Ticketing foundations: Setting up for success

Webinar transcript

Kim: Okay, so hi and welcome to our webinar on setting up a successful ticketing system in Atera. Let’s look at our agenda. Okay, so for our agenda today, we’ll start with some brief introductions. I’ll go over what you can expect from Atera’s help desk solution. I’ll highlight what it means to build a strong ticketing foundation and what you’ll gain from the session. Then, we’re going to dive into the Atera platform for a demonstration of how to set up your help desk solution. Finally, we’ll wrap it up with a Q&A session. You’ll be led through this by myself. I’m Kim, a Customer Success Manager at Atera. My aim, and the aim of all of our Customer Success Managers, is to make sure our customers are getting the most value out of Atera. I’m joined today by my colleague and my very special teammate, Rebecca. Hi Rebecca, thank you for joining us. 

Rebecca: Hi everyone! 

Kim: Rebecca will be answering your questions in the Q&A box. Make sure it’s in that box, Q&A, not chat. She’ll take some time throughout to answer your questions and at the end, we’ll have her hop on to kind of answer one live or to summarize or provide a tip. We’ll see how things go. 

#Housekeeping Notes 

I’m going to drink some water because this is a long session today, but don’t worry, I’ll try to make it interesting. Okay, so some notes. This webinar is being recorded, so while I encourage you to open up your Atera platform and follow along, also keep in mind that you can go back to the webinar for help at your own pace. We should send that to you by tomorrow. Don’t be shy with questions. Rebecca, like I said, is here to help with your questions as you type them into the Q&A window. It’s possible we won’t get to all of your questions today, so we’ll make sure to get back to you after the webinar. At the end of the webinar, we’re going to launch a short survey. This is important for ensuring you get the kind of content most relevant for you, so please take a moment at the end to respond. Don’t mind me, I can’t press my button here. There we go, sorry about that. Okay, I’m going to launch a poll. One second. There we go. So there should be a poll tab now. Please visit that tab and respond. We’d really like to know if you’re currently using our ticketing system. 

#Poll Results and Participant 

Insights I kind of anticipate we’re going to get a mixture of participants here who are new to Atera, learning about ticketing for the first time, or long-time users that are now just adopting this feature. Some of you might already be integrating the ticketing system into your workflow. Let’s see. I can see that we’ve got the majority of you not using our ticketing system, so that’s great. Oh, now more people have answered and I can see that it’s about half and half. Great to see that. I hope for those of you already using ticketing, this will kind of fill up some holes for you, fill some gaps, or maybe you’re new to the team and that’s why you’re doing this. For those of you who are new, this is going to set you up with the foundation. 

#Atera’s Help Desk and Ticketing 

Features Atera’s help desk and ticketing have several features that work in concert to bring you the most value. You can see how they’re broken down in each of these columns. I’ll go through some of these features today, and we’ll be hosting a second webinar in the series on advanced topics in ticketing that will take a deeper dive into areas we don’t get to in this webinar. That’s going to be on March 4th, just keep that in mind. I’ll remind you a few times throughout this. Really, what you’re getting out of Atera’s help desk and ticketing is enhanced customization and collaboration, whether it’s through ticket queues or our ability to make technician groups. We also have automations like round-robin assignments and quick reply templates that are there to save you time. You provide your customers with omnichannel support through the various ways people can reach out to you. You can see a couple of those here, of course, and note that the Teams and Slack integration is coming soon with the much-anticipated release of our AI Co-Pilot. I can’t wait for that. Finally, on this slide, the support portal makes it easier for your end-users to find the answers they need.

#Introduction to Knowledge Base and Reporting 

Oops, sorry, my mouse is a little slow. I need an IT professional here to help out with that. Okay, so along the lines of putting information in the hands of your users or customers is the knowledge base. There’s also reporting and analytics that help you make data-driven decisions, excuse me, and to showcase the hard work that your team does. Finally, service management helps track all of that hard work. 

#Importance of a Strong Foundation 

Now today, I’m not going through all of the aspects that I just touched upon because we’re really talking about the foundations here. But so you know, Atera’s ticketing system is designed to optimize and automate your IT processes. It’s providing a central platform for communication, management, and tracking of issues. The goal here, and why all of this matters, is to establish a strong foundation so that you have long-term success through enhanced efficiency and response times, improved organization and accountability, and reduced ticket resolution time. I’m going to go through the essential areas covering the configurations you’ll need to get started and I’ll get you set up with ticket management. What you’ll gain from this session, my hope is that you’ll leave with the confidence to dive into setting up a ticketing system that scales with your business. 

#Demonstration of Atera Platform 

Okay, so I’m going to share my Atera platform now. Note, Atera has two types of all-in-one solutions: one is for MSPs and one is for ITDs. Today, I’m going to demo our MSP version. So if my site looks a little different from yours, if you have an ITD version, that’s why. For example, this platform has a Customers tab while yours will have a Sites tab if you’re an ITD. But no worries, for the ticketing portion, it’s all basically the same. 

#Creating Tickets in Atera 

To begin with, how are tickets created? There are actually a number of ways to create a ticket in Atera, whether we’re talking about technician-created tickets or end-user-created tickets. I’m going to go through five of those methods. 

# Method 1: Email Requests 

The first one, the most common method of creating a ticket, when you think of this sort of field that’s ticketing, it’s basically when a user emails you with a request or an issue. So now, when that user emails you, it’s going to trigger the creation of a ticket in Atera. I want to help you set that up first. So we’re going to go, everyone, you can go into the Admin section. Instead of kind of scrolling through looking for the right area, I always just say go to the search bar and type it in. So we’re going to type in “Email Settings.” 

#Setting Up Email Configuration 

Okay, yeah, so this is where we’re going to give you the most customized and seamless experience for your users and your technicians. The primary customer support address is where you’re going to start. Here’s where you’re going to add your support address. Emails to this address will then need to be forwarded over to your Atera-generated support address. You’ll actually need to do the second part after you put in your email address here. Go over here to “Learn More” where you can see how to set up an email forwarding rule in your email provider. That’s an important step, so I’ll let you do that part on your own time, but just note that you’re going to need to do that. 

#Outgoing Email Configuration

Now, you can also set up an outgoing email domain for responses. There is the no-reply option if you don’t want people to reply to your ticketing. But if you do, and most likely that is the case, you can do so through the DKIM domain verification or using customized SMTP settings. As you can see, the DKIM is the recommended method since it does provide an extra layer of security. The reply-from name can be the technician’s name or, if you have kind of a generic field, you can toggle that off. You can use a generic name like “Support” or something like that.

#Additional Support Email Addresses 

You can add that there. Below that, you can add additional support email addresses. This is perfect if you have a queue for a specific department or site. The final section right here allows you to auto-create a new contact. I highly recommend this for easily keeping track of your contacts and adding additional members. When that happens, you can choose to send an email to somebody who’s new and you can choose which email template that can be. I’ll show you soon how to create an email template, but for example, if you’re directing new contacts to join the customer portal, you can add the credential information in there. I’m not going to dive much into the customer portal today; that’ll be in the advanced webinar, but just keep that in mind. 

#Ticket Creation Methods 

#User-Created Tickets 

Okay, so we’ve done the settings. Going back now to the various methods of creating a ticket, the most popular technician-created method. We just had the user-created method. Now, technician-created is simply by going here: New and Ticket or going to the Ticket section. So I’m going to hit Admin there. In the main area, I’ll hit Tickets and just select New Ticket. If somebody comes to your desk and they have an issue, something they need your help with, and you want to create a ticket to make sure you have a flow that you’re tracking, this is a great way to do this. 

#Technician-Created Tickets 

I’ll come back here in a second. I just want to let you know a third way to create a ticket is from alerts. Let’s go back to that Admin panel and this time we’re going to look up Thresholds. I’m going to select one. I’ll select Leor here. We have our threshold items here. You’ll see that when you create a threshold profile, you’re going to get an alert when devices exceed those thresholds. 

#Setting Up Threshold Profiles 

Now, a tip while we’re here: this is really important. I want you to take time at a later date to not just use the presets. The presets are really examples, but I want you to create alerts that are going to be the most relevant and customized for you. Otherwise, you’re going to get inundated with a lot of noise, a lot of alerts, and tickets. I don’t want you to have that; I want it to be very relevant. So do take a little bit of time here. If you need any help, you can reach out to support as well; they’re a great source of help. 

#Alert Settings 

After you’ve got your threshold profile set up, you’ll go over to Alert Settings right here. On the right, you can select if you want a ticket to be created for those kinds of alerts. Whether you want also critical or you can select warnings, you can select both or none of those. This is great if you can choose specific sites or customers. You can select all, which might be the case, or maybe you have a VIP customer or site that you just specifically want to have an alert for, and you can do that and save that. 

#Creating Tickets from Alerts 

So I’m going to go now into our Alerts page. We’ve set up our alert settings here right here. So we’re back in the main tab, the main menu, and you can select Alerts. I can see these are all of the alerts that I currently have. Right here is one that was automatically created from the setup that we just had. So this ticket was automatically created. You also have the ability to manually create an alert and a ticket from an alert. It’s just here: Create New Ticket. You can see it pulls in all of the relevant information for you, so you can just fill in any additional information that you would like from there. 

#Customer Portal and API 

There are two more ways to create a ticket. One is via the customer portal. Like I said, I’m not going to dive into that, but I just wanted you to be aware. Definitely sign up for that webinar that’s coming up so you can do a part two of all of this. The final way is by API. I’m not really going to go into great depth here because it’s very specific, but if this is something that you would like to do to create tickets, you have the API documentation right here. I just want you to be aware that that is an option. 

#Managing Tickets 

#Viewing and Managing Tickets 

Okay, so let’s move back now to the main page and we’re going to go to Tickets. Once a ticket has been created using one of the various methods that I’ve mentioned, they’re going to show up on this page. From here, there are two queues: one is for the tickets that require a one-time resolution—they’re now in the ticket queue, the technician’s queue—and the second is for scheduled tickets. These are great; they act as reminders. They can be recurring. Maybe there’s a task that you want to do every week or every month. You can just create a ticket and schedule that to recur. 

#Bulk Actions and Filters 

Going back to the main tickets area, something that I can do here is select this so I can take bulk actions. That includes assigning a ticket, setting the status, setting priority, merging tickets—that’s a really great one if you want to select multiple and merge them if they’re related. We have filters here, so you can filter this page. Maybe you want only open tickets and you want to see anybody assigned to Abigail, for example. I can do that, and you can also save as a new view. This makes sure that it’s there for you to access quickly later on. If you have a specific view that you would like to regularly access, it’s great to do that. You can do multiple of those. I’m just going to reset that for now. Before we even go into a ticket, there are some things that you can see and actions that you can take.

#Ticket Overview and Customer Association 

If I hover over a ticket, I can get an at-a-glance overview of what’s happening. For example, John Smith reached out to say his printer is not working—very short, sweet, and straight to the point. The blue writing here is this specific customer or site. The reason why this ticket pulled in and was connected right away to the customer is because the relevant domain has been set up in the customer section. I’ll show you that really quickly. So, customers or sites if you’re working on an ITD platform, and I’ll go ahead and click one of the customers. If I go here, I can see that the domain has been set up. Now, anytime a ticket comes in and it’s from somebody’s email address that has this domain, the system can automatically see which customer that belongs to. This is definitely worth doing if you never set that up when you began with Atera. 

#Using Atera’s AI Co-Pilot 

Back to the tickets page now. If you have Atera’s AI Co-Pilot add-on, which I highly recommend, you can use this to generate a summary of the ticket and even take an action to get a solution. You can see that right there. 

#SLA and Sentiment Analysis 

The SLA shows you if you’re within the time limit for resolving a ticket. Setting up SLAs will be covered more in the advanced webinar, but just so you’re aware. Sentiment analysis is an AI feature. Even if you don’t have the add-on, you have this ability. It displays the tone of the ticket, so everyone has access to that. 

#Assigned Group 

Everything I’ve shown you so far is available even before the ticket is opened. This is to dramatically save time on organizing tickets. I want to increase your efficiency for your technicians—the ability to easily see what the ticket is and whether it should be assigned to somebody else. This assigned group column is helpful for that, and it streamlines the distribution of tickets to your technicians based on the different responsibilities they’re handling. This is great also for our enterprise-level teams. The most common groups, of course, are Tier 1 and Tier 2, but you can be creative if you have other ways that you’d like this to be organized. 

#Setting Up Technician Groups 

I can show you how to set that up. It’s very straightforward. Let’s go into Admin and Technician Groups. You can see it’s a new feature here. It’s just a matter of selecting a new group and adding the information. An additional benefit to creating groups is that we have this brand new feature: the group-based permissions feature. It’s just released and it’s great for, for example, if your finance team is using Atera for budgeting and billing or HR. The ability to read and respond to those tickets can be limited to just that group, so that’s really cool. 

#Responding to Tickets 

Let’s go back to the tickets. There are some important areas that I want to highlight when you’re responding to a ticket. I’ll just click on any ticket here. For example, you can respond internally—this is just going to be among the technicians—or you can use a public reply. When you’re replying, to save time, you can select from quick reply templates here. I see we already have a bunch, and you can create new ones. When you create new, it’s going to take you to the quick reply template section of the admin panel. You can either go there from Admin or just from creating new. You could create a new one, for example, a reminder to reboot your computer—something like that. As I know you’re used to saying, I was just saying that to my kids today as they were having computer issues, and they rebooted and it worked, and I felt like a superhero, like all of you. 

#Utilizing AI Co-Pilot 

Another way to help—again, I’m always trying to find ways to make your lives easier—is the Co-Pilot. I’ve already talked about this a little bit, but when you select Co-Pilot, like I showed before, it’ll summarize the ticket, help you troubleshoot, and take action. That’s really the benefit of AI. That’s the kind of AI that Atera uses, where it’s not just giving you content; it’s taking it a step further and taking action. This can save a tremendous amount of time. 

#Time Tracking and Remote Access 

On the right, we have time tracking. I’m going to pause that; I don’t need to track this ticket. For our ticketing on Atera, we have that set up automatically. You can change that so it’s not automatic. I’ll show you how in the settings in a moment. Note, you can also use manual time entry, so check that out. There’s “Show More” for even more information to dive in, especially useful for people with billing. 

#Contact and Contract Information 

Contact information: you can see the contract. There is a default setting in the customers where you can choose which contract will be the default, and you can change that. Something that I really like is scrolling down here. You can remote into the device if it’s online. This is great. You can connect in and choose which option here. Really, really handy. I think this is a huge benefit, actually. I just want to point out it’s a benefit of having this consolidated solution—having your ticketing and your RMM come together to create one easy interface. 

#Calendar Integration 

Finally, I wanted to highlight for you that you can integrate your calendar here. This is perfect for scheduling with the contact if you need to dig deeper on a call or visit. 

#Workflow Efficiency 

Okay, so now that we’ve looked at all the different methods of creating a ticket, what the ticketing page and the ticket itself look like, let’s explore ways to make your workflow more efficient, whether that’s through automation or customized settings.

#Ticket Settings Configuration 

We’re going to start with ticket settings, so let’s go to Admin again. I’ll type in “ticket settings.” I hope all of you are getting used to just typing in what you’re looking for and not searching and digging through. 

#Ticket Timer Behavior 

I’m going to go through the various configurations, which I hope will be easily understood now that you’re acquainted with the components of the ticket. I could have started here—it kind of seems natural to start with settings—but I think if you’re not aware of the reasoning behind it, it’s not as clear. So that’s why I wanted to show you the other aspects first. First, you can decide the ticket timer behavior that we were talking about, for created, accessed, or closed tickets. For example, if I want the ticket timer to automatically start whenever I’m on a ticket, I can select this and you saw that in action with my ticket. 

#Managing Spam Tickets 

Manage spam tickets. I hope this won’t happen too frequently, but when it does, you can choose to enable automatic spam marking on your tickets. 

#Billable Time and Default Duration 

For our MSPs, you can decide whether time spent on a ticket is billable, and you can change the default duration when adding a time entry. You can also add ticket rounding. 

#Default Response Type 

Something that I find very useful and valuable is setting the default response type. Internal is a great one to set as the default if you’re prone to accidentally sending what should have been an internal note as a public note. Even though our internal notes are labeled and in yellow so you can really differentiate, if you’re managing a lot at a time, this can still be a handy safeguard to make sure you’re not sending those internal notes. Just set those as the default; it’s easier to switch over to public. 

#Ticket ID Sequence and Sentiment Analysis 

Ticket ID sequence: if ever you’re in need of resetting the sequence with a new number, you’re able to do that right there. 

Ticket sentiment analysis: if you remember, I showed you that AI feature that displays the tone of the ticket. If this isn’t useful, you can turn it off. Really, the more customized the ticketing page, the more efficient you can be. So if it’s not useful, I don’t want you to have things that you don’t need. 

#Enabling Ticket Auto-Tagging 

Enable ticket auto-tagging: this is great to help you with filtering your tickets. When this is on, what happens is we have AI that will automatically add ticket tags. That’s not a paid feature; that’s what everybody has available. Note about those automatic tags from AI: you can replace those with your own tags. You can custom-create some right from the ticket itself to really help with that filtering. 

#Customer Portal Visibility 

Finally, you can also choose which tickets can be viewed in the customer portal by the contact who opened the ticket. You have open, pending, resolved, closed—those are the standard. You can also see that I have a list of custom statuses here on my demo environment, which you can also create if needed from the custom field section, which I will show you soon. And a reminder—one of several—I hope you know what I’m going to say now because I’ve said it over and over again: the customer portal is going to be an advanced topic. So definitely register for that March 4th webinar. I believe it’s March 4th. Like I said, it’s a part two on ticketing that’s going to be hosted by my colleague Shera, and I think it’s going to be excellent. I don’t think you’re able to register yet for it—I might be wrong—but definitely keep an eye out for that. 

#Ticket Automation Rules 

We’ve covered ticket settings. Now we’re going to go to the ticket automation rules. This is a pretty cool one, so let’s go to ticket automation rules. 

#Benefits of Automation 

One of the biggest benefits to setting up ticketing in Atera is the ability to set up automations. We are always asking how we can be saving time. There are a lot of reasons to set up a ticket automation, for example, to route a ticket directly to the right technician or to create different rules that will define the status of the ticket. Because there are so many options, take a little time to play with this feature, thinking about all the basic but time-consuming tasks that you’re doing and see how you can automate those tasks. I have a colleague, Daniela—Rebecca and I work closely with her—and she always asks how you can be automating your workflow. So keep Daniela in mind as you play around with this area. The time that you’ll take to set this up is going to save you a lot of time later on. Just note, go to this “Learn More” button. You see this “Learn More” throughout our site; it’s really helpful, but especially in an area like this where you can be really creative, it can help you to dig into this a bit more. 

Example: Follow-Up on Pending Tickets I’ll show you an example, though. I recently spoke to a client who said they’d love it if, when a person hadn’t responded to a ticket for a while, they’d get a nudge—a reminder to go back to the ticket. So let’s walk through how to do that since this would be manually a time-consuming task. 

#Adding a New Rule 

There are three actions you take here: add the trigger, the conditions, and the actions. So I’m going to add a new rule. Let’s call it “Follow Up on Pending Ticket.” I’m just going to copy and paste that for the description. You could add longer, you know, we say 72 hours. The trigger is going to be “Ticket Status Changed,” and then we’re going to ignore the flow. So that means you can see if we have a hierarchy structure, we’re just going to jump over that. And yeah, let’s make that active. So I’m going to select “Add.” 

#Creating Conditions 

Now we’re going to create the conditions to check how long the ticket status has been pending. So you can see “Ticket Property” and it’s going to be “Status” and “Operator Equals Pending.” So when it switches over to pending, and I’m going to say “Must Match,” we’re going to add. So we need to add another property here. So it’s going to be “Hours Since Status Changed.” This is a beta feature that’s pretty cool. “Equals,” and we said 72 hours, and click “Add.” 

#Defining Actions 

Finally, we need the action. So the action: when that is the case, we want to send an email to the contact. Then I can choose from one of my email templates. I already have a list of email templates here that I can choose from, but now I want to show you how you can create your own templates so you’ll have something. Maybe right now you don’t have anything. 

#Creating Email Templates 

Let’s go over to email templates and I’ll show you how to create that. Okay, email template. So I am going to go over here to the right. I’ll give it a template name. Let’s say “Reminder 72 Hours.” Reminder 72 Hours. I’m going to add. All right, so I can give it a subject—whatever I want to say, “Friendly Reminder,” I don’t know. And we’ll go over here: “Hi,” and we have these snippets that are going to pull in the information, “Contact Name.”

#Automated Email Templates 

You can automatically pull in that contact name since this is an automated email. Your ticket and let’s put in the ticket number. I think that’s enough. Oh, maybe we can also put the ticket title. “Your ticket [Ticket Number] titled ‘[Ticket Title]’ is awaiting a response.” Something like that. “If this has been resolved or if you have an update, please let us know. Thank you.” And then we can put “Technician First Name” for how we’re going to end that. Then we would save the changes, and that’s it. Now, after saving it—I’m not going to bother saving it—after saving that, you will now have that as your drop-down when you’re creating your automation. You now have this email to choose from. Create as many email templates as you need here. 

#Ticket Forms 

This has been a lot, but I hope it’s not been too overwhelming. I’m not done yet. I just have a couple more features to go over. Next, we’ll go over a feature that helps save time. That’s what I’m trying to do—help your technicians save a lot of time and provide the best service possible. That is going to lead us to ticket forms. So let’s go back to our Admin. 

#Creating Ticket Forms 

Ticket forms allow the technicians to get the correct relevant information documented in the ticket for each one of their end users’ requests or for internal purposes. They’ll be right on the ticket. You can choose a form, and that will pull up the most relevant information. It’s going to also ensure you’re gathering the most essential data so that you can make the right decision—maybe who’s going to answer the ticket or it’s going to pull in the information that you need for reporting purposes. I highly recommend using our reporting, and the more data that you have, the more data you can use for that. It’s as easy as clicking “New Template,” putting in a name at the top, and then on the left here you can see our presets. On the right are the available ticket fields. You can choose what’s available or you can click “New Field” to create additional custom options. Selecting that will take you to the Custom Fields section of Atera. 

#Custom Fields 

Let’s go there now. I’ll go there this way. Custom Fields. On all entities of Atera, you can add a custom field. This provides more granularity and flexibility. Again, it’s also going to help with the reporting, and in this case, it’s going to help with streamlining the flow for your technicians. For example, if you have Tier 1 and Tier 2 technicians and you want to indicate which tier this ticket should be assigned to, you would click “Add Field.” We’ll do “Target Ticket,” we’re going to have “Dropdown,” and let’s call it “Tier.” Let’s make it mandatory. User can edit, and then the values: we’ll put “Tier 1,” press the plus again, “Tier 2.” Then you add, and that will be that. I’m going to cancel for now. Similar to ticket automations, this is something that you should play with. Use the “Learn More” to dive in a little bit here, but definitely look around here, play with this along with your ticket automations. This is a really helpful area that I think you should dive into a little bit more. 

#Additional Resources and Support 

That wraps the content that I wanted to show you. Before I stop sharing my screen, I want to remind everyone where they can find more resources. 

#Help Center 

Go to this question mark here, the Help Center. This is where you’re going to get more of these articles to learn more. You can also get them from the Help Center—a really helpful knowledge-based library there. 

#Community 

Our community: if you’re not a part of our community, definitely sign up. It is a place where you can get peer-to-peer recommendations and information. Now, it’s one thing to get it from me—I work at Atera, I have a specific view. Talk to our community members and see how they’re doing this in real time. What kind of custom fields are they using? What kind of ticket automations are helping to make their day easier? 

#Product Updates 

Product updates: we are always updating. I hope you’ve noticed that if you’ve been with Atera for any amount of time, there’s constantly something new. This happens because of right here where you see “Share Ideas and Feedback.” We’re constantly trying to understand what is working for you, what’s not working for you, what’s on your wish list. If any of you have a customer success manager, share that with them in your meetings, but come here and share those ideas and feedback. I promise that we’re checking this, and it’s the most valuable thing you can do for us and for yourselves—so that we can help you. I hope that’s clear. 

#Support Team 

Talk to your support team. Whenever you want to start a live chat with support, it might seem at first that it’s a bot because it’s going to ask a couple of questions that are automated. After answering that, you’re going straight to a person. I can’t emphasize that enough. We’re talking about great technology to help with your day, we’re talking about AI, all these great features, but at the end of the day, when you need some help and you reach out to support, we’ve got a team of individuals—human beings—who are just really there to help you. They’re very eager; they really care about helping. So I want you to know that about our team. I’m really, really proud of them. Shout out to our support team. 

#AI Assistant 

Get instant answers. Not everybody has the paid AI add-on, our Co-Pilot. It’s definitely worth looking into, but everybody has this AI help. This is going to be helpful as you’re diving into ticketing. Make sure you know you’re not going to necessarily remember all of this. I will make sure you get the recording, but also you can go here. Maybe you remember we talked about this but you can’t remember where it was. “How do I make internal replies the default?” I can ask the AI assistant, give it a second to think, and then it tells me exactly where I need to navigate to set internal note as the default technician response type. Super helpful. Great thing with AI: always give it feedback if it’s good or bad. It’s definitely learning from you, and this is very specific to Atera. The information that you’re putting in our AI is just yours; it’s not public. 

#Q&A Session 

Kim: Something to remember there. Okay, so I’m going to move on now. We’ve learned a lot of information. The Q&A now. For those of you who’ve been asking questions, let’s bring Rebecca back on. Rebecca, do you have any questions that you want to share or answer live or anything? 

Rebecca: Absolutely, Kim. Thank you so much, that was amazing. Let’s also launch the survey so everyone can share their amazing feedback. Wonderful. Please make sure to respond because we want to make these as useful for you as possible. We’d love your feedback. Diving into a few questions, we had some really great ones. I was actually mid-typing the response to David, but let me just respond live. 

David’s Question: He said, “Right now I open all of my tickets. Is the easiest way for end users to do it via email?” 

Rebecca: For this one, I would say I think that it really depends on your end users’ level of technicality. But I think the easiest transition that we find is generally starting with opening by email, just because email is something that they’re very used to already, and so it’s an easier learning curve. That’s my recommendation. Kim, if you have any other additional thoughts, feel free. 

Kim: Yeah, definitely. I think by email is what people think of when they think of opening a ticket. But we also have the customer portal. I know I didn’t go into that today, but that is a great option. Soon we’ll have our autopilot released whereby if your users are using the customer portal, they can also access AI to help them with those simple requests like “Oh, I can’t find my password” or things that can be answered quickly and easily. But for sure what Rebecca said, email is a great option. 

Rebecca: Perfect, thank you David. 

Nir’s Question: Can users create a ticket via the agent without having to log into Atera’s help desk? 

Rebecca: Yes, they absolutely can. They can do so via the help desk agent. This is Windows only, so keep that in mind. Essentially, if you activate the help desk agent for your end users, they’ll be able to have a little widget in their system tray and they’ll be able to directly from there click into it and either go into the customer portal or create a ticket directly from there. That way they can avoid having to log in. It’s a one-time authentication process for the end users, but after that, there’s no login required to create tickets. I’ll actually share my screen to show a little bit more about that. 

Kim: Yes, an authentication process is necessary. I’ll share with you the KB (knowledge base) article so you can see all the steps, but it’s pretty straightforward and again a one-time process. 

Rebecca: Perfect. Just taking a look to see if I’ve missed anything. 

Jacob’s Question: I would like the technician to get an email alert when a ticket is assigned. Is that possible through automation? 

Rebecca: Yes, it absolutely is through our ticket automation rules. Kim, if you still have Atera open, can we go together and build this out for Jacob live? 

Kim: Oh, I closed it. Do you have it open, Rebecca? 

Rebecca: Yes, give me a moment. I’ll stop sharing this so we can extend the screen. Just give me a minute over here. And a note, I saw in the chat a request for the recording. Yes, everyone will receive a recording of the session. 

Rebecca: Awesome. I don’t know why, just give me a minute. Oh, there we go. Okay, you guys can see my screen, can confirm? 

Kim: Yes, absolutely. 

Rebecca: Perfect. So in terms of building out the automation that you had in mind, we’re of course going to go to our Admin and to our ticket automation rules. We’ll go ahead and click “Add a New Rule.” We’ll say “Notify Technician Upon Assignment.” 

Kim: Notification. 

Rebecca: So the trigger in this case will also be “New Ticket Created.” Again, we’re going to ensure that we’ve selected “Ignore the Flow” because we don’t want this to be hierarchical, and we’ll make this active. So we’re going to go ahead and add this to our rules. Then in terms of the conditions, you’re going to choose… 

Rebecca: Let’s see… Why am I not finding what I’m trying to find…? 

Kim: Status. 

Rebecca: Okay, equals… No, that’s not right. Apologies, I’m struggling. Kim, do you have any ideas? Just want to see if we can figure this out live; otherwise, of course, we’ll send you a screenshot after the meeting or the webinar. 

Kim: I think it’s worth sending it afterwards. This is a good clue about when I recommended earlier learning more from that article. It definitely is helpful in creating those automation rules. So definitely, even when I’m creating automation rules, I’m usually getting some help from our knowledge base article just because there are so many variations. It’s also something when you have time to play around with it and try all the different options, seeing what works—that’s another way. I do find it’s hard to do it on the spot. 

Rebecca: Fair, yeah. So I’ll send that to you after. Apologies, I couldn’t figure it out this second. It should be rather straightforward. I think I’m just missing something to remember there.

Kim: Okay, so I’m going to move on now. We learned a lot of information. The Q&A now. For those of you who’ve been asking questions, let’s bring Rebecca back on. Rebecca, do you have any questions that you want to share or answer live or anything? 

Rebecca: Absolutely, Kim. Thank you so much, that was amazing. Let’s also launch the survey so everyone can share their amazing feedback. Wonderful. Please make sure to respond because we want to make these as useful for you as possible. We’d love your feedback. Diving into a few questions, we had some really great ones. I was actually mid-typing the response to David, but let me just respond live. 

David’s Question: He said, “Right now I open all of my tickets. Is the easiest way for end users to do it via email?” 

Rebecca: For this one, I would say I think that it really depends on your end users’ level of technicality. But I think the easiest transition that we find is generally starting with opening by email, just because email is something that they’re very used to already, and so it’s an easier learning curve. That’s my recommendation. Kim, if you have any other additional thoughts, feel free. 

Kim: Yeah, definitely. I think by email is what people think of when they think of opening a ticket. But we also have the customer portal. I know I didn’t go into that today, but that is a great option. Soon we’ll have our autopilot released whereby if your users are using the customer portal, they can also access AI to help them with those simple requests like “Oh, I can’t find my password” or things that can be answered quickly and easily. But for sure what Rebecca said, email is a great option. 

Rebecca: Perfect, thank you David. 

Nir’s Question: Can users create a ticket via the agent without having to log into Atera’s help desk? 

Rebecca: Yes, they absolutely can. They can do so via the help desk agent. This is Windows only, so keep that in mind. Essentially, if you activate the help desk agent for your end users, they’ll be able to have a little widget in their system tray and they’ll be able to directly from there click into it and either go into the customer portal or create a ticket directly from there. That way they can avoid having to log in. It’s a one-time authentication process for the end users, but after that, there’s no login required to create tickets. I’ll actually share my screen to show a little bit more about that. 

Kim: Yes, an authentication process is necessary. I’ll share with you the KB (knowledge base) article so you can see all the steps, but it’s pretty straightforward and again a one-time process. 

Rebecca: Perfect. Just taking a look to see if I’ve missed anything. 

Jacob’s Question: I would like the technician to get an email alert when a ticket is assigned. Is that possible through automation? 

Rebecca: Yes, it absolutely is through our ticket automation rules. Kim, if you still have Atera open, can we go together and build this out for Jacob live? 

Kim: Oh, I closed it. Do you have it open, Rebecca? 

Rebecca: Yes, give me a moment. I’ll stop sharing this so we can extend the screen. Just give me a minute over here. And a note, I saw in the chat a request for the recording. Yes, everyone will receive a recording of the session. 

Rebecca: Awesome. I don’t know why, just give me a minute. Oh, there we go. Okay, you guys can see my screen, can confirm? 

Kim: Yes, absolutely. 

Rebecca: Perfect. So in terms of building out the automation that you had in mind, we’re of course going to go to our Admin and to our ticket automation rules. We’ll go ahead and click “Add a New Rule.” We’ll say “Notify Technician Upon Assignment.” 

Kim: Notification. 

Rebecca: So the trigger in this case will also be “New Ticket Created.” Again, we’re going to ensure that we’ve selected “Ignore the Flow” because we don’t want this to be hierarchical, and we’ll make this active. So we’re going to go ahead and add this to our rules. Then in terms of the conditions, you’re going to choose… 

Rebecca: Let’s see… Why am I not finding what I’m trying to find…? 

Kim: Status. 

Rebecca: Okay, equals… No, that’s not right. Apologies, I’m struggling. Kim, do you have any ideas? Just want to see if we can figure this out live; otherwise, of course, we’ll send you a screenshot after the meeting or the webinar. 

Kim: I think it’s worth sending it afterwards. This is a good clue about when I recommended earlier learning more from that article. It definitely is helpful in creating those automation rules. So definitely, even when I’m creating automation rules, I’m usually getting some help from our knowledge base article just because there are so many variations. It’s also something when you have time to play around with it and try all the different options, seeing what works—that’s another way. I do find it’s hard to do it on the spot. 

Rebecca: Fair, yeah. So I’ll send that to you after. Apologies, I couldn’t figure it out this second. It should be rather straightforward. I think I’m just missing one thing I will mention, and maybe this will be covered a little bit more in the next session with the advanced ticketing, is to keep in mind the logic of our ticket automation rules. I’m sure you’ll see here the “must match” option. I’ll just choose something for the sake of this demonstration. Essentially, how our “must match” works is it functions as an AND logic that can be seen in other tools or mechanisms. So if you select both, like let’s just say you have multiple conditions, if you select “must match,” then essentially both conditions need to be met. Whereas if you leave it blank, then either condition could be met in order for the action to be carried out. Please keep that in mind when you’re selecting “must match.” Obviously, if you only have a singular condition, it doesn’t matter whether you choose “must match” or not. But if you have more than one, keep in mind if you want an AND or OR operation. 

#AI and Automated Solutions 

Sayad’s Question: With using AI, can we generate automated solutions for common issues? 

Rebecca: Yes, you absolutely can. Not only does our AI provide summaries and replies, it also provides you with suggested solutions. What’s really wonderful about it is it’s also agentic, meaning you have the Atera agent installed on your devices, and it can actually suggest and complete actions to resolve issues as well. So definitely recommend checking that out. If you’re interested in a trial of the Co-Pilot and you don’t have access at the moment, please let us know and we will take care of that. 

Kim: I feel like this is the year for AI. We’ve had AI for a long time, there have been a lot of updates, and there are many more to come. Everybody at Atera is really excited for what’s to come and just itching to share it with everyone. Looking forward to all of the new features there with AI. 

#Closing Remarks 

Kim: Well, thank you everyone for sharing all of these questions and Rebecca for answering those. Any questions that we didn’t get to, we’ll reach out to you afterwards. No worries there—give us some time and you can receive a response to your questions. You’ll also receive a recording of this webinar. Like I said, I encourage you to sign up for our webinar on advanced ticketing. We covered the basics today and the advanced session will take it to the next level. That’s going to be March 4th, I believe. Also, check out any of our other webinars that you can sign up for, or you can look at our collection of past webinars. You can get those recordings too. We always save them in our library. I hope this was useful for all of you. I really enjoyed sharing information about tickets with everyone. I think it’s a wonderful feature. If you don’t already have it integrated into Atera, definitely now is the time to do so. Have a wonderful rest of your day everyone, and maybe we’ll see each other again soon. Thank you, bye everyone. 

Rebecca: Thanks Kim.