Your Source for Providing a Better Customer Service and Customer Support Experience

Parature Service Desk Widgets

Service Desk Widgets allow you to have contextually relevant content from outside systems integrated into the Ticket Details page. With a widget, you can pass Ticket, Customer, or Account fields as URL parameters to the third-party system, allowing data specific to the ticket being viewed to be displayed in the customizable-size widget.

Custom Service Desk Widgets pull contextual data about your Tickets, Customers, or Accounts and insert them in a special frame in a ticket. You may only have one active widget at a time, but as many inactive widgets as you wish. Custom Service Desk Widgets currently only work with Parature Ticket. We suggest first trying out widgets on your Parature Sandbox as a best practice.

To get started on creating widgets: Read more »

Leveraging Parature Email Templates

Email Templates is one of the new features Parature introduced in the Parature ‘10 Release. Parature’s Email Templates can be used to improve readability of emails, enhance branding of email messages, and provide more control over the support experience. Check out the points below to see how you can improve the customer experience with the Email Templates feature:

Email Styling
Customize the design of the email notifications received by your customers and CSRs. These customizations can range from including a company logo or custom fonts, colors, and layouts. This feature also provides the ability to include applicable text, such as disclaimers, contact information, or department links. Read more »

Parature for Facebook

Newly Available Parature for Facebook Helps Companies Increase “Face-Time” while Keeping Support and New Customer Acquisition Costs Low

Today we announced the general availability of Parature for Facebook, the industry’s first and only customer service application that enables direct customer engagement through Facebook. The Parature for Facebook application, delivered on-demand through Parature’s software-as-a-service model, helps companies, educational institutions and government associations directly engage with their Facebook fans to resolve service issues, answer pre-sales questions and conduct one-to-one customer interactions, all within Facebook and accessible through an easily installed Support Tab on a Facebook page.

Several new and existing Parature customers have signed on as users of Parature for Facebook, but language learning software giant Rosetta Stone Inc. (NYSE: RST) made history today when it became the very first company in the world to unveil support and service through Facebook to its more than 6,000 fans. Read more »

ParaConnect for Salesforce

Does Salesforce keep the most up-to-date information about your Accounts? Do you limit access to your Portal for only ‘active’ Accounts? If you answer YES to both questions, then you’ll be interested in this tip.

In Salesforce, the status of an Account is typically stored in a custom field on the Account record. That status is then reflected in Parature by an SLA or custom field. When an Account becomes inactive or canceled, the Salesforce record is updated. By default, ParaConnect for Salesforce only updates the Parature Account and Customer records if the corresponding Salesforce record was updated since the last sync. So how can translate the status change to the Customer records in Parature? The answer comes in the form of Salesforce Triggers.

The trigger for this scenario is will execute when a Salesfoce Account record is saved. It will proceed to “update” all Customer records that are associated to the Account record that was modified without actually making any changes to the Customer records. Read more »

Parature offers a simple and easy way to place links to a website not hosted by Parature on your Parature Portal. In fact, the website will opened up directly in the Portal.

To create a Portal Tab, you must be logged in as an Admin. Go to the Portal Tabs page located under the Setup tab. Hit New Portal Tab, and fill out the form.

Setting up a new Portal tab

Read more »

Improving Search Techniques on Your Knowledgebase

Having difficulty finding what you want in the Parature Knowledgebase? The following tips are meant to provide enhanced techniques to improve search results. Also provided, are a few ideas on how to leverage your own knowledgebase to improve the satisfaction of your end users.

Searching the Parature Knowledgebase™

Search keywords rather than entire phrases. Let’s say you are looking for a video tutorial on how to submit a ticket. Your first thought may be to search “video tutorial how to submit a ticket” as your phrase, but this may not render the desired results because there are so many combined words that the search engine is looking for. Begin with something simpler like “submit a ticket” or “video submit ticket”. This kind of search may return more than one result, but it should be easier to find the article you are looking for. Read more »

There are two types of links for Ticket Attachments that can appear in ticket email notifications: Secure or Unsecure. The unsecure link allows anyone to download the file. The secure link will restrict who can download the file based on whether they have visibility of the ticket from the Service Desk or Portal.

To select which type of link to include in ticket email notifications, just add/replace the existing link with the corresponding variable into the Customer or CSR email template. Read more »

Knowledge for Your Knowledgebase

Often times, companies fall short of having the appropriate resources for managing their Knowledgebase, such as a Technical Writer or Administrator. Sometimes knowledgebases are even managed by more than one individual. With this mix of resources, it can frequently be difficult to collaborate and maintain a clean and informational knowledgebase. These obstacles shouldn’t deter you from striving for a robust knowledgebase though. Implementing specific practices and procedures can help improve your knowledgebase and maintain its prime condition.

Let’s start with the basics-what are the best steps in reviewing a knowledgebase article and its location? Begin by considering folder structure and layout. What questions do your users ask the most? What items are they most likely to look for when navigating to the knowledgebase? Organize your folders based on the needs of your end user, whether this is structuring them for beginners to experts or starter information to advanced techniques. Start with analyzing how your customers will read the knowledgebase; this will be your most helpful tool in folder layout. Read more »

Ticket email notifications act as alerts to Customers or CSRs that an update has been made to the ticket. Extend the usefulness of email notifications by including information the recipient is interested in.

• Ticket Fields
  Do your customers reply to tickets by email? Do your customers have multiple open tickets at the same time? If your answer is YES to both questions, you may want to include some ticket fields to remind them about the issue they submitted.

Ticket Fields

How IGN is Optimizing Self-Service for First Contact Resolution

Chris Henderson, Senior Manager, Customer Service at video gaming giant IGN Entertainment (a division of Fox), spoke at ParaFest last month and shared some great tips.

She’s been with IGN since 1997 and, as a video gamer herself, really knows her customers. And she’s proven time and time again that you can achieve high rates of first contact resolution even with tight staffing restraints.

Here are just a few tips:

1. When it comes to designing your portal, design for success. Design your support center with the same care your company uses presenting their product. Read more »