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Category Archives: Using your helpdesk

Effective knowledge management with Kayako helpdesk software

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Posted by Jamie Edwards on March 19, 2010 – 6:25 PM
Filed under Using your helpdesk

By building a well organized and easy to navigate knowledgebase, your customers get encouraged to search and find their own answers to simple queries. The more knowledge that can be collected and reused, the more agent time can be spared and the faster issues can be diagnosed and resolved.

The larger the organization, the larger the potential for ‘knowledge leak’ and wasted resources. Knowledge that goes unrecorded, or recorded knowledge that gets missed when handling a support issue results in overlapping work and inefficiencies.

It is important to employ effective knowledge management tools – to make sure that:

  • New knowledge gets captured and recorded at the point of discovery;
  • Existing knowledge gets effectively searched to find articles which might assist in the resolution of an issue;
  • Existing knowledge is presented to both customers and agents in a way that encourages the knowledgebase to be searched used – in a user-friendly and easy-to-navigate way;
  • Recorded knowledge can be evolved and collaborated on.

Kayako SupportSuite, eSupport and LiveResponse provide a number of features that facilitate all of these processes and requirements. This is how Kayako customers save their agent’s time, get more work done, save on resources and produce happy customers: Read More »

Adding a live chat status button to your web pages

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Posted by Jamie Edwards on January 8, 2010 – 3:17 PM
Filed under Using your helpdesk

SupportSuite and LiveResponse lets you generate HTML code which you can place on your web pages to display a live chat button. You can display a button and track your visitors in real time on any number of pages and across multiple websites.

In this post we will show you how easy it is to do.

For the purposes of this guide, we’ll assume your support desk is located at http://support.kayako.com and the web page on which you want to display a live chat status button is located at http://www.kayako.com/index.php.

This is a two step process:

  1. Use the tag generator in SupportSuite or LiveResponse to generate the button HTML code
  2. the HTML code into one of your web pages

The tag generator can be found in the staff control panel, under the Live Support tab, as shown below.

The Tag Generator is located under the Live Support tab

The Tag Generator is located under the Live Support tab

You have four ‘tag’ options:

  • HTML Button – use this option if you want to generate code that will produce a clickable button showing the status of your live chat (Available, Offline, Away, etc).
  • E-mail Signature – use this option if you want to add an e-mail friendly link which displays the status of your live chat.
  • Text Link – use this option to generate a text link only representation of your live chat status.
  • Visitor Tracking – use this option to generate code which will not display any live chat status, but will still allow your agents to track visitors who visit your web page.

We will select the HTML Button option.

The HTML code snippet has been generated

The HTML code snippet has been generated

Copy the generated HTML snippet, and paste it into the source code of your web page. Although this HTML code loads JavaScript, you should treat this snippet as if it were an image declaration – the JavaScript will import code and the graphic when your page loads.

Pasting the HTML snippet into our web pages HTML code

Pasting the HTML snippet into our web page's HTML code

Save your web page source code, upload the file to your web server and visit your web page. You should now see your live chat status graphic.

Setting up satellite desks (multiple front ends, one back end) with Kayako

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Posted by Raghav Arora on November 30, 2009 – 11:15 PM
Filed under Using your helpdesk

Deploying satellite help desks (separate front ends which connect to one backend) involves a relatively trivial code edit to one file in each of your deployments.

This guide applies to self-hosted customers only.

1) Perform the installation of your primary desk (which includes adding your database details to the config.php file).

2) Now, set up the front end to your second support desk. Upload all of the product files except for the /setup/ folder to your secondary desk location (this can be on a separate server).

3) Edit the config.php file of this secondary support desk and add the same database details as in your primary desk’s config.php file.

4) Open the index.php file of your secondary desk (and every other front end which you deploy) and find the following code:

define("SWIFT_AREA", 40);

5) After this line, add the following code:

if ( true == stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], 'support.xyz.com') )
{
    $_REQUEST['group'] = ' abc ';
    $_GET['group'] = ' abc ';
    $_POST['group'] = ' abc ';
}

6) Replace “support.xyz.com” in this code with the domain of your secondary front end.

7) Replace each occurence of “abc” with the name of the template group you wish the secondary front end to load. Note that this has to be a different template group for each secondary front end deployed.

You can configure template groups to load specific templates, departments, knowledgebase, troubleshooter, news and download categories. This enables you to offer seamlessly separate and individual desks to your customers, while working from just one administrator and staff control panel.

To access your support desk from multiple domains, you will need to purchase an additional domain license for each. For more information about additional domain licenses, please contact our sales team.

We recommend testing this on a non-live installation so that you catch (if any) environment related problems.

Round-up of community released translations and language packs

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Posted by Jamie Edwards on September 3, 2009 – 12:13 PM
Filed under Using your helpdesk

Kayako help desks can be fully localized. Text throughout the software is abstracted into language packs – an exportable XML language file that governs phrases for the end-user support center, and flat-file language packs for staff and administrator control panel locales.

Being able to easily export, modify and import language packs has led to a growing repository of community contributed translations and language packs. We and our customers are in an incredibly fortunate position, which is to have access to works kindly shared by other Kayako customers.

Multiple locales can be stored, managed and made available to your end-users

Multiple locales can be stored, managed and made available to your end-users

This post is a round-up of all of the language packs released for recent versions of Kayako software. The full list of releases and translation discussions can be found in the community forum.

Please note that SupportSuite language packs can be used with SupportSuite, eSupport and LiveResponse. It is also generally safe to ‘ignore versions’ – phrasing is rarely changed between Kayako releases. If you are looking to use a language pack which has been released for a version earlier than the one you are running, you can use Craig Brass’ language pack updater tool to ensure your older language pack does not miss any new phrases.

As explained above, this is a round-up of only the recently released translations and language packs. You will find many more in the translations forum.

Many, many thanks to our valued customers and community members Joost Sanders, PetterSandvik, nocare, noddle, soasi, pabloaugusto, jcasares, lpandolfino, Aquaria and craigbrass for sharing their translation work making this post possible!

Making the live chat icon visible only to authenticated users

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Posted by Jamie Edwards on September 2, 2009 – 12:41 AM
Filed under Using your helpdesk

The live chat icon is located under the side navigation and user bar, by default. The exact HTML that inserts the live chat button can be found in the navbar template.

Some of our customers have posted on the forum asking how they can hide the live chat status icon from support center visitors who are not logged in.

This can be done by applying a very simple modification to the template code.

In the administrator control panel, go to the templates section. Then, open up the navbar template (found under the “General” templates category).

In the navbar template code, find the following template code:

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<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3" width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td align="center">
        <script src="&lt;{$swiftpath}"><!--mce:0--></script></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>

And replace it with the following:

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<{if $_USER[loggedin] == true}>
<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3" width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td align="center">
        <script src="&lt;{$swiftpath}"><!--mce:1--></script></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<{/if}>

This modification wraps the template code which displays the live chat status icon in a conditional statement that asks: “Is this visitor logged in?”  (<{if $_USER[loggedin] == true}>). If the answer is yes (true), then the live chat status icon is displayed to the visitor. If the answer is no (false), no icon is displayed in the visitor.

However, there is a caveat to this change. Because the visitor monitoring code is embedded in this live chat button (to save loading multiple objects when loading a page), you will no longer be able to monitor guest (not logged in) visitors on your support desk.

To work around this, you can add an else to the conditional statement that will output visitor tracking code if the visitor is not logged in:

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<{if $_USER[loggedin] == true}>
<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3" width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td align="center">
        <script src="&lt;{$swiftpath}"><!--mce:2--></script></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<{else}>
 
<script src="”&lt;{$swiftpath}"><!--mce:3--></script>
 
<{/if}>

The code still asks “Is this visitor logged in?”. However, rather than loading nothing if the answer is no, visitor tracking code will be loaded.

The resulting functionality is:

  • Visitors who are logged in to the support centre will see the live chat status icon, can be monitored and will be able to start a new chat
  • Visitors who are not logged in to the support centre will not be able to see an icon, but can still be monitored and will be able to receive proactive chat request invitations from chat operations

This short guide is a good example of the power that can be tapped from the Kayako template system. Our customers think that the template system is incredibly easy to work with, allowing them to tailor their support desk with very little effort.

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