HAPPYNESS QUOTIENT

the HappyFox blog

May, 2012

Use Custom Fields for Precise Data Collection

- Mohan Ramkumar on 30 May 2012

HappyFox is fully loaded. Each line of code and every pixel of design is carefully thought out to help you serve your customers better. We know for a fact that our customers pay as much attention to details as we do and hence our developers have designed HappyFox to be extremely customizable.

From the background color to fields in the forms, there are a bunch of customization options to make a HappyFox instance fit perfectly to your needs. Your HappyFox instance is ready to use out of the box and all the industry standard fields and forms readily available. However, if you feel the need to add more fields to your ticket, we have it figured out for you too.

Types of Custom Fields

Ticket and Contact Fields

HappyFox lets you create custom fields in two different sections of the ticket – Ticket and Contact fields. The process to create them is the same, but they have to be created in two different sections of the Manage tab for the sake of better organization. Custom contact fields play a significant role in collecting more data from the customer, to get to understand their concerns better. Ticket contact fields are primarily for managing the ticket more efficiently by the support team.

Creating a Custom Field

When creating a new custom field, you can make it dependent on another custom field. Better yet, if the field you are linking to already has another dependency, that can be taken advantage of too!

Choosing the Custom Field Type

To ensure that data collection is done correctly, you can try using the custom field types from the drop down list. For instance, if you don’t want people to enter anything but numbers in a field, choose the field type Number. Nobody can get away with typing “xyz” for a telephone number then!

As the name suggests multiple option fields allow you to provide multiple values and let your users choose more than one value.

Settings and Permissions

Field Settings

Fields can either be made mandatory when filling in the details or visible only to the staff. If you are creating a ticket level field, there is the additional option to make the field compulsory when it’s marked completed. So, if you have a field to collect the operating system used by the customer and if it’s left blank when the support team is closing the ticket, they won’t be able to until the data is entered.

Drag and Drop to Order

Like every other option, HappyFox makes it easy for you to limit custom field access only to certain categories. To make things even more easier, custom fields can be reordered and you can have different order for each category as well! Besides, it only takes a simple drag and drop to move things around.

How many custom fields have you created in your instance? Do let us know how custom fields help you collect relevant information from your customers and assist them better!

Custom Fields — No Comments

Great Products Have Customers Who Inspire

- shalin on 29 May 2012

Seven years ago, when we decided to release a ticket system built for internal use as a product, we thought we were being too ambitious. We launched it as Helpdesk Pilot, ran a small Adwords campaign and sold 11 licenses in the first month. We were surprised that our product that was competing in the market with 200+ other popular scripts, with about one tenth of the featureset had immediate takers.

Every customer is unique and we cherish each and every one of them. Right from the very first sale, we’ve been blessed with customers who have made quite a mark in our journey. I thought it would be of immense help to share with you how customers have inspired, helped and educated us and other world class brands. Here we go:

Continue reading →

Insights — 1 Comment

Enhance Productivity with Smart Rules

- Mohan Ramkumar on 25 May 2012

Customer support is a delicate and complex process. There are lot of moving parts and unknown variables in the support equation. Constant vigilance is required from the part of the support team to make sure that the customer is happy. Naturally, members of the support team have to perform multiple redundant, unproductive actions as a part of their job if a business isn’t using a helpdesk solution like HappyFox.

Take for instance the case of timely notifications. If a ticket remains unanswered for hours or days at a time (depends on your SLA), ideally it should be escalated to the next level support for immediate redressal of the issue. Otherwise the customer might become irate and take his business elsewhere. Do it manually everyday and sooner or later, important support tickets might slip through the cracks.

Similarly, if you have dedicated staff attending to a particular segment of your customerbase, tickets created by those customers can automatically be assigned to the right team members instead of the regular support queue. On the other hand, if a reply sent to a customer fails to get a response after a set number of days, such tickets might have to be closed automatically. Smart rules in HappyFox takes care of activities like these without any human intervention.

Simply put, smart rules help automate a major chunk of the administrative duties of a support team. Naturally, the support team can just focus on what they do best – helping customers and stay productive.

Creating a Smart Rule

New smart rules can be created from the Manage section of your instance. After giving it a relevant name and a clear description, there is an option to set it’s status to be either active or inactive. This option helps you use smart rules only when they are needed and instead of deleting them forever, you can keep them in the list for using it sometime in the future.

Creating Conditions

As I noted earlier, conditions define how effective a smart rule is, in enhancing the productivity of the support team. HappyFox offers a bunch of default conditions that cover almost all aspects of the support instance. To make conditions more complete, HappyFox includes all the custom fields you have created in the instance as well.

Selecting an Action

There are many actions for you to trigger once a smart rule is in place and they are all great. I’m going to focus on the mail action to give you an idea how flexible HappyFox actually is.

Putting Tags to Use

Since smart rules are all about automation, it should be extremely simple to automatically address the email to the right customer, associate it with the correct support in-charge, insert the relevant ticket number and so on.

Tags for the Recipient Field

HappyFox employs tags to make all these happen and more. Each field has a set of relevant tags and selecting them would insert the right set of information.

Using Tags

For example, the client tag is for inserting the name of the customer associated with each individual ticket that’s processed by the smart rule. In the same vein, tags like subject and ticket id always pull the respective subject and ticket number of every ticket managed by the smart rule.

Using Tags in a Reply

Tags aren’t limited to the recipient and subject fields alone. They can also be inserted in the body of messages at the appropriate places to make the email sound more personal.

Associating Categories

Once a smart rule is created, it can be assigned to one or more categories. Smart Rules feature is available across all our subscription plans and there is no limit for the number of smart rules one can create.

How have smart rules enhanced the productivity of your support team? Do share with us the smart rules you have in place in your HappyFox instance!

Smart Rules — 9 Comments

Communicate Internally with Private Notes

- Mohan Ramkumar on 24 May 2012

To provide better customer support, the support team should be equipped with better information. At times, it might take a lot of internal communication before giving a right solution to the customer. Using emails to communicate internally with the team to come up with a solution is inefficient and beats the whole point of having a cutting edge support tool.

A support executive can ask around the floor for clarification or help on a particular topic, but at the end of the day it’s not on record and might not be the best idea when the ticket is up for a review. To address issues like these, HappyFox offers the Private Note feature. There couldn’t be a better way to communicate internally and is just perfect for documenting the support process in its entirety.

Absolutely Private

True to its name, Private Notes are very private and are visible only to your staff. The customer could never access or get hold of a private note. Never. The use case scenario for a private note could be anything. For example, to reply back to a customer requesting for a discount, a support executive might need the input of the billing or marketing team. A private note promptly opens up a discussion at the end of which the customer is apprised of the outcome.

Private Notes makes more sense if you have a distributed workforce. No matter where your support, operations or marketing team is located, they can work together right from HappyFox to provide a world class customer support experience. When part of the support team is leaving at the end of their shift, private notes detailing the vital parts of a conversation with the customer ensure that the team stepping into a new shift could hit the ground running as soon as they sign in.

Creating a Private Note

Creating a private note is extremely simple too. In the ticket details screen, click on the Add Private Note button.

Composing a Private Note

In the private note section, you can compose a message just like you would every other time, except this time only people from your team have access to the update. Since private notes send out email alerts to all recipients, use the drop down menu to select only those who are relevant to this particular conversation.

A Sample Private Note

Once updated, private notes are distinctly marked for clarity so there could be no confusion distinguishing between internal and external communication.

Private Note in a Conversation

There is no limit for the number of private notes that could be created for each ticket.

Managing Notifications

Eventhough part of a group, there might not be a need to include everyone in the customer support process. Those who don’t want to be a part of this process can turn off private note alerts from their Settings page.

How do you use private notes in your company? As always, leave your comments below!

Private Notes — 2 Comments

Save Time with Canned Actions

- Mohan Ramkumar on 22 May 2012

Customer service needs to stay personal. Not every response could be generic. But in some cases, you might need to send automated responses to customer support queries. For instance, you might get a bunch of mails everyday asking for ways to retrieve username/password or about the various pricing plans of your product. The reply to these queries would be mostly identical.

Or it could be a lengthy presales pitch requiring you to explain in detail the advantage of using your product. Instead of the support team coming up with an answer everytime, you could use a professionally written sales copy which highlights the features better. That’s when Canned Actions come in handy.

Canned Actions Tab

Canned actions of HappyFox are stored responses that you could use while replying to tickets. These help cut the hassle of typing in similar responses every single time saving a whole lot of time in the process. To create canned actions, head over to the Manage section. HappyFox allows you to create multiple canned actions and select them all later from a drop down. Cool isn’t it?

Creating a Canned Action

Creating a canned action begins by giving it a name and explaining in brief the context of it for the sake of others.

Inserting a Reply

Insert the text of the content and if necessary select appropriate actions to go with the canned action. Options to change the status and priority of the ticket and assigning it to a member of the team are available. For example, you could set to mark all tickets to high priority and assign it to a customer support manager automatically if a canned action for escalation is used.

Allowing Access

The HappyFox team values your privacy and you can pick and choose who gets access to which canned action. Not only that, canned actions can be restricted to certain categories to prevent irrelevant responses sent out by mistake. Yes, we thought of everything to make things easier for you!

Using a Canned Action

To see a canned response in action, open a support ticket and hit the Reply button. Use the Apply Canned Action drop down to pick the one that fits the ticket better and then click on Update the ticket button. That’s it, HappyFox will automatically perform the associated actions and you can move on to helping the next customer.

Do you use Canned Actions already? What additional features would you like to see added to Canned Actions?

Canned Actions — 2 Comments

Harness the Power of Custom Reports

- Mohan Ramkumar on 21 May 2012

The HappyFox dashboard is a thing of beauty. At any given minute, you can checkout the key metrics of your support process from a bird’s eye view. From ticket inflow to status and priority, things that matter are presented in a visually sumptuous format. Consider this the vital stats of your support team over the past week and it’s perfect for arriving at business decisions on the fly.

Dashboard

But, most of us need to do more with our data. Mixing and matching various sets of data might end up offering valuable insights about the state of the support infrastructure in place. We understand the concern, and that’s the reason we have built the ability to pull custom reports in HappyFox. Custom reports offer you a variety of ways to put multiple data points together and come up with charts and graphs, which then end up enlightening you about interesting trends that otherwise might have gone unnoticed.

Creating a New Report

After logging into your HappyFox account, head over to the Reports section. Name the report appropriately and you can even add a brief description explaining what this report is all about for other users of the HappyFox account.

Adding Data Sources

Now, we come to the interesting part of the reports section – adding Data Sources. Every single aspect of the ticket is up for closer inspection. Not only that, HappyFox also allows you to add the custom fields you have created so far to be used as well! Besides, you can add multiple data sources and collate all the data together in any manner you please.

As you can see, you have the option to create reports with certain mandatory data sources as well as some optional additions. Each data source can have a condition, which in most cases is a check if data is available or not.

Allowing Access

And, as the last step, access to the custom report can be restricted to a select group of users helping you keep internal numbers private. As soon as the report is run, a quick rundown of numbers from the data sources is put right in front of you just like in the case of the dashboard.

Chart View

The numbers are followed by a colorful graph that visually showcases the ebb and flow of tickets based on the selected sources. By default, the graph shows the ticket status over a period of time, but you can toggle it to display assignment and priority visually as well.

Pie Charts

To see the numbers for a particular day, just hover the mouse over that day in question. This wealth of information isn’t locked away and it can be downloaded in CSV or Excel formats for internal use. Pie charts are like icing on the cake and they throw more light into the stats.

If you offer a Service Level Agreement to your customers, then you will really appreciate the SLA section of the reports. A precise breakdown of SLA performance ensures that you are always on top of one of the key metrics of your business.

Stats

That isn’t everything. The table view at the fag end of the page offers equally compelling information too. Toggle between the views and you will be surprised to see some juicy nuggets of information from the data sources you are analyzing. Response Stats and Staff Performance views are two of my favorites!

What’s your thought on the Custom Reports feature? Got any suggestions to make it better? Sound off in the comments section!

Reports — 6 Comments

Maximizing the Happiness Quotient

- shalin on 21 May 2012

HappyFox is ten months old. It’s built on the rock solid Helpdesk Pilot platform, a pioneer in the helpdesk solutions domain for seven years now. That’s the reason hundreds of customers entrust us with the critical part of their business – keeping customers happy. We understand our responsibility in keeping the happiness loop intact at all times.

In the era of over priced apps with ugly interfaces and also ran gold diggers, we are in it for the long haul. Transparency is the name of the game and that’s what matters to us the most. When you buy a HappyFox subscription, you can be rest assured it comes with no strings attached. There is no fine print and from pricing to SLA, every detail is in front of you to make the right call.

Our goal from the get go was to build a web application that actually helps you serve your customers better. From the feedback we have got from our users and the community, we’re are delighted to learn that we are on the right track. We are always hard at work planning exciting things for you and it’s time we started sharing them with you on a regular basis.

After almost twelve years of running a profitable business, we’ve got a wealth of information to share with you all. From entrepreneurship to bootstrapping and coding tips, we are planning to share a lot in our blog, starting today. Day in and day out, our Evangelists are going to churn out stuff that will help you build a better business. The idea is to grow stronger, together.

And one more thing, this blog is for you and naturally, we are open to ideas and suggestions. Just let us know a topic of interest to you and we’ll research it for you and come up with something worthwhile. Better yet, if you are willing to share the knowledge in your own words, send it over to support@happyfox.com and we’ll publish it here with a byline.

Come, let’s chat up!

You can also follow us on Twitter for latest updates and announcements!

News — 1 Comment

Tenmiles Corp

HappyFox is a product of the technology driven folks over at Tenmiles Corporation, who enjoy creating web based software that makes life easier for everyone using them.