Alerts to Customers
Page Status: in Beta (Work in Progress)
Introduction
The Alerts to Customers feature sends automatic email alerts to customers for two events:
- New Ticket
- Ticket Closed
Alerts to customers are email notifications which are sent via Commit Alerts Server, to all External Recipients defined for the Ticket.
External Recipients are defined per Ticket and contain email addresses which should be notified for any email correspondence concerning the Ticket. The email addresses may belong to existing Accounts in the database or not. See more details in Ticket Recipients.
New Ticket Alerts are sent when a new Ticket is created for the Account by an employee or via Commit API. See more details in New Ticket Alerts Special Cases.
Closed Ticket Alerts are sent whenever a Ticket is being closed, i.e. the Ticket Status changes to Completed.
Alerts Format
The Alerts to Customers email format is defined using a textual Ticket Email Templates, which allows users to design the Alert email format. The system comes with default alert templates which can be found in Settings > Email Templates. Default template for new Tickets: "Ticket – Alerts to Customers – New Ticket". Default template for Closed Tickets: "Ticket – Alerts to Customers –Ticket Closed".
Other templates can be used by selecting them for the Alerts via Options > Alerts to Customers tab. See more details in Alerts to Customers Settings.
New Ticket Alerts Special Cases
New Ticket Alerts are sent when a new Ticket is created for the Account by an employee or via Commit API.
New Tickets will not trigger an email alert to the customer in the following cases:
- Changing a Ticket's status to New manually. Only when a new Ticket is actually created in the database an alert is sent.
- When Tickets are created by customers via Commit Email Connector's Email-to-Ticket feature. In this case the customer will be notified about the new Ticket by the automatic-response sent by Commit Email Connector if enabled. See more details in Commit Email Connector.
- When Tickets are created via Commit Email Connector using automated emails (i.e. formatted emails; usually sent by external applications) do not trigger an email alert to the customer. See more details about automated emails in Automated Emails.
- When Tickets are created by customers via Commit Web Interface.
Alerts to Customers Settings
In order to enable Alerts to Customers, it is required to activate Commit Alerts Server first. See more details in Commit Alerts Server.
Once Commit Alerts Server is activated, the Alerts to Customers settings should be enabled and configured from Tools > Options > Alerts to Customers.
The Alerts to Customers settings are defined globally and require Sys Admin privileges.
The settings include:
OFF – choosing this option disables all alerts to customers triggered by the events of new Tickets and closed Tickets.
ON – choosing this option will enable the Alerts to Customers feature within Commit Alerts Server.
In this section, administrators can choose which events trigger alerts and which email template will be used for the alerts. Separate templates can be used for new tickets and for closed tickets. The email alerts templates can only be based on plain-text templates.
It is also possible to attach a predefined PDF Ticket Report which will be created automatically and attached to the email upon sending the email alert to the customer. The report format can be selected from predefined reports, or, from your own customized reports. To learn more on how to design your own layouts click here.
Web Links
Web Links enable your customers to quickly open the customers' Web portal and view or edit the Ticket details. This saves the need to go explicitly to the Web Interface site, login and search for the Ticket in order to see its details.
The Web Links feature requires using Commit Web Interface for Customers.
When using Web Links the system automatically adds links to the email alert body. The Web Link should be part of the email template and links will only be added when the email template includes a reference to add links.
Even when this option is enabled, Web Links will be added only when sending email alerts to Accounts which have active Web Users
Note that this option requires enabling Web Links from Tools > Options > Web Interface.