I am thinking of using the support ticket system for my own company.

One feature we are missing is the ability to send canned replies or otherwise specify a reply to an existing ticket as the answer to a new ticket. This will help support to avoid answering similar questions again and again.

Is something like this in the works for the 2.x branch? Or, do we have to roll our own?

If the latter, I guess it would live best as a separate contrib module? If so, a hint or two to the best approach for coding this would be greatly appreciated.

Comments

jeremy’s picture

jeremy commented

There's no specific implementation of this planned in 7.x-1.x or 7.x-2.x at this time. However, it's an often requested and obviously useful feature, so I too would like to determine the best way to do it, and would happily merge in the functionality.

One idea I had was Trigger and/or Rules integration; however, that would be more for automated answers. It sounds like you're looking instead for a manual effort, selecting the appropriate template to post a reply. I'd recommend the first thing to do is to review available contrib modules and see if anything can satisfy this requirement. Anything that can post a comment on a node from a template would work.

jeremy’s picture

jeremy commented

This is the closest thing I've found -- I'm not familiar with it, and there's no 7.x version yet, but otherwise it seems to be doing what you need:
http://drupal.org/project/canned_texts

venkat-rk’s picture

venkat-rk commented

I tried a bizarre (?) approach to doing this using entity reference and that wound up as an issue.

I am going to check out your suggestion to try canned_texts module. Need to figure out how to upgrade it to 7.x, though. :-(

johnv’s picture

johnv
Primary language Dutch
commented

A term reference might be an alternative for entity references. In D7, the terms not only have a ´title-name´ but also a Description out of the box.
However, I haven´t seen-used a proper formatter that shows the description instead of the title. ´canned text´ creates a new view - you could use a EVA-field or Viewreference-field for that.

venkat-rk’s picture

venkat-rk commented

The difficulty I foresee with using term reference (apart from the formatter) is that one would need to create as many terms as there are canned replies, which can quickly grow into a big list on a busy support ticket system.

By using existing support ticket comments, we are reusing stuff that's already there, although I can see that this can potentially be a huge list as well.

May be the answer is to create a separate entity for canned replies, create nodes for each canned reply and then use entity reference to bring in those canned replies into the support ticket system. This is what I originally tried before attempting support ticket comment as the entity reference. May be I should try again.

johnv’s picture

johnv
Primary language Dutch
commented

Using existing comments is a good idea - you do not need to define new entities. But how do you define which comment is re-usable?
IMO the biggest trick is to seduce the user to create the 'canned replies'. Do you have an easy-to-use workflow? Will some-one have a separate task to evaluate all answers and create this kind-of FAQ-database? Or can an answer be marked as (potentially) re-usable?

About the Term reference: these are entities, too. Indeed, you might end up with a long list - likewise with 'normal' entities/nodes. It will give you a lot of contrib-widgets that will use the hierarchy, which you'll want to use to group the answers.

Good luck!

purencool’s picture

purencool commented
Issue summary: View changes
Status: Active » Closed (outdated)