Help Desk Anyone? Arggggghhh!
Believing that a properly functioning support “desk” is a better alternative than wading through an ever increasing pile of email to find customer support requests, I set out to find a helpdesk program that delivered!
And as I use cPanel hosting with Fantastico installed, that was my first port of call. Once you’ve logged in the your cPanel, click on the Fantastico Deluxe icon - it’ll be right down the bottom - you’ll see a suite of different software applications you can install on your web server. This is also where you’ll find the WordPress blogging platform.
On the left hand side of screen, I found the heading Customer Relationship, and browsed through the offerings there.
I visited the various home pages of most of the software offered, and the one that best seem to fit the “ticket” (’scuse the pun) was “os Ticket”.
But here’s the rub…
FOUR HOURS LATER I was still nowhere near getting it to work as it should.
OK - the install was easy enough. The modifications I needed to make were easy to do. In fact, I had it set up to run in under 10-15 minutes.
While everything else seemed to work fine, the major problem I had was setting up the program to read any INCOMING emails into the system.
i.e. I want customers to be able to email my support desk either with a new enquiry, or with a response to an existing ticket.
No matter how many times I went through the program support forum, and tried all the different sorts of alternatives suggested, it just didn’t want to do the job.
Not good. Not good at all.
Being the persistent little critter that I am, I plugged on… and I found out os Ticket has NOT been supported for almost TWO years since late 2005. Great! The one I wanted, wasn’t possible!
Then I discovered a “better” program based on it called eTicket… so off to download that one.
Again, the install was relatively easy (I’m starting to understand all these database setup requirements etc now and needed to with this one ‘cos the instructions were NOT clear about this), and the configuration etc went smoothly.
But would you believe, I had EXACTLY THE SAME PROBLEM with the emails not being received by the helpdesk.
Now there are two ways the email can be processed - either
- in real time (using “piping” to redirect the email to the program) or
- read from a mailbox every five minutes using a cron job
My Advice?
Whatever you do, forget the piping setup with this program - I NEVER got it to work. The second option was far easier to set up, and works like a charm.
And the install instructions I encountered during this total experience - shockingly incomplete! I’m not a dodo when it comes to programming, but I found it very hard to work out and troubleshoot. God help the “average” bear!
The other problem to be aware of was that emails sent to my gmail.com address did NOT arrive. It seems Google has some filtering there to prevent this type of mail from getting through.
Final Verdict
Once I got eTicket installed and running, it seems like it will be able to do the tasks expected of it nicely. Specifically:
- record customer enquiries lodged by either ticket online or email
- send to admin email notification of new messages as they arrive
- send to customer response from admin (yeah - I know it’s obvious, but you better test to make sure it WORKS)
- allow customer to respond (by email) to that reply
- and repeat the above process
So now the SEVEN HOURS of effort was finally rewarded…
But what a waste of a day! It should have been SO-O-O much easier.
Tags: cpanel eTicket Fantastico help desk os Ticket support ticket systemPopularity: 80% [?]
