Major New Update: Introducing Unified Search and Reports Export

Whenever we ask our customers what their support agents’ favorite features are, the most common answers all relate to tools that save on time and allow you to do more with less, without cutting corners on the customer experience.

We’ve always placed a huge amount of emphasis and effort on stripping out repetitive tasks and what we call unproductive clicks. When we approach each new feature, we ask ourselves ‘How can the helpdesk do the most legwork?’. This means that your team can focus on what they do best: delivering an awesome customer support experience.

New little search box; what wonders do you hold?

We are very excited to introduce Unified Search – your support agents’ new search companion that will make finding and organizing information across your helpdesk easier and quicker than ever before.

This small search box undersells itself: subtle and quietly occupying a small amount of space of the helpdesk navigation, you wouldn’t think much of it.

Powerful, cross-helpdesk search engine

Start typing into the search box, though, and it’s power will be revealed. Unified Search will search everything in your helpdesk, including tickets, chats, user accounts, user organizations, news postings and the knowledgebase as you type.

The search results are aggressively sorted by relevance and where appropriate shows how long ago the item was created or updated. This puts the most relevant and important information in front of you first.

Highlight a result by hovering your mouse (or stepping down the list using your keyboard) will reveal additional extended information. If you highlight a ticket, you’ll see the ticket’s department, owner, creator, status and priority. Hover over a user record and you’ll see their email address, country, telephone number and other profile information.

If the search engine  matches any text to the contents of a ticket (or chat history, or knowledgebase article, etc), a truncated version of the matching text will be shown (up to five lines), with the match clearly highlighted and intelligently truncated to offer the most useful content using the least amount of space.

The search results can be even more refined using advanced search operators: search “for phrases”, -exclusions and +inclusions. A search for ["Wiley Coyote" -Rocket] will only return results that include the exact phrase “Wiley Coyote” and do not include the word Rocket.

These are great usability features, which come together to make visually sorting through a list of what would be complicated search results a breeze.

Unifying your helpdesk’s information with tag search

Tags allow you to categorize different kinds of information across the helpdesk – regardless of the type of object you’re tagging. Tickets, chats, user profiles and user organizations can be labelled together using tags.

In this example, we have tagged anything that relates to our beta8 project, including our customers involved in our ‘Beta 8′ and relevant tickets.

If we type beta8 into the search box, the search engine will also include anything tagged with beta8 in the results. This is where Unified Search really unifies – it is an amazingly powerful way to organize and retrieve information, across all of your channels and types of content, throughout your helpdesk.

Fly through the admin control panel

As well as searching the content of your helpdesk, the new Unified Search also comes into its own in the admin control panel. We have indexed all of the sections and content in the admin control panel.

You are now just a few key presses away from searching template names, SLA plans and navigating to sections. It works a lot like the Windows 7 Start Menu or Mac’s Spotlight search.

It is a much quicker way of finding and getting to where you want, and the feedback from people who have tested it so far couldn’t be better.

Export Reports to Excel (.xls, .xlsx) and HTML

You can now export your helpdesk reports into downloadable spreadsheets in the updated Reports beta (Weapons-Grade Helpdesk Analytics For Everyone).

All of your reports (including complex ones like multi-grouped and matrix reports) can be packaged into downloadble .xls and .xlsx documents.

We have taken care of the formatting, including heading styling and cell shading, keeping things usable while maintaining compatibility with popular spreadsheet programs. Turn your helpdesk reports into presentable spreadsheets in a single click, ready to crunch.

It is also possible to export a report into a clean .html document, ideal for printing and emailing reports directly from the helpdesk.

Get the update

Kayako OnDemand customers will be automatically updated in the coming week. We’ll take care of the work, so put another coffee on.

The update is available now for Kayako Download customers with an active support and updates subscription, who can find the updated product files in my.kayako.com. As always, an upgrade guide for Download customers can be found here.

A full change log for this update (4.40.831) is available.

Happy searching!