Celestron]

Point B is very important for us as well... Please reply if there is a solution you know of. Otherwise, I'll try to engeneer a mod...

[Xolphin]

Could anyone from Kayako please comment on this? I need a solution for this too...

[Doug I.]

Frankly, I recall wanting to do something similar to what you are requesting as well. However, there are a lot of situations where it just won't work well (especially when many users like to use multiple email addresses, and when users send email directly versus using the web form).
You'll end up having your employees constantly updating emails to match the UserId in your system. I just don't think that this is practical.

However, I do like this suggestion as a nice workaround to bridge external products.

- Is there an API for pulling back search results, etc from SupportSuite for display within external systems? e.g. show all tickets associated with accounts with this loginapi_userid value.

A simple PHP script with some email parameters on the end would do nicely.
I can envision something like:

Querytickets.php?email1=john@yahoo.com?email2=john @netzero.com

The results could be a nicely formatted table of all emails to and from these two email addresses. This technique could encourage an external CRM/Accounting package to open a browser and call this script with all emails on file for a particular account. SupportSuite wouldn't have to know the relationship of these emails, as the script and SQL command would simply handle the work of bring all the data together in one view.
You would then only need to make sure that your external program can support recording of multiple email addresses for a single account and build the Query string accordingly.

This shouldn't be hard to do for Kayako as they already know where all their email data elements reside.

My .02 cents,
Doug

[eserra]

Hi all, I just opened a support ticket on the same topic

I'd also suggest to give the possibility to fill "User Registration" custom fields from a LoginShare module, this wuold be great

Hoping that kayako staff will answer to our common needs...

Tnx in advance

Regards

[craigbrass]

The only fields you can prefill currently are :-
- Username (if applicable)
- E-Mail Address
- Full Name

Unfortunatly you can not prefill custom fields at the moment but I for one would like to see this included in V4.

Hopefully one of the mods will move this to the Feature Requests board so it will get notices when Jamie meets with the developers to discuss what will be included in V4.

[Bashar]

I'm looking to have the same, is it possible now to be accomplished ?

[getUP]

We have tried doing similar to this but ended up with sessions not being reset, so if you viewed a ticket for one customer, you'll get the same results if you browse to another.

What we're looking for now is a way to display search results after clicking on a link, similar as the links shown in ticket notifications.