It is interesting that the variables are only supposed to work in the email body. Because the event notifications that are sent to the staff who have their email address hard coded into the event message "To:" line, actually show the real email address of the client that was entered with the #customeremail# variable. It's just that an email is never sent to the client or any of the other ticket recipients that are not hard coded into the event. So the logic seems to be in SmarterTrack to include customers in the event notification, but the code to make it generate the email message to that customer when sending the event notification emails does not work. From the staff perspective, by looking at their own email notification generated from the event, it looks like the client DID receive a notification when the tickets was closed and the event notification was generated. Very odd...

 

This is a big stickler for our clients. We moved from Kayako to SmarterTrack, and Kayako would let us create notification events for just about anything we could think of to notify the clients about. So our clients got used to knowing when changes were made to their tickets and/or their tickets were closed. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating moving back to Kayako, it had it's flaws as well...

 

With SmarterTrack not being able to automatically notify the clients of status changes, our clients are complaining quite vocally that SmarterTrack is not keeping them informed when their tickets are updated and/or closed.  The logic behind having ticket system events that require an agent to update the ticket and then remember to manually send an email to the client to let them know their ticket has been updated and/or closed leaves me kind of amazed.

 

Surely this has come up with other customers besides us. I feel like there must be people, other than us, that have customers who want to be notified when their ticket is closed???   Yes, I know it probably sounds like a training issue for our staff... But if we look at it that way, it leads us down the path of why pay for an automation product if we want to keep having our staff "remember" to do things manually. And we definitely don't want to go that direction.

 

Has anyone else come up with a solution to notifying the clients and ticket recipients, other than trying to get staff members to remember to manually send an email to the client before they close a ticket? 

 

Sorry for rambling on so much....  :-) 

 

Thanks,

 

Eddie

 

We will look into adding this feature to Smarter Track's event system. Thank you for your input, we will update this thread once a decision is made.

Hello again Eric!

 

I just had another thought. How about using the survey's after a ticket is closed. Would creating a survey with the wording about "The status of your ticket has recently been changed to Closed. If you feel that this status should not yet be closed or you need further assistance with this issue, please reply to your ticket to reopen it."... 

 

Would that automatically go to each client when the ticket status is closed? And if it has to have a question because it's really a survey event, maybe even include an actual survey type yes or no question at the bottom of it?

 

Eddie

 

After internal discussion, we have decided not to implement this feature. Instead, we suggest configuring a ticket status event that will send a reply to ticket when the status is changed to Closed. If you do go that route, and you have your departments to send a notification to the user when a ticket is auto-closed, it is possible that your clients could receive two emails notifying them that their ticket has been closed.