Usage
Notifications allow informing customers and support staff of their question’s updates by email. This convenient tool relieves users of routine checks of their question lists in the web interface.
Basically, every update of an existing question or creation of a new one triggers a number of system checks. One of these checks is whether CRMdesk should send relevant email notifications to customers and/or users and, if yes, which templates to use. When the system mails a notification, it puts your support email address in the ‘From” field and inserts the question ID into the message subject line.
Thus, notifications settings include Email Notification Templates and actions selection.
Path
Setup tab – Workflow – Notifications
Procedure - Templates
To change an Email Notification Template, click the template title in the list in the upper area of the page or press the Add Template button to create a new one.
In the template detail screen, the fields have the following meaning:
- Name (required) – a title that uniquely identifies the template;
- Subject (required) – the string that fills the subject lines of messages created with the template;
- Body (required) – the text of the messages created with the template;
- Cc – email address (or multiple addresses) to which a copy of each message should be sent;
- Bcc – email address (or multiple addresses) to which a hidden copy of each message should be sent.
For flexibility reasons, the Subject and Body fields of a template can contain constants and variables.
Constants are character strings that are the same for every message. Examples of constants are:
- A greeting, such as ‘Dear customer,’ or ‘We have received your question and it will be processed shortly.’
- A signature, for instance, ‘Sincerely, CRMdesk team’.
Variables are placeholders in templates that are dynamically replaced with transaction data during message generation. For example, when you need to include question status in each notification message based on a template, you add the %STATUS% variable to the Subject line.
Available variables and their applicability for Subject and Body fields depend on your custom field settings. Their complete list always appears at the bottom of the each template detail page.
To save your changes, press the Submit button. To check the spelling in the template, press the Spell Check button. To delete the template, press the Delete Template button.
Procedure - Events
To control the choice of Notification Templates for various question events, you should make settings in the following areas:
- Customer Desk Notifications – for events initiated by customers via the Customer Desk web interface. These include: question creation, question update, question closure.
- Support Desk Notifications – for events initiated by your support staff via the Support Desk web interface. They include: creating, editing, moving, reassigning, closing, reopening a question, as well as posting a reply or a note for the question.
- Mail Interface Notifications – for the creation of new questions and update of existing ones via the CRMdesk email interface.
For each event in each of the three areas, select two templates you want the system to use to generate and send notifications to the customer and the support team member associated with the question in process.
In case when no notification is required, select None in the appropriate picklist field.
To save your settings in each area, press the Save button below the corresponding picklist group.
These settings are global and thus do not depend on products, areas, question statuses etc.
Tips
CRMdesk allows creating a template for every action in every section for both customer and support notification. However, managing such a large number of templates may become cumbersome. Instead, try to use variables to make your notifications more personalized.
Next: Workflow Automation