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Capitalizing on Self-Help in the Portal

Ricky Cecchini
  • Updated

Our partners often ask how they can best capitalize on the self-help capabilities of their portal.

After all, with repeated usage, the MSP partners will amass a large number of helpful resources that should help their users cut down on tickets and issues.

The challenge is making it easy for the user to see the resource they need BEFORE they submit a ticket.

There are varying schools of thought on the best practice here, but we'll stick to two different tactics in this article.

Before continuing on with this article, it's helpful to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of how CloudRadial's ticketing forms are structured. Be sure to check out the Academy course on ticketing if you haven't already.

Not in the CloudRadial Academy? Here's how to get in: https://radials.io/Training 

Providing Assistance Before Tickets are Submitted

When building ticket forms, MSPs have the ability to be as detailed or as general as they like. Many partners prefer to optimize their ticket forms to include helpful articles, videos, and other resources directly into their forms before the user can send off the ticket.

The result is that the user is put directly in front of the helpful resource that may fix their issue before they submit the ticket in the hopes that they will be able to resolve the issue before raising a ticket and needing to wait for a response from the MSP.

To do so, most MSPs use articles and videos. Here's how they're doing it:

Embedding Videos Into Tickets

  1. When building a ticket, use the Display Only (text or HTML) question type
  2. For Label, enter any text you'd like displayed above the portal
  3. For the Text or HTML field, you can insert appropriate HTML code to embed your video
    • Most video hosting services, such as YouTube and Vimeo, have an embed option on their videos that generates appropriate HTML code for you. When you pull this code, you can insert it directly into the video. This is the preferred option.
    • Alternatively, using a simpler HTML code can sometimes work as well. Here's an example of simple embed code for a video: 
      • <iframe width="420" height="315"
        src="https://YourLinkGoesHere.com"        >
        </iframe>
  4. When it's all put together, it'll look something like this:

    mceclip0.png

  5. Once the video HTML is inserted, select Show more options... at the bottom
  6. Uncheck the option for Is question included with ticket response?
    • While it's useful for certain use cases, this option just puts link HTML into tickets which ends up causing clutter. It's best to disable it for this use case.

Add more videos as appropriate. You can also pair the video with conditional ticket triggers as you see fit - for example, to not show the video unless you ask the question "have you seen the training video on this before?" and the answer is "no".

Linking to Related Non-Video Resources

The option to link to relevant resources is similar to the steps mentioned above. 

  1. When building a ticket, use the Display Only (text or HTML) question type
  2. For Label, enter any text you'd like displayed above the portal
  3. For the Text or HTML field, you can insert appropriate HTML code to embed your article
    • Here's an example of simple embed code for an article or webpage: 
      • <a href="https://YourArticleLinkGoesHere.com/" target="_blank">
        Displayed Text Goes Here!</a>
  4. Once the HTML is inserted, select Show more options... at the bottom
  5. Uncheck the option for Is question included with ticket response?
    • While it's useful for certain use cases, this option just puts link HTML into tickets which ends up causing clutter. It's best to disable it for this use case.

Your articles may come from various places. Know that you can also link off to anything within your portal (such as your knowledge base, quick starts, university courses, etc) - all you need is their Permalink.

You can find the permalink of a piece of content by:

  1. Selecting your content
  2. Selecting Edit on that content
  3. Using the Permalink option at the bottom-right to get the link to the content

mceclip0.png

 

This is the URL that you can use to link off to, which is usable in the HTML listed before.

Providing Assistance After Tickets are Submitted

Some MSP partners prefer to offer guidance with resources after tickets have been submitted. In doing so, they can track how many users have their tickets resolved by the helpful content.

If the technician tries to help them and the issue has already been resolved, that gives the MSP a way to track how much time they've saved. 

This method is also simpler than those mentioned in the other step - it just requires putting instructions within a confirmation message for a ticket, either directly or via a link. To do so:

  1. Create a problem report or service request with the forms customized to your needs
  2. Select the Confirmation tab 
  3. Enter in information as needed here to link to the resource
    • For video resources:
      • Most video hosting services, such as YouTube and Vimeo, have an embed option on their videos that generates appropriate HTML code for you. When you pull this code, you can insert it directly into the video. This is the preferred option.
      • Alternatively, using a simpler HTML code can sometimes work as well. Here's an example of simple embed code for a video: 
        • <iframe width="420" height="315"
          src="https://YourLinkGoesHere.com"          >
          </iframe>
    • For non-video resources
      • Here's an example of simple embed code for an article or webpage:
      • <a href="https://YourArticleLinkGoesHere.com/" target="_blank">
        Displayed Text Goes Here!</a>

This message with your resource will now show after the user has submitted the question. 

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