The HaloPSA setting that turns follow up calls into a scheduled action

Connor: Help desk hygiene is something that I just I love to see, you know, MSPs that really take their help desk seriously. They keep the ticket count down, they have really defined statuses, they have it in nice views. It's like my Holy Grail of help desk. However, that can always be a challenge depending on what's thrown at us and the scenario I'm going to talk about today is the following. I ring my customer. My customer is going to be called Ben. I'm going to call Ben this morning or whatever time it is now, 11:00 a.m. I'm going to call Ben and say hey Ben, just ringing up to catch about your problem without look. And Ben replies, hey Connor, thanks for ringing. I'm currently at a conference for the next three days. Can you give us a call some point after 3 p.m. on Monday? And you're like sure, no problem at all. Hang up the phone and then you add a note to your ticket.

The problem is what note do we add to our ticket? Now you could say it's just simply on hold or with customer and you can type in a note, we'll call on 3 p.m. But how are you going to know? How are you going to be triggered to do that? Then you could say well, we're going to schedule it in. So I'm going to go create an appointment and I'm going to say Monday at 3 p.m. I must call Ben. The problem is that's quite a bit of work to schedule in all these things and add in the date and the time, and it's just a long process for something that really is quite a simple thing.

I've been asked about this a handful of times over the past couple of weeks in the Discord and from a few of our partners, and I've come up with a bit of a creative solution, if you will. Now that is what we do. We find elegant solutions to technical problems. My name is Connor Fagan. We are Renada Solutions and we do a myriad of things, but mainly HaloPSA and HaloITSM consulting. So today let me show you what creative solution I've come up with.

So I'm going to head over to service level agreements, and under service level agreements there is a feature that you may have turned off because it is very annoying. But basically what the feature is is allow the agents to specify an auto release date and time. So that means if I put the ticket on hold, then after a certain amount of time it's going to come off hold. Brilliant. We can set a maximum amount of days they can do in the future. So we could say 14 days. If we're scheduling it more than 14 days out, we should probably reevaluate the process or understand why that's happening. You might want to increase that or decrease it. It's completely up to you. And then we can set a status, so we could say we have an action, and we'll go through this in a minute, an action that says you know place on hold, and then after 14 days it comes off hold and goes, now process or updated or whatever you want. I'm just going to put updated in here just for now.

Okay, so we're going to allow an auto release. Brilliant. We can't do more than 14 days, and after 14 days the ticket status is going to change to be updated. Fantastic. The problem though with this is this is very annoying if you've not configured it fully. An example, if you will, so I'm on the default SLA on this ticket. And if I go to email the customer, I can go great, this is an email, save, and it then pops up the auto release hold. Well, I don't want to auto release an email because they're going to reply. When they reply it's waiting on the customer. Any other action, as well, out of the box when you do this is going to pop this up. Ignore the horrible spelling and grammar error on don't, but it's fine.

So how do we get around this and how do we make this an actual workable solution? I have a suggestion. So first of all, and this is a bit of a chew, I'm not going to lie, we have to make sure that that popup, that annoying, you know, when do we set the release popup doesn't fire on the actions that we use on our tickets. And to do that we go to configuration. We find the actions that we're using on the ticket. Let's just go for email customer. And we want to scroll all the way down until we find enable auto release prompts and I'm going to take click, if I can, no, don't give me that prompt.

So as far as the engineers are concerned now, once you do that on all of these actions, yes, you've got to do it on them all. When we do this now and I do test and press save, we're not going to get that pop up. So it's working as it was. Fantastic. Then what I recommend doing is something like the following. Let's together make a new action and we'll call this, um, future reach out. I don't know, it's you can find a better creative name than me. And let's just make it 50 is fine. I'm going to use this calendar icon and make it future because we can. What we want to make sure we have in here, which is by default, by the way, is enable auto release prompts is on.

And what I also want to say is if we do have you know future reach out, I also want to make sure that we add a note on here so we know why we're reaching out in the future. So I'm going to add a private note. I'm just going to say this is required. You could make this a public note. So just to note, if you want your customers to see it, it's again completely up to you. But I'm just going to say future reach out.

Then I'm going to go to a ticket workflow. So this is my incident or ticket management workflow. And for today I'm just going to add this into step two. And I'm going to allow the action future reach out. I'm going to press save. So I'm not going to advance the workflow. It's just literally going to change the status, which we've not actually done. Oh my Lord, Connor, when we click future reach out, we also want to change the status to, I'm going to pick scheduled in this build. You could have something, you know, F for future reach out or planned or follow up or whatever you want. You can change the status as you desire, but I'm just going to say it's scheduled.

Like so, what happens now on a ticket? I have this ticket here. I'm going to triage it as a backup problem. Again, it support. Fine. What we now have is a button up here which says future reach out, and I can click this button and I can say, um, customer is at a conference. Asked me to reach in five days. Cool. Save. Why hasn't that triggered the auto release prompt?

Let me pause and come back in a second. The reason that didn't prompt for auto release hold is because my status wasn't putting the SLA on hold. So why would it ask us to release it? So again, just double check these things. Make sure that the status is your assigning is actually putting the ticket on hold. But then what we should do, if I just take this ticket here, triage this again, and then I click future reach out, try again, customer asks me to reach out in five days, and then we press save and then it says, when do you want to reach out? So we can then select a date. Let's just say five days. So one, two, three, four, five. Or did he mean business days? I won't get down that road. We'll just say then. And then we can type in the time we want to reach out. If it's just the day, just type in 9:00 a.m. and then click set.

And what you'll notice on the ticket is you'd then in the top right have a follow-up date. Now what I recommend doing with this, so you know what tickets you have in this state and what you need to follow up with, is I recommend making a list area on the left-hand side called, um, scheduled. So I'm just going to click acknowledged and I'm just going to save it as new. And I'm going to edit this and I'm going to call it tickets to follow up.

Okay, we're going to say open tickets where the status is scheduled, and I'm going to press save. And it now shows me both of my tickets that are scheduled. What you can also do, which is really nice because we have that follow-up date, we can also add the column filter. So to do that you can press the three dots in the top right, edit columns, and what I'm going to do is edit service desk view. And I'm just going to save it as new. That will give us then two columns.

Just going to refresh so I know which one I'm actually on. So this is the current default one, but I want to use this new one at the bottom. So I'm going to edit this and I'm going to say ticket to follow-up. Okay, and what I'm going to add here is the field follow-up date and I'm going to put that all the way at the top. And I'm going to say this is the, I want to primarily sort by this column and I want it to ascend. And I'm going to press save and then save. And what you end up with is the column profile on this with the follow-up dates on the left-hand side.

To apply that column profile though to this list, we have to edit the list and we have to assign the tickets to follow-up column profile we just made like so. So if I refresh this list, will have the follow-up date in it, where is acknowledged will show us the normal service desk view.

Some people say Connor, I just want them out of my mind. I don't want to see them. In which case that's fine. All you've got to do is add filters to all of these. So let's say we don't want to see it in all. We can edit this list for all and say status does not include scheduled. In this way they're out of sight, out of mind. You know what you've got to work on today. And this is all the priority of your desk. And what we know is, in whenever it releases, so five days in my case, it's going to come back in and change the status to be updated, which will appear in here for me. And then we know we can then start working on that ticket again.

One last thing I do want to tell you though, because this will bug some of you out, is when I do this and I type in SLA hold auto release, one of the bug bearers that people have is trying to use this from like the dropdown scrolling menu. And they kind of want it to be able to have it so you can type in this box. And I've never really touched on this before, but you can actually control this behaviour globally in Halo. Um, and to do that, what you want to do is go to configuration. You want to go to advanced settings, I believe. And then what you want to do is change the time field input type from dropdown to be browser default input.

If I just change it to dropdown and show you that again very quickly, what you will see now is when I do this, I have to scroll through this little menu, which some people like, some people dislike. Again, the world is your oyster. Do whatever you desire. I think I actually prefer the default browser default input box, but it is up to you.

So to recap on today's video, we went to tickets, service level agreements, and we enabled the feature, um, allow agents to specify an auto release date and time. Then what we did is we went to one of our tickets and we made sure that on every single action where we are changing the status, really, that we untick the box. Don't allow that, basically. So if we go to tickets and actions and click on an action, all the way down here we have this enable auto release prompt, and we want to untick that unless we want to use it on that action, of course.

And away we go. We then made a new action, and in this video we called it future reach out. And we said on here, make sure that we do, um, have the ability to specify an auto release prompt. We also said if we're doing this, you know, at a private note, we want to know why we're following up in five days, and added that to the workflow. So we found the ticket we had, we went to the workflow, we edited the workflow, we edited the step in the workflow where we want the action to appear. This could be in multiple places, of course. And we just added in the action to here by clicking add allow actions and typed in future follow-up.

And the last part of this was just a little bit of UI work where we made a new column profile by clicking the dots in the top right. We made one called tickets to follow up and we added in the follow-up date field in here. And then made a new list which has the follow-up date which we specify. And we can now start working through tickets that we need to follow up with. And you'll see it's un-hold and there's a follow-update. And that's it. It's a little work around, little bit of creative thinking, um, that hopefully will really help you just manage your desk a little bit better.

You may love it, you may hate it. Have at it. I've been Connor Fagan. We are Renada Solutions. Have a beautiful day. Any questions, put them down below. We will try and reply. As always, keep safe, take care, bye-bye.