Frontend tab: 

• • Show these fields when customer creates ticket - defines whether Department Selector, Priority Selector and Order Selector fields will be displayed on "Submit Ticket" form
  • Allow customer to attach files - allows / prohibits attaching files to messages. This option works for web-form ticket submissions; the email attachments are controlled in the Gateway settings
  • Max Upload File Size (Mb) - restricts the maximum attachment size
  • Allow file extensions - restricts the file extensions that are allowed for attaching. Use commas to list multiple extensions
  • Enable Contact Form integration - enables submitting tickets through the native Contact form. If this option is enabled, any message posted through the contact form will be parsed to a ticket; otherwise, the form submissions will be processed per standard Magento scenario;
  • Disable standard contact form emails - disables native Magento contact form notification emails and uses the Help Desk Ultimate's ones instead;

  • Allow external view for tickets - enables/disables external view option

• External View Link is a long encrypted URL which allows accessing the ticket thread without being logged in to a store account. This link is crucial in case you allow guest submissions, but do not use the Email Gateway functionality.

  • Show selected entities to customer on ticket page - shows or hides the correspondent attributes from the ticket thread.

Ticket Escalation tab:

• • Allow ticket escalation - enables / disables the Escalate functionality
  • Supervisor email(s) - the email address (-es) the escalate messages will be sent to
  • Email Template to supervisor - the email template that will be used for escalation notices.

If this functionality is allowed, a customer can send a complaint or comment regarding an open ticket directly to store supervisors, bypassing the current department and agent.

If the Escalate option is invoked, a customer will have an option to submit the special message, which will be sent to the email(s) specified in the extension configuration.

Managing Departments

The extension allows creating unlimited number of Departments. You can view the existent ones and create new through Help Desk -> Departments backend grid.

Here's how the department setup looks like.

Managing Tickets

The tickets can be viewed and managed through Help Desk - > View Tickets backend grid. Here is how this grid looks like:

This grid can be sorted/filtered by any of the columns. Pay attention to the following options available from the grid.

• • Export - the extension allows exporting the grid in its current state (i.e., with filtering and sorting applied) to a .csv or .xml file.

  • Search - the extension can search the Subject of the ticket and its full content for the query words. 

• Note: the search "stacks" with the currently applied filtering. E.g., if you filter the grid by an Agent and run search, the latter will be conducted among the tickets currently assinged to the selected agent only.

  • Actions - mass actions are supported. Here's the list of Actions you can apply from this grid:
    
    • Assign to Department
    • Assign to Agent (Note: if the new assignee belongs to a different department, the dept assignation will be automatically updated as well)
    • Change Status
    • Change Priority
    • Delete

• • Action - manage ticket in the popup window

Creating new tickets

The extension allows creating tickets from the backend. There are several areas a new ticket can be created from.

• From the View Tickets grid via the Add Ticket button
• From the Customer Account details page via the Create Ticket button
• From the Order View page via the Create Ticket button

• From Order Details page

Ticket Attributes

A ticket has a number of basic properties and parameters:

• • Ticket ID - is assigned to a ticket automatically on submission. Has a format like "ABC-12345". The ID serves a number of crucial purposes, the main one is properly associating email ticket updates with the ticket thread. Ticket ID MUST be kept in the subject line if a ticket is replied to directly via email.

  • Status - the parameter introduced to ease managing the workflow. Technically, all statuses except "Closed" (including the Custom Statuses you might have created) are identical, and can be used for filtering the View Tickets grid. Status "Closed" prohibits further updates from the customer side - the ticket thread can still be viewed, but submitting any new messages to that particular ticket is disabled. NOTE: a "Closed" ticket can still be re-opened by the store admin.

  • Priority - the parameter introduced to ease managing the workflow. Has 4 default values, can be used for filtering the View Tickets grid.

Replying to a ticket 

From the backend

Once you open a ticket from the Help Desk - > View Tickets grid, you will get to the Ticket Details screen. It is divided into 3 sections.

The right sidebar contains a number of subsections, which provide additional information and facilities for processing the ticket.

Details section represents basic ticket attributes (as explained above):

• • Help Desk Agent - current assignee
  • Department - current department
  • Status
  • Priority
  • Order

  • External View - you can copy the External URL from here

  • Rate - ticket rating, specified by the customer

Customer Summary section contains customer-related info:

• • Customer - Name and Email address (for a guest user, Email only)
  • Country - for registered customers only
  • City - for registered customers only
  • Phone - for registered customers only
  • Customer Note - this is a special note that can be added by the agents; this record will not be visible in the frontend, and will be displayed in all the ticket from a given customer.

The Last Customer Orders section provides summary on customer's most recent purchases (up to 5 records).

The Last Customer Tickets section provides summary on customer's most recent tickets (up to 5 records).

The Reply section:

there's where you actually reply to the ticket. This section consists of the text area (with switchable WYSIWYG editor) and the file attachment option.

The Use Quick Response option allows inserting pre-defined text shortcuts.

The extension allows storing pre-made reply templates that can be pasted into a ticket reply. You can manage these templates in Help Desk -> Quick Responses grid.

Basically, creating a Quick Response only requires specifying Status (Enabled / Disabled), Title and Content. The Storeview selector allows distributing the Quick Responses between the existent storeviews.

After a Quick Response is saved, it can be pasted to the Reply message.

The New Status selector and the Reply button - after you click Reply, the message will be submitted to the ticket (and the email will go out to the customer), the ticket status will be set to the selected one.

The Ticket Thread section:

It contains the communication history. There are entries of 3 types - Message (shown in the Discussion tab), Notes (invisible to customers, can be posted by admin users at any time), and System Events (Status/ priority changes, re-assignation, etc; displayed in the History tab).

The "All" tab includes the entries of all types.

Switch to 'All' enabled

Note, the color-coding implemented in the extension. Messages from the customer and the agent, system messages and Agent notes are highlighted with different colors.

Via email

Both the customer and the store admin has a possibility to reply to a ticket via email bypassing the module's webform. This functionality is only available if the email parsing is enabled and the email gateways are set up.

To reply to a ticket via email it is enough to respond to any ticket-related notification. Such response will be parsed into the Help Desk and attached to the ticket thread given the following conditions are met:

• • The response is sent to the gateway email address. If an email is send directly to customer's / admin's address or to any other destination, the ticket will not get updated.
  • The ticket ID ( ABC-1234 ) is kept in the subject of the email. If the message subject gets altered and the ID is removed, the response will not get attached to the existent thread; a new ticket will be open instead.

E-mail variables and templates

{{var ticket_uid}} 

ticket ID

{{var ticket_subject}} 

ticket subject

{{var ticket_status}} 

ticket status

{{var ticket_priority}} 

ticket current priority

{{var ticket_first_message}}

content of the 1st ticket message

{{var ticket_created_at}}

ticket creation date

{{var message}}

content of the latest relevant message

{{var department_title}}

the title of the current department 

{{var customer_name}}

customer's full name

{{var customer_first_name}}

customer's first name

{{var customer_email}}

customer's email address

{{var agent_name}}

the name of the current agent

Additional facilities

Statistics

The 3.0+ version of the extension features a reporting system that allows estimating the effectiveness and the quality of the service. There are 3 types of reports, available through the Help Desk -> Statistics backend menu entry.

Workload Report

This report is meant to give the instant idea of the current load level of the support team. The report lists total number of ticket per-department and per-agent. The tickets are summarized by status and by priority.

E.g., an Open ticket of Urgent status will add +1 in 3 columns: New and Open Tickets, Open Tickets and Urgent Tickets.

The report can be exported into a file; .csv and .xml output formats are supported.

Agent Statistics

This report is aimed at estimating the effectiveness of support Agents. It calculates the Average First Response Time and Average Ticket Closing Time parameters per-agent. The Graph can be switched to represent either First Response or Closing times.

The report can be exported into a file; .csv and .xml output formats are supported.

E-mail Rejecting

Uninstallation 

If you just need to temporary disable the extension, you can just do the steps 1-5, without deleting the files of the extension.

1. 1. Disable compilation, in case it is enabled.
   2. Login to your FTP, navigate to app/etc/modules/

   3. Open the file AW_Helpdesk3.xml and change the following line:   

      <active>true</active>

      to   

      <active>false</active>

      Now your Magento is unaware of the existence of this module.

   4. Clear the cache under var/cache
   5. Make sure that the site is working properly, otherwise roll back the changes and apply to our technical support.

   6. If everything works fine, it is safe to delete the files of the extension.
      In case you need to clean the database, make a backup and then run the following query in MySQL: 

      DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_customer_note' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_template' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_department_agent_link' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_department_notification' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_department_permission' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_gateway_mail_attachment' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_gateway_mail_reject_pattern' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_gateway_mail' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_gateway' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_migration_temp_data' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_ticket_status_label' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_ticket_priority_label' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_ticket_message' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_ticket_history_additional' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_ticket_history_attachment' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_ticket_history' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_ticket' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_ticket_status' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_ticket_priority' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_department' DROP TABLE IF EXISTS 'aw_hdu3_department_agent' DELETE FROM core_resource WHERE code = 'aw_hdu3_setup'

      Note, if you are using the table with prefixes, you must specify them in all table names. 
      If you are not sure how to do that or expect any troubles with it, please contact your server administrator regarding the matter.
      If you remove the tables as it is described above, you will need to reconfigure the extension completely again after the extension is reinstalled (department/gateway details, etc). All conversations history will be lost as well.