Autoresponders are automated emails sent to customers as a record of each ticket they submit in the support center. We generally suggest including key information, including ticket ID, Subject, Status and a direct link to the ticket, but you can also include Department, Type, and Priority of the ticket.

In addition to that, the other popular ways to use autoresponders are:

User Registration emails- to confirm and activate their support center account

Survey emails- to let customers rate their support experience

Notifications- to let staff users get these alerts when specified ticket or user actions occur

News Subscriptions- to alert customers whenever a new article is added to the helpdesk

Auto-close- to alert customers that an idle ticket has been closed (this can also be set to simply downgrade a ticket status)

To create an autoresponder template, click on Templates > Manage Templates > Tickets > email_autoresponder

Macros are powerful way to speed up ticket resolution by automating actions that you find yourself making very frequently. Ticket macros are 'predefined replies' taken to a new level.

With macros, you can quickly answer commonly asked questions using pre-written responses and pre-select ticket actions and move tickets through more quickly through the support process.

For example, we find ourselves referring tickets frequently to the finance department. Instead of informing the customer that their ticket is being transferred, transferring the ticket and changing the priority of the ticket...let's use a macro.

First, automate the move to finance by creating a macro called Move ticket to finance. This macro changes the ticket department to Finance, set the ticket priority to Medium and add a message in the reply area.

In the staff control panel, go to Tickets > Macros. Click on the Insert Macro button.

To use a macro, click on the Reply tab of a ticket. Above the ticket properties bar, find the Macro selector.

When you select a macro, two things happen:

• The ticket reply area fills up the content you specified when creating the macro
• The ticket properties bar is pre-selected with any ticket properties you specified when creating the macro

None of these things are saved or sent automatically. All the macro is doing here is filling in and selecting fields, so make sure to hit the Send button to save the ticket's property changes.

You can use this process to apply more than one macro (to combine a bunch of pre-written replies, for example).

A canned response is very much like a predefined reply, except we use them in live chats (via GFI HelpDesk Desktop) instead of email.

This comes in handy, because text messages, images, URLs or code, can all be used as canned responses.

To create a canned response, first add a category or two by clicking Insert Category under the categories tab. Then go ahead and click Insert Response under the same tab.

Visitor rules are designed to automate the ID, group and mine information from visitors to your website. With this information, you can automatically offer a chat with visitors, who have browsed certain pages or have spent significant time on your site.

Rules take the repetitive work out of your hands, while still helping you help your most promising leads while you're fresh in their minds.

These are the two major ways you can target a visitor with visitor rules:

• When a visitor first enters your website- rules are checked once when the visitor opens up the site.
• Each page a visitor opens- rules are checked on every page load during a visitor’s session.

To set up a visitor rule, find its section under the live support tab in the admin control panel.

We can automatically close unresolved tickets that haven't been touched or updated a specified period of time.

From this page, you can create, delete, enable or disable auto close rules.

Helpdesk parser rules can also determine department changes, which tickets are marked as spam, ticket priority, ticket status and so on. For this reason, this is a powerful automation tool.

For more information on mail parser rules, see Mail parser rule essentials for setting up email rules.