Using Drag as a Helpdesk
Customer support teams often use different platforms to manage incoming tickets. With Drag, you can handle these tickets (or emails) directly from Gmail. No more converting emails into tickets or tickets into Emails. This guide explains you how to turn Gmail into your new collaborative ticketing system with Drag.
Contents:
How to set up Drag as a Helpdesk
- Create boards to manage incoming customer inquiries.
- Categorize and organize inquiries.
- Define where your replies will come from.
- Define where email replies will load on Drag boards.
- Turn the most used responses into shared templates.
- Create automations to save you time.
How to operate Drag as a Helpdesk
- Control when and by whom things are getting done.
- Give context to all tickets with Drag tabs and internal chat.
- Get help on replies with shared drafts.
- Add new inquiries manually.
- Track your team's performance.
Pro tips
- Share tickets across different teams.
- Manage tickets coming from forms.
- Read a real case study on how customers use Drag as a Helpdesk.
Take these first steps to customize Drag according to you Helpdesk requirements.
The first thing to do is create a Helpdesk board, where incoming inquiries will load in real-time. Whether your Helpdesk email address is a real email account (with password), a Google Group, or simply an alias, you can plug them into your Drag boards to receive tickets into one shared workspace. You will need to:
Create a board.
Invite team members to the board.
Add incoming emails (i.e., choose which inbox or Google Group you want to assign to that board).
Here's a step by step to create a new board for your Helpdesk inbox.
This is how a Helpdesk board looks like:
In Kanban view:
In List view:
Here's how you can change between kanban or list views.
If you go for the Kanban view, don't forget to customize the the columns width by dragging and dropping them like in a spreadsheet cell 😉.
Work gets easier when you can simply know what is happening without asking around or digging in for information. You can categorize customer inquiries in 4 ways using Drag:
Customize your columns (if you are using Kanban view) or lists (if you are using list view) to adapt Drag to your Helpdesk workflow. For example, you may want to split inquiries into:
New Emails
Screening
Solving
Escalation
Or you can create your own. To rename the columns/lists, simply click on their titles (on the top left). There will be an inline editing input field, just type the desired title and click outside the input field. The names will be auto-saved.
Create Drag's shared tags to categorize inquiries based on key information about each customer or ticket. For example, you may want to tag tickets according to the customer plan, company size, type of enquiry they have (technical support, usability question, admin, etc.), or anything else.
You can easily filter your boards by tags, which is very handy when there is a mix of different inquiries on a board.
You can also organize your cards visually with color-coding. Each color can represent the level of urgency of a ticket, its current status, the timezone in which that customer is (so your agents don't call them at 4 am 😅), or something else.
Extra tip: Create a fixed card with the colors and respective meanings to quickly help the team get used to them.
With Drag, you can reply to emails from your own personal user@ email address or a shared email address such as support@.
More than that, you can choose a "Reply Default" for your emails. If you define support@ as your default reply email, all replies will come straight from support@ (yes, even if you are logged in to your personal account!).
Read here the step by step to set your reply default.
When you receive replies to existing emails on Drag boards, you can choose if those replies will stay on the same column where they were left or go back to the first column of that board.
For example, if your board is divided into "New Inquiries", "In Progress", "Escalated" and "Closed" and you receive a reply to an enquiry that is under the "Closed" column, that enquiry is likely not "closed" anymore and may require further action from your team. In this case, it can make more sense for you to change the board configuration to move replies back to the "New Inquiries" column.
Learn how to set up replies in this article.
A helpdesk often requires the same responses to be sent over and over. We get that. In Drag, you can turn them into a template and share them with your team.
It means once you have created all the necessary templates, you won't need to worry about spreading them around. They will be automatically available for everyone on your team.
Here's how to set up shared templates.
Why do the same things over and over if you can automate them? Our automations allow your Support team to put lots of things in auto pilot.
A few examples include:
Tagging cards as "Priority Support" if sent from that very important customer.
Assigning inquiries to a specific team member based on which customer sent the email.
Moving emails automatically to a specific board or column based on which alias they were sent to (e.g. support-europe@ vs support-latam@).
You have set up all of your Helpdesk inside Drag, well done! 👍 Now, it's time to learn the best way to operate it on a daily basis.
Now that you have your board all set up, emails start coming in. How do you know who is working on what and when? Use assignments and due dates to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
With assignments, you always know who is working on what.
Oh, and you can see what inquiries are assigned to you in 1 click with the "Assigned to Me" view under each board.
Customer service also depends highly on keeping up with due dates. By assigning due dates to inquiries, they will be displayed on the board, and the team will prioritize inquiries and keep the speed on the ticketing solving.
Besides, this feature is integrated with Google Calendar, which means the due dates go straight to your schedule to remind you of deadlines.
Lots of times, it’s not possible to solve an enquiry immediately, or by one single agent. Drag allows you to track the progress of inquiries, collaborate on them with other team members and add more context around a specific task. Read more about these features here.
1. Notes and ToDo Tabs
Sometimes there is important information about an enquiry that can't be lost or specific tasks that need to be done to complete it. That's what the "ToDo" and "Notes" tabs in Drag are. They can be found on the top of the email detailed view, next to the email title.
Example:
A customer has a strange problem, and you jumped on a conf call with him to understand more the context of the problem. Instead of writing down on pen and paper your meeting notes, you can make notes directly in Drag Notes before sending the problem to your tech team.
2. Internal Team Chat
Customer support depends on constantly communicating with teammates to solve tickets fast and efficiently. That’s why there's an internal team chat inside each card. Instead of going to a chat app to talk to other team members and give all the context about a specific enquiry, you can simply mention them on the chatbox and start talking about that particular email or task.
Example:
A customer requests something that you don't know how to solve. But you know that your colleague Samantha has done something similar for another customer a few days back. Instead of finding Samantha on Slack + copying the content of the email and pasting to her + explaining who the customer is + explaining the steps you have already tried to fix that issue, you can just ask: "@Samantha, how did you solve it last time"? I bet Samantha would appreciate that too 👌.
Rather than copying and pasting text and sending it through other channels to get help or approvals for drafts before sending emails, it's possible to share email drafts with colleagues simply. This feature offers collision detection to avoid misunderstandings while your team is drafting an email.
You can read more about how to used shared email drafts here.
When customers send support inquiries to your support inbox, they load automatically in your Drag Helpdesk board, that's great. But what if a customer called you instead to report something? You certainly don't want to lose track of that.
That's why with Drag, you can add new cards manually into the same Shared Inbox board where your email is already loading.
When you have all the data about email usage, you can measure your team’s productivity, in a whole scenario or individually. It’s crucial to have a better idea of how efficient the team is performing.
With Drag, you can have insights with the Analytics feature and generate reports across all of your boards' performance. Click here to learn how to use analytics and reports.
Many times it's necessary to move tickets across your organization and receive collaboration from other teams to solve them. Instead of forwarding emails around or opening a ticket on an entirely different platform, Drag allows you to share tickets across various teams within your organization efficiently.
You often receive reports that require technical support. Why not creating an "IT Support" board, shared only with your tech team, and simply dragging the technical inquiries to their board to ask for their help?
The same goes for the sales team when customers ask for a plan upgrade. Just drag it into the "Sales Team" board and let the Sales team do their magic!
You receive refund requests from customers, which need to be handled by the finance team. You can be 1 click away from dragging this request into the "Finance Team" board!
To do that, just create an empty board, invite the respective team members to that board and drag inquiries into that board when needed. Boom 🤯!
If your organization’s website offers forms for customer support on your website you can send all the results directly to your Helpdesk board in Drag.
This tip requires setting specific automation. So if you’re not familiar with creating automations learn more about them here. To set it up:
Click the Drag icon on the top left corner of your screen and select Automations;
Add new automation with the name you desire;
Select the board you want to use to receive the incoming tickets from forms;
In the second tab, "Condition" choose the option "Receiver email" and "Contains,” then fill the field text with the email you send the form results to (website.support@, for example) Or select Subject, and on the settings of your form set a specific subject for that )
On the third tab, select the action "Move to" and select the destination board in the dropdown.
This step saves the team the time they would spend copying and pasting the information on a card.
Curious to see how all of the above works in practice? Read how Boosted Commerce is building a 100+ brand platform, using Drag for smooth and consistent Customer Support. They handle 100s+ of monthly customer conversations in multiple languages and have achieved 100% faster integration of Customer Support systems from their newly acquired brands with Drag!
And there you are! You can now use Drag for your Customer Support seamlessly, using all the available features.
Still need help? Our Support Team will love to help at support@dragapp.com.
Contents:
How to set up Drag as a Helpdesk
- Create boards to manage incoming customer inquiries.
- Categorize and organize inquiries.
- Define where your replies will come from.
- Define where email replies will load on Drag boards.
- Turn the most used responses into shared templates.
- Create automations to save you time.
How to operate Drag as a Helpdesk
- Control when and by whom things are getting done.
- Give context to all tickets with Drag tabs and internal chat.
- Get help on replies with shared drafts.
- Add new inquiries manually.
- Track your team's performance.
Pro tips
- Share tickets across different teams.
- Manage tickets coming from forms.
- Read a real case study on how customers use Drag as a Helpdesk.
How to set up Drag as a Helpdesk
Take these first steps to customize Drag according to you Helpdesk requirements.
Create boards to manage incoming customer inquiries
The first thing to do is create a Helpdesk board, where incoming inquiries will load in real-time. Whether your Helpdesk email address is a real email account (with password), a Google Group, or simply an alias, you can plug them into your Drag boards to receive tickets into one shared workspace. You will need to:
Create a board.
Invite team members to the board.
Add incoming emails (i.e., choose which inbox or Google Group you want to assign to that board).
Here's a step by step to create a new board for your Helpdesk inbox.
This is how a Helpdesk board looks like:
In Kanban view:
In List view:
Here's how you can change between kanban or list views.
If you go for the Kanban view, don't forget to customize the the columns width by dragging and dropping them like in a spreadsheet cell 😉.
Categorize and Organize inquiries
Work gets easier when you can simply know what is happening without asking around or digging in for information. You can categorize customer inquiries in 4 ways using Drag:
1. Customize columns / lists for Helpdesk
Customize your columns (if you are using Kanban view) or lists (if you are using list view) to adapt Drag to your Helpdesk workflow. For example, you may want to split inquiries into:
New Emails
Screening
Solving
Escalation
Or you can create your own. To rename the columns/lists, simply click on their titles (on the top left). There will be an inline editing input field, just type the desired title and click outside the input field. The names will be auto-saved.
2. Use shared tags with key information
Create Drag's shared tags to categorize inquiries based on key information about each customer or ticket. For example, you may want to tag tickets according to the customer plan, company size, type of enquiry they have (technical support, usability question, admin, etc.), or anything else.
You can easily filter your boards by tags, which is very handy when there is a mix of different inquiries on a board.
3. Use color coding for visual segmentation
You can also organize your cards visually with color-coding. Each color can represent the level of urgency of a ticket, its current status, the timezone in which that customer is (so your agents don't call them at 4 am 😅), or something else.
Extra tip: Create a fixed card with the colors and respective meanings to quickly help the team get used to them.
Define where your replies will come from
With Drag, you can reply to emails from your own personal user@ email address or a shared email address such as support@.
More than that, you can choose a "Reply Default" for your emails. If you define support@ as your default reply email, all replies will come straight from support@ (yes, even if you are logged in to your personal account!).
Read here the step by step to set your reply default.
Define where email replies will load on Drag boards
When you receive replies to existing emails on Drag boards, you can choose if those replies will stay on the same column where they were left or go back to the first column of that board.
For example, if your board is divided into "New Inquiries", "In Progress", "Escalated" and "Closed" and you receive a reply to an enquiry that is under the "Closed" column, that enquiry is likely not "closed" anymore and may require further action from your team. In this case, it can make more sense for you to change the board configuration to move replies back to the "New Inquiries" column.
Learn how to set up replies in this article.
Turn the most used responses into shared templates
A helpdesk often requires the same responses to be sent over and over. We get that. In Drag, you can turn them into a template and share them with your team.
It means once you have created all the necessary templates, you won't need to worry about spreading them around. They will be automatically available for everyone on your team.
Here's how to set up shared templates.
Create automations to save you time
Why do the same things over and over if you can automate them? Our automations allow your Support team to put lots of things in auto pilot.
A few examples include:
Tagging cards as "Priority Support" if sent from that very important customer.
Assigning inquiries to a specific team member based on which customer sent the email.
Moving emails automatically to a specific board or column based on which alias they were sent to (e.g. support-europe@ vs support-latam@).
How to operate Drag as a Helpdesk
You have set up all of your Helpdesk inside Drag, well done! 👍 Now, it's time to learn the best way to operate it on a daily basis.
Control when and by whom things are getting done
Now that you have your board all set up, emails start coming in. How do you know who is working on what and when? Use assignments and due dates to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
With assignments, you always know who is working on what.
Oh, and you can see what inquiries are assigned to you in 1 click with the "Assigned to Me" view under each board.
Customer service also depends highly on keeping up with due dates. By assigning due dates to inquiries, they will be displayed on the board, and the team will prioritize inquiries and keep the speed on the ticketing solving.
Besides, this feature is integrated with Google Calendar, which means the due dates go straight to your schedule to remind you of deadlines.
Give context to all tickets with Drag tabs and internal chat
Lots of times, it’s not possible to solve an enquiry immediately, or by one single agent. Drag allows you to track the progress of inquiries, collaborate on them with other team members and add more context around a specific task. Read more about these features here.
1. Notes and ToDo Tabs
Sometimes there is important information about an enquiry that can't be lost or specific tasks that need to be done to complete it. That's what the "ToDo" and "Notes" tabs in Drag are. They can be found on the top of the email detailed view, next to the email title.
Example:
A customer has a strange problem, and you jumped on a conf call with him to understand more the context of the problem. Instead of writing down on pen and paper your meeting notes, you can make notes directly in Drag Notes before sending the problem to your tech team.
2. Internal Team Chat
Customer support depends on constantly communicating with teammates to solve tickets fast and efficiently. That’s why there's an internal team chat inside each card. Instead of going to a chat app to talk to other team members and give all the context about a specific enquiry, you can simply mention them on the chatbox and start talking about that particular email or task.
Example:
A customer requests something that you don't know how to solve. But you know that your colleague Samantha has done something similar for another customer a few days back. Instead of finding Samantha on Slack + copying the content of the email and pasting to her + explaining who the customer is + explaining the steps you have already tried to fix that issue, you can just ask: "@Samantha, how did you solve it last time"? I bet Samantha would appreciate that too 👌.
Get help on replies with shared drafts
Rather than copying and pasting text and sending it through other channels to get help or approvals for drafts before sending emails, it's possible to share email drafts with colleagues simply. This feature offers collision detection to avoid misunderstandings while your team is drafting an email.
You can read more about how to used shared email drafts here.
Add new inquiries manually
When customers send support inquiries to your support inbox, they load automatically in your Drag Helpdesk board, that's great. But what if a customer called you instead to report something? You certainly don't want to lose track of that.
That's why with Drag, you can add new cards manually into the same Shared Inbox board where your email is already loading.
Track your team's performance
When you have all the data about email usage, you can measure your team’s productivity, in a whole scenario or individually. It’s crucial to have a better idea of how efficient the team is performing.
With Drag, you can have insights with the Analytics feature and generate reports across all of your boards' performance. Click here to learn how to use analytics and reports.
Pro tips
Share tickets across different teams
Many times it's necessary to move tickets across your organization and receive collaboration from other teams to solve them. Instead of forwarding emails around or opening a ticket on an entirely different platform, Drag allows you to share tickets across various teams within your organization efficiently.
Example 1:
You often receive reports that require technical support. Why not creating an "IT Support" board, shared only with your tech team, and simply dragging the technical inquiries to their board to ask for their help?
Example 2:
The same goes for the sales team when customers ask for a plan upgrade. Just drag it into the "Sales Team" board and let the Sales team do their magic!
Example 3:
You receive refund requests from customers, which need to be handled by the finance team. You can be 1 click away from dragging this request into the "Finance Team" board!
To do that, just create an empty board, invite the respective team members to that board and drag inquiries into that board when needed. Boom 🤯!
Manage tickets coming from forms
If your organization’s website offers forms for customer support on your website you can send all the results directly to your Helpdesk board in Drag.
This tip requires setting specific automation. So if you’re not familiar with creating automations learn more about them here. To set it up:
Click the Drag icon on the top left corner of your screen and select Automations;
Add new automation with the name you desire;
Select the board you want to use to receive the incoming tickets from forms;
In the second tab, "Condition" choose the option "Receiver email" and "Contains,” then fill the field text with the email you send the form results to (website.support@, for example) Or select Subject, and on the settings of your form set a specific subject for that )
On the third tab, select the action "Move to" and select the destination board in the dropdown.
This step saves the team the time they would spend copying and pasting the information on a card.
Read a real case study on how customers use Drag as a Helpdesk
Curious to see how all of the above works in practice? Read how Boosted Commerce is building a 100+ brand platform, using Drag for smooth and consistent Customer Support. They handle 100s+ of monthly customer conversations in multiple languages and have achieved 100% faster integration of Customer Support systems from their newly acquired brands with Drag!
And there you are! You can now use Drag for your Customer Support seamlessly, using all the available features.
Still need help? Our Support Team will love to help at support@dragapp.com.
Updated on: 10/06/2021
Thank you!