Customer support: FAQ and tickets
Customers can read your answers to common questions on a Help page in the customer portal and write to you through Tickets. Both live in the panel under the Support menu.
FAQ and the Help page
Section titled “FAQ and the Help page”Open Support > FAQ and click New FAQ entry. Each entry has a Question, an Answer (plain text, line breaks are kept), an Order and a Published switch. Customers see published entries on the portal Help page, in that order, with a search field. The Help item appears in the portal menu once at least one entry is published.
Below the answers the Help page shows “Did not find your answer?” with Open a ticket.
Tickets
Section titled “Tickets”In the portal under Tickets a customer fills in New ticket: a Subject, a Topic (only when you created topics, see below), optionally one of their servers (or Not about one server) and the Message.
A ticket opens as a chat: messages are bubbles, the customer’s own on the right, yours on the left. The composer at the bottom sends without reloading the page (Enter sends, Shift+Enter adds a line), and new messages from the other side appear on their own within about 10 seconds, together with the new status. The customer can Close ticket at any time; a message to a closed ticket opens it again.
In the panel, Support > Tickets lists every ticket with its customer, topic and status (open, answered, closed), with filters for status and topic. The menu shows how many tickets are waiting for you. Open a ticket to answer in the same chat, see the customer, server, topic and opening date on the right, and Set status. Your answer sets the ticket to answered; a customer reply sets it back to open.
Ticket numbers
Section titled “Ticket numbers”Every ticket gets a random 6-digit number, for example #498549. It is shown in the portal, in the panel, in the chat
and in the emails, and it is recorded in the audit log. Portal ticket addresses use the number, not a running id.
In the email templates use the variable {TicketNumber} ({TicketId} still works).
Topics
Section titled “Topics”Topics are optional. On Support > Tickets the Topics card lists them: type a name (for example “Billing”) and an order and click Add; rename or reorder a topic with Save, remove it with Delete.
- Without topics, customers just write their ticket.
- Once at least one topic exists, customers must pick one when they open a ticket.
- Deleting a topic keeps its tickets; they simply have no topic any more.
Emails
Section titled “Emails”- New tickets and customer replies go to the addresses under Notifications on the Tickets page (“Email new tickets and customer replies to”, comma-separated). Empty: the alert recipients.
- The customer gets a confirmation email when they open a ticket (template ticket_opened, “Support: ticket received (to the customer)”) and another one for every answer.
- Reply-To on ticket mails (the Notifications card): optional. When a customer answers a ticket mail, the answer goes to this address. Replies by mail are not added to the ticket.
- The templates are ticket_new, ticket_opened and ticket_reply under Settings > Email > Templates. Mails need a working Settings > Email setup.
Attachments
Section titled “Attachments”Customers and admins can attach files to a message (up to 5 files per message). A message always needs text; a file alone
is not sent. Allowed types are PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, PDF, plain text and ZIP, checked by the file content, not by its name.
Set the size limit under Notifications > Largest attachment (MB per file, default 10, at most 12). The web server’s
PHP upload_max_filesize must allow it too.
A file can only be downloaded by people who can see the ticket (the customer, you, and the customer’s reseller for their own tickets). In emails an attachment shows as a line like “[2 attachments, …]” instead of the file itself.
Customers of a reseller
Section titled “Customers of a reseller”Customers of a reseller do not write to you. Their reseller answers them: in the reseller portal, Tickets and FAQ work like the pages above, with the reseller’s own topics and FAQ entries. The reseller gets the ticket emails (at their account email address). You never see those tickets.
Who can use it
Section titled “Who can use it”- Admins need the permission Answer tickets and edit the FAQ (
support.manage). - Help and Tickets are portal features: turn them off for everyone or per customer with the portal feature switches (FAQ and Support tickets).
- A customer can open up to 10 tickets and write up to 30 messages per hour.
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