State update after a customer email follow-up

[Giulio Soleni]

Hi,
I'd like to have all the tickets set to a pending reminder state after a followup of the customer.
I think that is quite easy to do for the followups made from the web console (by tuning the parameters in Ticket -> Frontend::Customer::Ticket::ViewZoom)
but I cannot find a way to automatically set the state of the ticket to pending reminder after an email followup of the customer.

I would use this setting to have a quick report of all the tickets for which customers are waiting for a reply.

Any suggestion?

Thank you in advance.

Giulio

[crythias]

There's a next state after followup in SysConfig Postmaster settings. (Search the forums)

Edit to add: though it doesn't give you how much time to follow up...

[Giulio Soleni]

Hi crythias, thank you for your reply.
I partially solved my issue. I defined 2 open states (no more pending) labeled customer_waiting and support_waiting.
I assigned the PostmasterFollowUpState to customer_waiting and I also defined a filter to distinguish if an incoming email is from the support or from a customer. To do this I set the following filter:
Filter Name: support mail fwup to customers
Filter conditions:
From: .*@(mycompany1.dom|mycompany2.dom|mycompany3.dom)
To: .*@(?!(?:mycompany1.dom|mycompany2.dom|mycompany3.dom)).*

... that is from my company domains to all but my company domains...

Set Email Headers
X-OTRS-FollowUp-State: support_waiting
X-OTRS-FollowUp-SenderType: agent

This work for all external customers ... but I still have the problem for internal customers (belonging to my company) for which I still could not find a way to define a correct filter.

[crythias]

you should safely assume that any email that comes in is a customer. You shouldn't expect any email to come in as an agent.

[Giulio Soleni]

you should safely assume that any email that comes in is a customer. You shouldn't expect any email to come in as an agent.

... unfortunately I may not

I will push my collegue to work through the Agent web console only but for many of them the email reply to the customer remains the primary method to answer to requests... I may say it's almost a mandatory need for our company.
They all agree that ticket locking, 1st reply to customer and of course all other ticket operations like changing ownership, moving to another queue etc are all operations that must be done through the web console, however I have to let my collegues to use the email in reply to customer's requests.
So I have to find a way to fully integrate it with OTRS...

I'll try to go deep through the usage of postmaster filters ... is there a document that explain the usage of all the fields that can be used in the filter part? (I mean, not only the X-OTRS variables)

[crythias]

Agent response via email is a security risk because anyone can spoof being an agent.
If you must filter out customers from agents, go with the smaller of the two: filter the FROM agent email addresses. When dealing with internal helpdesk simultaneously, you have yet another battle, with respect to whether or not the agent is eligible to email create new tickets as a customer.

I understand the desire to update tickets via email by way of agent.
http://forums.otrs.org/viewtopic.php?f=53&p=29516 How some have done it
http://forums.otrs.org/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=8221 Why it's not recommended

[eraglandMDI]

I had a similar requirement and I'm thinking trying to do it using the supported postmaster filters too. However for now I solved my problem by editing the ./Kernel/System/PostMaster/FollowUp.pm directly.

First, why I did it. We created a new state called "awaiting parts" and made it a "pending reminder" state because our Helpdesk Agents often have to order things and wait for them to arrive. However as soon as a customer replies thank you to the request the followup article re-opens the ticket and the pending date was lost.

We could have changed it globally using PostMasterFollowUpState, but we also have a third state called "pending user feedback" where we want the ticket to be re-opened on customer FollowUp.

My solution was to find the StateID's in the "ticket_state" table and add this to the bottom of the section labeled by "# set state":

Code: Select all

if ( $Ticket{StateID} =~ /^10/ ) {
    $State = 'awaiting parts';
}
 
if ( $Ticket{StateID} =~ /^6/ ) {
    $State = 'pending reminder';
}

This exact code won't work for everyone, but you get that idea.

Cheers,

-Eric