Ticket System Features

WATS includes an incredible number of features thus allowing it to be one of the most advanced and cost effective ticketing system in the customer relationship management (CRM) area.

You have two releases available :

• the free help desk software release which includes basic functionalities
• the premium release, a comprehensive support ticket system with all the features you could expect

The table below gives a breakdown of features per release :

 

Ticket numbering

Every ticket can be associated to a single number or a dated number (date-number). This ID is then displayed next to the ticket title and can be used as a reference to communicate with your customers.

Ticket integration with your site

You can define whether you want tickets to be displayed together with your posts or not. You can also define who can browse the tickets : any visitor, only registered users or ticket originator and admins.

WATS integrates smoothly with your theme by reusing your existing single post template for ticket display. It drastically simplifies the installation and integration of this help desk software within your website. It also comes with a default ticket template to display tickets that can easily be customized if you want to have a design specific to your tickets. Indeed, ticket display is just like the single post display with few modifications (custom fields, number, priority, product, status and type).

Ticket keys

For each ticket, you can set a type, a status, a priority and a product. Every key is optional, you can enable or disable every key based on your needs. Then preset values can be customized in the options page for each key. Finally, when you create a ticket or when you update it, you can select the appropriate values for each key.

Ticket custom fields

You can define an unlimited number of custom fields. Then, your customers will fill in these fields when they submit a ticket and they will appear in the ticket display template. The values are tracked in the database and easily accessible. The custom fields values can be updated during the ticket life and they can be used to filter the frontend ticket listing.

Currently, WATS supports those five types of custom fields for the forms : text input, datepicker, checkbox, radio button and drop down selector.

Ticket submission

You have 3 ways to submit tickets with WATS :

• through the admin ticket edition page,
• through the front end submission form,
• by email (thanks to the email piping feature).

This flexible support system platform gives you the flexibility to connect with your customers and log calls the way you want to.

During the ticket submission process, registered users have the possibility to attach files to their tickets both in the frontend and the admin sides.

Call centre ticket creation

You can set the ticket author on behalf of any customer. This is quite beneficial for call centre where an operator would open a ticket on behalf of a customer calling in.

Ticket visibility

You have three different setups available for ticket visibility :

• all users (registered or not) can see the ticket
• only registered users can see the ticket
• only ticket author and admins can see the ticket

Ticket follow-up

Ticket follow-up is performed within the frontend by just adding comments and updating the custom fields : status, priority, product and type of ticket. This is where the conversation between the customer and the customer support staff is happening.

Admins have the capability to submit internal updates that will be only visibile to admins.

During the ticket update process, registered users have the possibility to add files to the tickets both in the frontend and the admin sides.

Ticket assignment

WATS gives you the option to assign tickets to individual users. You can define who can assign tickets and who can be assigned to a ticket.

Ticket listing

Both in the admin and the frontend, you can browse the list of tickets.

On the frontend side, you can filter tickets through selected values for status, priority, product, type, author, ticket number and even custom meta key. You can also view ticket details inline and export the list of tickets to Excel.

Last but not least, you can define a set of custom queries that you’ll select to filter the tickets without having to set all the filters every time.

Ticket notifications

WATS includes an extended notification system to ensure that everybody gets notified in a timely manner when a new ticket is submitted or when an update is added to an existing ticket.

You can even define rules to notify specific email addresses when there is a new ticket or a ticket update matching specific type, priority, product and status keys, as well as author country and company values. This is very useful if you don’t want to be notified for all tickets opened or if you only want to notify some people when specific tickets are raised. Notification rules can also be defined to notify ticket author, ticket owner, admins and ticket updaters only for specific tickets.

You can also define notification rules based on ticket resolution due date. You’ll fill the due date at a point during ticket life and then notifications will be triggered when the due is approaching at regular intervals. Rules give you the flexibility to configure the due date notification interval and when the notifications are supposed to start.

You can also define per ticket notification list for updates. This gives you full flexibility ticket by ticket on the notification list if you want to keep someone updated on the progress made during ticket life.

In the options, you can customize the notification email signature to include your organization contact details.

If you want to have full control over the notification email format, you can take advantage of the built-in API to completely format the notifications email according to your needs.

Raw statistics

In the WordPress admin panel, WATS adds a dashboard widget containing few stats about the number of tickets. You can also add a widget with the same stats to your frontend theme sidebar.

Ticket list export

From the frontend ticket listing, you can directly export the filtered list of tickets to Excel thanks to the built-in XML exporter. This is quite convenient if you need to make some reports.

User profile management

In the user profile page, the administrator can define the following settings for each user :

• Account expiration date : allows to lock the user account after a specific date (useful for contracts or subscription with an expiration date)
• Country : allows you to associate the user with a country
• Company : allows to associate the user with a company name
• Service level agreement : allows to associate the user with a service level agreement

Last but not least, the admin can prevent the user from modifying its email address.

The user profile specific settings can be disabled globally if they aren’t needed.

Company profile management

The administrator can define companies and associate these with users. This is quite useful to group users by company. Then users can be moved from one company to another and company name can be modified along the time as required.

Service level agreement

It is possible to define multiple service level agreements and then assign these to companies or users individually. This is quite beneficial if you want to keep track of the level of service associated to a company or a user.

Settings

In the WordPress admin panel, WATS adds a page for the options where the admin can set the ticket numbering format, define a shared guest user who will be allowed to submit ticket, add, modify or delete statuses, priorities, products and types of tickets and define the categories where tickets can be submitted. A lot of other options can also be set there.

Premium support and updates

By ordering WATS Premium, you are entitled to receive Premium support from WATS lead developer. We won’t ask you to fill a form in a forum and wait for X months to have an answer. No! You will just send a mail and then you’ll get back an answer to your question within less than 24 hours.

Level of service offered to Premium customers (metric observed over the last 6 years) : 99% of the questions raised are solved within 24 hours, the remaining 1% requires just few days (more complex problems and bug fixes).

In addition to the Premium support, as a Premium customer, you are entitled to receive new Premium releases during one year after the initial order.

Localizations

WATS is available in the following languages :

• English (Minimum release : 1.0, Originator : Olivier)
• French (Minimum release : 1.0, Originator : Olivier)
• German (Minimum release : 1.0.23, Originator : Tobias Kalleder)
• Spanish (Minimum release : 1.0.49, Originator : Esteban)
• Lithuanian (Minimum release : 1.0.50, Originator : Arturas)
• Russian (Minimum release : 1.0.53, Originators : Alexey and Eugene)
• Indonesian (Minimum release : 1.0.53, Originator : Rizal Fauzie)
• Italian (Minimum release : 1.0.54, Originators : Erick Jara and Alessandro Pagano and Roberto Scano)
• Polish (Minimum release : 1.0.55, Originator : Eryk Lewandowski)
• Belarussian (Minimum release : 1.0.56, Originator : Alex)
• Romanian (Minimum release : 1.0.56, Originator : Alex)
• Dutch (Minimum release : 1.0.56, Originator : Anita Berghoef)
• Hindi (Minimum release : 1.0.56, Originator : Outshine solutions)
• Slovak (Minimum release : 1.0.57, Originator : Branco)
• Norwegian (Minimum release : 1.0.59, Originator : Ole Petter)
• Ukrainian (Minimum release : 1.0.59, Originator : Howard)
• Irish (Minimum release : 1.0.62, Originator : Jordan)