[SOLVED] Process Tickets - Reply to customer through email

[dolfiz]

Hi all,

we are creating a custom process through Process Management feature to model a support service accordingly to our client requirements. We create a GenericAgent that, after the email fetching, creates a process ticket from the inbound email. So a ticket creation can be done manually by agents ("Create Process Ticket") or automatically by OTRS after the email fetching. In the letter case the agent will find a new ticket on his queue and will begin to work on the request.

We would like to let our agents to establish an email communication with customer, recorded in ticket as articles. The feature we need is the same as the existing one used in email tickets: "Replay to", with template selection. The communication must be customized by agent and is not expected to be like an automatic invariable reply. Is it allowed on OTRS? It seems to me like a basic functionality, but maybe I'm missing something or simply process tickets are not expected to work in such way.

Any hint or suggestion is appreciated.

Thanks,
Luca

[dolfiz]

UPDATE:

The only solution I think about is to define a Notification triggered by event ArticleCreate (with eventually proper filters) that sends details about article created by Agent to Customer. The agent creates a Note in the ticket with details about the proper response for the customer. In this way we will not be able to select different templates, but at least an email should be sent. Actually, I tried this way but no notification is sent I still think that I'm missing something...

Hope someone, with more experience with the tool, can help me.

Thanks anyway,
Luca

[dolfiz]

UPDATE:

I've found out that if the customer sends an email related to the already existing process ticket (i.e. ticket number in the email subject), OTRS correctly link the email as a new article to the existing ticket. The agent can see the email from customer and in this case he is able to reply. The article representing the customer email is indeed marked as "customer – email-external". It seems that the option to reply to customer is enabled only in some cases (first default article for phone-ticket or email-ticket, article created from customer email receiving).

I'm going to add further update here in order to avoid too many posts (at the beginning I though it was a good idea...). Maybe some other dummy users like me are dealing with same problem.

The reply function is enabled only on article of some kinds, like said before. Actually, if I send an email to the support mail otrs is fetching from, the ticket that will be created will have the default first article set as "customer – email-external". This is another case where the reply functionality is enabled. And this makes sense.

Unfortunately this does not change my need: I would like to reply to customer also in the case where the process ticket does not contain articles of such types ("customer – email-external"). Is it allowed in some way?

[dolfiz]

SOLUTION:

we found a workaround to solve our problem: we've created a GenerciAgent that create a Process Ticket from a Phone Ticket, triggered by TicketCreate. Then we disabled the possibility to create Process Ticket directly by the agent hiding the option in the NavBar. Now the agent works on Process Tickets that were formerly Phone Ticket and so he can replay to Customer via the built-in function "reply", selecting the proper tamplate (because the first article made by default for Phone Tickets give this possibility).

Hope this can help someone or just highlights some OTRS behaviour for beginners like me.

Cheers!
Luca

[223roni256]

Hi Dolfiz. Dolfiz I read you post and you wrote " We create a GenericAgent that, after the email fetching, creates a process ticket from the inbound email" can you tell me how you do this I search option in generic agent and documentation nothing work. It's very important so If can write to me I will be very graetfull.


Thank you for your time and help.
Regards.

[dolfiz]

Hi Dolfiz. Dolfiz I read you post and you wrote " We create a GenericAgent that, after the email fetching, creates a process ticket from the inbound email" can you tell me how you do this I search option in generic agent and documentation nothing work. It's very important so If can write to me I will be very graetfull.

Hi 223roni256! First of all I suggest you to open new threads for new topics, in order to let others benefit from the question.

Coming to your request, it's simple: just create a GenericAgent, triggered by an event of TicketCreate on the queue that you are using as entry point of your fetched email; in the action of the GenericAgent set the process ID and the first activity ID, and, if you need, some other dynamic field, state, etc... In this way a "normal" ticket born in the postmaster queue (for example) becomes immediately a process ticket. The same can be done for telephone ticket.

Hope it helps.
Bye,
Dolfiz

[MrStetson]

Coming to your request, it's simple: just create a GenericAgent, triggered by an event of TicketCreate on the queue that you are using as entry point of your fetched email; in the action of the GenericAgent set the process ID and the first activity ID, and, if you need, some other dynamic field, state, etc... In this way a "normal" ticket born in the postmaster queue (for example) becomes immediately a process ticket. The same can be done for telephone ticket.

Hi dolfiz,
I like the idea of this workaround. I configured a GenericAgent as described and I kind of end up in a process. The problem now is that the process information neither shows the process and actual activity nor shows any of Activity Dialogs which should be there. So it seems I have a process ticket but not a correct one. Any suggestion on this problem?

[dolfiz]

I like the idea of this workaround. I configured a GenericAgent as described and I kind of end up in a process. The problem now is that the process information neither shows the process and actual activity nor shows any of Activity Dialogs which should be there. So it seems I have a process ticket but not a correct one. Any suggestion on this problem?

If you can't see the process information probably it is not a process ticket yet, but still an email-phone ticket. Why are you confident that it really is a process ticket? Do you remember to set ProcessID and ActivityID in the Generic Agent that you setup? If you do all correctly you should obtain a process ticket and in the ticket view, in the right panel, you should see which process and activity the ticket resides in. Accordingly to the activity showed, you should also see the related activity dialog available.

Summarizing:
- set an email account to fetch to a queue (say FOO)
- create a generic agent on event TicketCreate
- set filter of the generic agent: only queue FOO
- as action of the generic agent set ProcessID, ActivityID and, if neededm queue, state, etc...

This should be enough.

Hope it helps.
Dolfiz

[MrStetson]

Sorry for answering after such a long time. Had to work on different stuff. Now back to my problem

If you can't see the process information probably it is not a process ticket yet, but still an email-phone ticket. Why are you confident that it really is a process ticket?

Because the screen tells me "Process Information" but no Activity Dialogs.

Do you remember to set ProcessID and ActivityID in the Generic Agent that you setup?

Sure.

If you do all correctly you should obtain a process ticket and in the ticket view, in the right panel, you should see which process and activity the ticket resides in. Accordingly to the activity showed, you should also see the related activity dialog available.

Nope. I'm not shown neither the process nor the activity the ticket resides in. Just "Process" and "Activity". Furthermore there are no Activitiy Dialogs shown. Just a lonely "Process Information" without any choosable Activity Dialogs.
By starting a new process ticket by hand everything works fine.

Summarizing:
- set an email account to fetch to a queue (say FOO)
- create a generic agent on event TicketCreate
- set filter of the generic agent: only queue FOO
- as action of the generic agent set ProcessID, ActivityID and, if neededm queue, state, etc...

check, check, check, check

This should be enough.

Unfortunately it still doesn't work.


UPDATE::::
OK, I just found the resolution. I used ProcessID: 1 instead of P1. Now everything works fine. Thanks anyway for your help.