Setup integration with almost any Help Desk system

Apart from the  growing number of integrated systems that work nicely with Nicereply, you can connect it to virtually any help desk or CRM system (even your custom-coded one). Here's a simple, general guide to this kind of integration.

To make things work, the help desk/CRM system of your choice needs to meet some basic requirements:

  • It has unique identifiers for agents (e.g. "jack-nicereply", "348592") or at least unique full names.
  • It should a unique identifiers for tickets (see details bellow)
  • It has the possibility to insert variables to outgoing email templates (notification templates, signature templates, etc.) 

1. Create Nicereply custom integration

Within Nicereply go to Integrations -> Add new integration and choose “Skip integration”. At first we will add new agents. You can do it either manually by “Add new person” or by bulk action “Import CSV”. 

The agent’s “username” must match the unique user identification on your help desk system, whether it’s "jack-daniels", "984922" or "Mary Poppins". Repeat this for every agent.

2. Update up your email template

As a next step, you need to find and edit the email reply template inside your help desk/CRM system. Most system support HTML email templates but we can setup plain text email templates too.

At this point you need to understand the components of Nicereply rating link: Your customers will be redirected from the email to your Nicereply Rating page via unique URL. Such an URL may looks like this:  http://nicereply.com/my-company/jack-daniels/12345/?s=10

This URL holds and pass following parameters:

  • "my-company" unique name of your company within Nicereply based on your sign up data
  • "jack-daniels" unique ID of agent inside your help desk and username inside Nicereply
  • "12345" unique ID of the conversation/ticket in your help desk (optional)
  • "?s=10" predefined rating value (instant rating)where 1 is the worst and 10 the best (optional)

You can setup fix rating URL/template for each of your Agent, but let's assume that your help desk/CRM offers an ability to use variables inside templates (e.g. {{variable.name}} or $variable_name$ etc.). 

The most simple Rating link for pain text emails may be:

Please, rate my reply here: http://nicereply.com/my-company/{{user.id}}/{{ticket.id}}

If you may use HTML in your templates you can use text based Rating link:

<strong>How nice was my reply?</strong><br /> <a href="http://www.nicereply.com/my-company/{{user.id}}/{{ticket.id}}/?s=10">Awesome</a> <a href="http://www.nicereply.com/my-company/{{user.id}}/{{ticket.id}}/?s=5">Nice</a> <a href="http://www.nicereply.com/my-company/{{user.id}}/{{ticket.id}}/?s=1">Bad</a><br>

Or even incorporate the images inside Rating link (put no spaces between <a> tags):

<strong>How nice was my reply?</strong><br /> <a href="http://www.nicereply.com/my-company/{{user.id}}/{{ticket.id}}/?s=10"><img alt="Awesome" src="http://www.nicereply.com/trackmaili/my-company/{{user.id}}/face_10.png" /></a><a href="http://www.nicereply.com/my-company/{{user.id}}/?s=5"><img alt="Nice" src="http://www.nicereply.com/trackmaili/my-company/{{user.id}}/{{ticket.id}}/face_5.png" /></a><a href="http://www.nicereply.com/my-company/{{user.id}}/{{ticket.id}}/?s=1"><img alt="Bad" src="http://www.nicereply.com/trackmaili/my-company/{{user.id}}/face_1.png" /></a><br>

When your help desk/CRM system does not provide unique User ID  – you can try to set up the integration using some variables like: "{{user.full-name}}" variable combination like "{{user.first-name}}-{{user.last-name}}" instead of "{{user.id}}. Keep in mind that the resulting string must be unique within your company and must be used as a "username" for Nicereply Agent/User.

When your help desk/CRM system does not provide unique Ticket ID – you will not be able to setup Ticket link (see bellow), but you can still collect the ratings for your agents. Simply omit the {{ticket.id}} variable from the URL but e.g. like this: 

<strong>How nice was my reply?</strong><br /> <a href="http://www.nicereply.com/my-company/{{user.id}}/?s=10">Awesome</a> <a href="http://www.nicereply.com/my-company/{{user.id}}/?s=5">Nice</a> <a href="http://www.nicereply.com/my-company/{{user.id}}/?s=1">Bad</a>

Make a test that your rating link(s) are working on some test case/ticket. You should see the rating in your CSAT rating feed with correct user name. No  Unknown Agent ratings should appear. 

I recommend you to see some more tips on  how to customise your email signature.

3. Link ratings to your tickets

As a last step we will set up the Ticket link, so you can jump from rating inside Nicereply right to the ticket/case in your help desk/CRM. At this point it will be good idea to go inside your help desk/CRM system web client and open detail view of any ticket or case.

Take a look at the URL in your browser – most application use nicely formatted URL so you can spot the Ticket ID there. The URL may be looks like:  http://my-custom.system.net/tickets/12345

Now go to Nicereply CSAT -> Rating Pages and click on Ticket link for your rating page. Here we will teach Nicereply how to build the link to your ticket. Select the Custom ticket link option, place there the URL to the details of your help desk/CRM system and replace the ticket ID by "<TICKET_ID>" variable:

Now all your ratings will have small but powerful "Go to ticket" icon which will open new tab with the ticket/case inside your help desk/CRM.

And that’s it!

You are the master of Nicereply integrations and your customers may give you feedback on quality of your service.