Why HaloPSA closure confirmations silently stop working

Connor: End user closure confirmation is something that I love to hate. I think I don't think most people need it. However, if you are moving PSA and your clients are currently used to it, then I think it's something that we need to adopt. Secondly, notification reminders to either the user or internal that the ticket is on hold and is waiting—you can also be really important. Again, I think less is more when we're spamming our customers, but if there is something quite important, we can control them getting emails to be like okay, we're waiting on you. So let's chat about both those things today, and I'll show you how to set them up, how to leverage them, and hopefully if you need them, this will provide some value.

Good day, my name is Connor Fagan and we're Renada Solutions, and today we're talking about end user closure confirmation and SLA hold reminders, or reminders in general to either your team or your customers to improve your help desk efficiency. So let's start with end user closure confirmation, shall we?

So in HaloPSA, go to Configuration, go to Tickets, go to General Settings. I'm going to zoom in a little bit for you all here, and then scroll down and what you'll find in here is end user closure confirmation. Now what this basically does is it puts the ticket into a resolved state before it's closed, and basically gives you a bit of a buffer. Now the reason I don't like this is because the ticket is technically still open in HaloPSA and I don't always find it adds a lot of value. But if your clients are used to confirming or denying if the ticket's completed, then you may want to leverage this.

What happens when you turn this box on is a few things appear. Basically, first of all is an email template and the email template is the default close your email template, which basically says we think we've fixed your problem, can you confirm or deny it, right? Um, if they don't reply and say yes, we've done it, then after X amount of hours—and these are work days, by the way—um, after X amount of workday hours—so if it's eight hour work days, times that by the days, so 24 would be three days—um, after three days, let's do 24. After three days it will automatically close, and we can have the option to send an email to the client to say you haven't responded, we've now closed your ticket.

You can also enable reminder emails, so you could say once a day send an email to the client saying we're still waiting on you, please let us know if this is resolved or not. Um, and what you can also do is send closure reminders to CC addresses. Um, and you can also allow administrators to skip the end user closure confirmation, so if an admin is closing the ticket, don't send the closure emails.

So what do these moving pieces look like? Well, there's a couple of things that need to be enabled to enable this. Um, the first thing is, once you turn this on, you should have the status in here called resolved, and this is what's going to be leveraged um in that closure confirmation. Now what's really important with this is that you actually have this turned on: enabling of sending SLA hold reminders. Now I've had a few builds where that is set to no, and then end user confirmation doesn't work. So just make sure that your resolved status is actually set to yes.

What you also want to make sure you're doing is you're looking at the email templates to make sure that that communication is aligned not only graphically with how you like your templates to look, but also the verbiage is how you speak to your clients. And to double check what they are—there's basically two at play here. There is the first one down here. Here we go, which is the default one, which is default closure email template or the ticket close pending close your template. ID 327. The ID's 14 and ID's 327 refers to email templates. And this ID here, so if we find the one that is 327, this one here, ticket close pending closure, you can basically make it look like this, which basically says your request has been—here, are you happy with it? Or you can use ID 14, which is the normal ticket closed one.

Now if you are using ticket um pending closure 327, you should actually add a few variables in here with a check or an X to say that it is closed—yes or no—to understand what those are. If you go back to Config, Tickets, General Settings, and scroll all the way down, I believe it tells you in here. So here, um, you can basically add the variables dollar deny closure, dollar confirm closure, or dollar confirm close you with feedback as variables in that email template so they can close or reopen, if you will, that pending closure ticket.

Again, um, sending emails to an end user when ticket is closed automatically, that's fine. That is just going to send out the closed email. Um, email template—that's what I'm trying to say. Um, and the reminder emails, just to confirm what they are, um, is if you go to Email, Email Templates, and reminder—remember what the number is—um, SLA hold reminder message. This is what the email is going to look like. So again, make sure you configure this one: your ticket is on hold and we are awaiting your response. That is ID 89. Piece of cake.

What you can also do in Ticket General Settings—if you didn't want the um end user closure confirmation to be something you use in your build—what you can actually do is have something a little bit different under SLAs and General Settings. And what you can do in here is you can enable SLA hold reminders. Now this kind of works similar. However, this isn't saying do you approve the close or not—this is just going to say we've closed it after a certain number of hours, days, whatever you set.

So you can go here and turn on enable SLA hold reminder emails. Again, make sure that the statuses of the ticket have this enabled. So Config, Ticket, Statuses, and let's just say waiting customer. And what you want to make sure you do is have a couple of things. One is you want to make sure you enable the sending of SLA hold reminders. And also, you might want to enable the user updates release from SLA hold, because if not, it will still be on SLA and still asking that customer to provide feedback.

Once you've enabled these two things, go to General Settings, Service Level Agreements, General Settings, scroll all the way down, and you can turn on enable of ascending SLA hold reminders. Again, you can dictate here if you want to use work days or just normal hours. So if this would be 48, you know, normal hours, that would be two days. If you use work days, that would be 24 times 2 is 48, giving us six days. God, I'm a math wizard. Um, and then you can also do number of hours without a response until the ticket is, you know, automatically closed. And again, this will just close a ticket and send the client an email: we've now closed your ticket.

Um, just to note with this though, and be careful with this—this is based on the status. So any ticket at all in the system, whether it be a project, CRM, or anything, if you put it on waiting on customer, it's going to send out these emails. However, you can override that per ticket type. So if you go to a ticket type—let's say Incident. Um, here we go. It's under Settings tells you what I know. Um, you can go down here and you can enable of sending of SLA hold reminders, and you can also turn on or off if you want the ticket to automatically close. So if you are thinking about setting up SLA hold reminders to email your clients, you'll want to make sure you can configure this here.

Now, whilst that is all well and good, you might want to be notified internally if a ticket has been sat at the state is New for so many hours, right? You might want the agents to know in the team, or you might want the team leader to know, or even the department leader to know that hang on a minute, this sales ticket has been set for New for eight hours. We need to allocate this to someone in the sales team. To do that, we can do that under the statuses. And we can say In Progress, if you wanted to do that. And we have these three email settings here. So we can inform the agent of no status change after this many hours. And again, this could be either the general ticket setting hours, normal hours, or the work hours. And you can make it recurring, so every X amount of hours let the agent know the ticket hasn't changed status.

We can do the same for team, and we can do the same for the team manager. So again, if you wanted the team manager to know that after eight hours the ticket is still sat in progress, you can have that recurring so every eight hours it will be notified to that team manager. And again, we can then select the email template like this. Um, again, we can have informing the user set here as well. So if you didn't want to leverage the SLA bit and wanted to do it all from statuses, we can do it over here. So we can email the user X amount of times, always recurring, saying hey, the ticket is still on hold, please let us know.

Now in some build, depending on the use case, I will also leverage here changing the status after this many hours. So what you could do is have, you know, with, I don't know, with customer or waiting on customer, and you could say after 24 hours change the status to be closed, okay? And we can do this as work hours. The problem is this doesn't recur. And what that means is if the ticket goes from waiting customer to close, then it's reopened and then it goes back onto waiting customer, it will never automatically close it again.

Now the use cases for this are quite relevant because what I've said to my partners is, is well, these are the options, right? And they go, well, actually, if it has automatically closed once and it's reopened, we don't want to to automatically close it again because we've clearly done something wrong in the past or we haven't handled it properly. We don't want to really annoy our customers. So this actually becomes really valuable. So again, there's a couple of use cases for which one you want to leverage.

So that's basically it. That's just a quick overview of you know, um, end user closure confirmation, um, SLA hold reminders, and also status reminders that you can leverage in your HaloPSA build to handle a few things. Hope this has been valuable to you. My name's been Connor Fagan. Hope you have a beautiful day, and we will see you all soon. Take care. Bye-bye.