Hotline Guide

FreshDesk Dashboard Screen

Once logged in the page title says “My Dashboard”

The menu on the left contains:

FIRST the MG Logo

SECOND a logo looking like a gas gauge which says “Dashboard” if you hover over it. This one shows statistics; you won’t need to use it.

THIRD is a TICKETS icon. Click this to get all the tickets in the system. This is really our home-page icon. You can ask for only those tickets not resolved, and you can sort them in ascending order because you want to do the oldest one first. More on that in a minute.

FOURTH is a choice of Contacts (this lists anybody who has ever contacted the hotline or Companies.  You may find it very useful when you are trying to search for a previous ticket to the Hotline from the same caller.

Solutions, Forums, Reports and Analytics are the remainder and we won’t use them right now.

Click on the TICKET icon. 

When you see “All Tickets” click on it.  You will see two white boxes with pull down options.  In the second box, the pulldown menu lets you choose All Unresolved Tickets.

Providing there are any tickets unresolved, you can choose how you want to sort the tickets.  The SORT BY tab is toward the top left corner of the screen (to the right of the Dashboard icon).  You will see at the top of the column “date created.” You can click on “Date created” and choose how you want to view the open tickets.  We recommend you start by picking the “Ascending” option.

Note: The right side is labeled FILTERS.  We will not be using the filters on this screen. 

SET UP A PRACTICE EMAIL SESSION FIRST:   Send a sample email or two to the Master Gardener Hotline:  help@mastergardenerssandiego.org.  Mark it “Practice email for (YOUR NAME).  Please do not open.” Include a question or two for your practice. 

The Freshdesk entries have a colored, lettered square to the left, i.e., The letters in the boxes are the initial of the caller’s first name.  (If you talked to Sam and hour ago and thought of something else to tell Sam, the colored initials make it easier to find Sam’s ticket.

Sign into Freshdesk using Agent 1 for emails as explained above.  

Click on “Tickets,” the third icon down on the left,  This is your home screen for emails and phone calls.  You will click back on “tickets” in the left column, every time you want to open your next ticket.

On the top, left side of the screen, click on “All Tickets” and then click on “All Unresolved Tickets.”  Then sort by date created and change to “Ascending” order.  This puts your oldest messages up on top of the list of tickets.  Now you are ready to go.  You will see all of the emails and phone calls in the queue.

TO READ AND RESPOND TO AN EMAIL  MESSAGE:

Looking at your list of tickets, you will see at the end of the subject line a unique number that has been automatically assigned to each ticket.  Please process the oldest ticket first. Click on the title of the email and the email will come up in the main window.

Now the screen will be divided into three vertical columns.  The  left column will contain the message from the sender.  Read that first.  Then you can go to the middle column and add any additional tags (more about that later).  

The next box is called “Master Gardener.”  Use the click down menu to find your name and click on it.  OR you can simply type the first two letters of your first name and your name will come up for I to select.  The “Status” box  in the middle column will automatically populate as “closed” when you complete your email response and click the ”send and close” option. 

We are not entering any information in the boxes for the “Type,” “Priority,” “Group,” or “Agent.” Then select the “Update” tab at the very bottom of that column.  The information you just entered will be saved.  

The third column on the right is automatically populated with the contact details about the sender.  You don’t need to do anything with the third column.

Summary

• Start with the voicemail ticket
• Listen to the message
• Add new contact to the ticket and a more meaningful subject description
• Then process as any other ticket and note your results in the ticket summary
• Last, close out of the ticket via the status

Listen to a phone message 

• From the dashboard page, click the ticket icon in the left menu. This will display the tickets in the queue.

• Click on the body of the first phone entry in the Ticket queue. It will look something like:

  Fwd: UCSD Campus Voicemail System: Voice msg from UC San Diego Unified Messaging 8586737398 Unread: 1 Recipient Mailbox: 26995.

• Click on the tiny little box to the lower left marked WAV. This will prompt you to open the phone message.
  • Because each computer/browser will play the information differently, work with your system to find out how to listen to the message (WAV file).
  • At the bottom left of your screen, a box will appear with some numbers and letters and an arrow.  Click on the arrow and then click on “open.”
  • On a PC it will generate a medium sized box with an eighth note in it. Your message will begin playing and can be replayed as many times as you need to understand the message.
  • On a Mac when you click on the WAV, iTunes will open and you will hear the message.
• Jot down the pertinent information so you will be ready to return the call.
• When you call them, ask for an email so that you can enter that into the new contact information.  You can go in and edit to add the email address later.

Add new contact info to the ticket 

For phone inquiries, we need to add the new contact to the ticket with the callers information . Initial incoming phone messages are forwarded from the Campus Voicemail System, the Freshdesk software assigns all incoming phone calls to the Campus Voicemail contact, we need to manually add the actual caller contact information to the ticket for phone call inquiries.

• Add a new contact to the Ticket:
  • From the phone message screen, edit the ticket details by hovering your mouse over “CAMPUSVM reported via email” or click to open the message. On the right side, a little drawing of a pencil in a box will appear in the main message box - just a little below and a bit to the right side of the message box. Click on the little pencil.
  • A new pop-up window titled Edit Ticket, will appear. Click the "Add a New Contact" link, this is just below the contact name (CAMPUSVM). A new window will appear with the contact fields blank.    
  • Fill in the caller’s name, and the phone number from the subject line.  Enter the email if you have it, but it is not required if you enter the phone number.
  • Later, you may have the person’s full name and email and you can add them later by following the same steps and then clicking the “Update” button at the bottom.
  • Change the Subject line to conform to our standard format for voicemail messages as follows:
    • Start the Subject line with the word “Phone:” so that we can easily identify this as a voicemail ticket.
    • Remove all of the original text except the phone number.Update the subject line of the ticket:
  • Then the phone number that was in the original subject line
  • Then include a few words that summarize what this call was about.
  • Example:  Phone: 760-123-4567 List of Soil Labs
• When you are done click SAVE at the bottom of that window or your work will not be saved.

The approach is to make a new contact with updated subject for the person who called, listen to the message, and prepare your response. After returning the phone call and/or leaving a message, you need to prepare a summary and update the status. Edit as needed with any new information and click the update button.  

• At the very end of your Hotline session, you will need to clean up the actual messages from the campus voicemail system (easy to do and explained later).
• PREPARE THE BOOKKEEPING IN THE FRESHDESK SYSTEM: UPDATE THE STATUS
• The middle column should say OPEN at the top.
• Add or adjust the TAGS
  • Tags are simply keywords we might want to sort on later. The system automatically uses words from the title, and they may or may not be good ones.
  • See email instructions for details on adding and updating tags.
• Under Master Gardener, find your name and click on it. It will go in the (your name) entry.
• Under Status, change to “Closed.”  If you left a message, a second call will trigger the creation of a new ticket.  If you left a message and invited the caller to respond or send more information, the return call will trigger a new ticket.
• So now you have modified:  Contact / Subject / Summary / Status and you have updated everything.

The very last step: Go to the telephone system, just like the old way, and listen to (and then delete) the message(s).

As a reminder and just so you will have everything in once place, here is the phone sequence: 
Dial 1-858-534-2000 
Press # 
Enter extension 26995 
Enter security code 8286 
Voicemail prompt options include: 2 Forward, 4 Delete, 5 Save, 6 Listen again, 7 Skip

If it is message that you have heard and marked “Closed,” click 4 for delete. Be sure to delete all the tickets that you have closed from the voicemails in the telephone system before you finish your shift. The messages will still be accessible through the freshdesk ticket.