Support Departments

From WHMCS Documentation

Support departments help you categorize tickets. The first step in the user ticket submission process is to choose a department. You can assign different staff to different departments with different people handling the different areas. Sales, Support, and Billing are common departments.

You can access this feature at Configuration () > System Settings > Support Departments or, prior to WHMCS 8.0, Setup > Support > Support Departments.

For more information about the Support Ticket system, see Support Tickets.

Creating Departments

To set up departments:

  1. Click Add New Department.
  2. Enter a Department Name and Description to display to users. The system will use the email address to send notifications relating to the ticket to users. Make this unique for each department.
  3. For Assigned Admin Users, check the boxes for each admin who will have access to the tickets in this department.
  4. For Clients Only, specify whether it's a clients-only department, which requires you to log in. For example, Sales would be a public department while you might set Support to clients-only.
  5. For Pipe Replies Only, select whether to require users to log in to the Client Area to open new tickets. Attempts to open new tickets via email will fail, but users can still respond to tickets via email.
  6. For No Autoresponder, check the box to prevent sending an autoresponder email when a new ticket opens
  7. For Feedback Request, check the box to send an email request for a user to provide feedback for their support ticket experience. You can review the results of the feedback emails via the Ticket Feedback Scores and Ticket Feedback Comments reports.
  8. For Hidden, check the box to hide the department. Users can only access hidden departments via a direct link.
  9. If you want to poll your mailserver using mail importing, enter the appropriate information at the bottom of the form. For more information, see Email Importing, Setting Up POP3 Importing via Google, and Setting Up Importing via Microsoft.
  10. Click Add New Department.

Re-using email addresses
Using the same POP3 details on multiple support departments is not recommended and will likely cause duplicate tickets to be imported.

Custom Fields

After you create a department, you can create custom fields to display during ticket submission.

To do this:

  1. Click the Edit icon for the desired department.
  2. Choose Custom Fields tab.
  3. Enter the requested field information and choose a field type.
  4. Check the appropriate checkboxes to show or hide the field or require a response.
  5. Click Save Changes.

For more information about custom field configuration, see Custom Fields.

Email Piping and Importing

You can automatically send user emails into the ticket system as tickets and ticket replies. To do this, you will need to either pipe or import the email into WHMCS (email piping and email importing).