Three separate settings flag a VIP user in HaloPSA

Connor: I know, I know we don't have VIP users. Connor, no customer or end user is more important than the next. Everyone gets the same SLA and the same treatment. However, we're all friends here. There are certain people in certain companies that unfortunately bear a lot of weight and it's important that in certain circumstances we give them a little bit of extra love.

Now one of the most important things, and I get asked this from time to time, is how do we flag who the important users are? Let's say the business owners, or if we've got a client having loads of issues, how do we make sure that we look after that particular client or particular user? Well, there's a bunch of things actually we can do in HaloPSA to help with that.

Alex Wilbur is a VIP for us and is also a very important user. You can tell that because his ticket is yellow. You'll also see that his SLA time has got 30 minutes left because he is a critical SLA for us. And if I didn't know that, when I click on him it also tells me in the bottom left that he is an end user VIP. Or the end user is a VIP. And if you're still not sure, there's a little star here as well. So this is overkill. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you're going to do all of these things, but I'm going to show you how we've done all of these things. And as always, you might find just a little bit of value out of some of this which you can incorporate into your help desk on a daily basis.

So my name is Connor Fagan. We are Renada Solutions and today we are talking about VIP users, important context, and how we understand who they are from our help desk. So let's start with a few foundational points, shall we?

So I'm going to start with Alex. Alex Wilbur, good friend of mine from my dev environment. He is a couple of things in this build. If I go to preferences and scroll all the way down, you will see that Alex has VIP or priority escalation. And what this means is tickets for this user will be adjusted to have the following priority level. This will pretty much override anything, so if there's ever a ticket for Alex it will always be in my case one.

So what does this mean? Well, if we go to configuration, tickets, service level agreements, and just going to pick default, in mine is talking about these levels here. Now this is an awful level, let's just forget you've ever seen that. There we go. So we have level one, two, three and four. So what that is asking me is what level do we want based on what SLA do we need? So I've put it as one, which in my build is critical, which is why at the beginning we saw a half an hour remaining SLA.

So I just go back to my good friend Alex. Got two of him, that's how much we like him. And go back to preferences. Scroll all the way down. We're basically reaffirming here that we can set a VIP priority escalation and that just bumps the SLA. It doesn't do anything else as far as I'm aware. We can't do anything with this as far as I know. It purely is for changing the SLA if a ticket is logged for Alex.

Under the permissions tab though, if we scroll all the way down to the bottom, we also have a setting here which says the user is an important contact. And what that does for us is two things. When you tick or untick that, you will note that next to Alex's name in the top left over here a little yellow star appears. That way we know Alex is important. If you don't have a star, you're clearly not that important. But what it also means from a service desk perspective is we can see a little star down here on the left hand side.

Now if you don't see that, don't panic. What you need to ensure you have set up is a column profile, and on the column profile you need to make sure you've got the column Flags set. Now this will show you a few things. In Flags it will show you a flag if you flag a ticket. It will show you a star if they're an important contact. It will show you a no entry sign if that user is inactive. So it is quite a useful thing to have on if you need it.

And an example, by the way, is I can flag this ticket and there you go, you can now see it's flagged. When we click that user is an important contact, that is also what triggers this end user is a VIP. Now we can't control this as far as I know. If they're an important contact, this is always going to appear down here. We can't make it modal as far as I'm aware. This is what you get.

And lastly, the little bit in this video I've done is change the colour in this view here to be yellow. Now it's not based on order, it's purely based on a rule in HaloPSA. And that rule in HaloPSA, if I go to configuration, tickets and rules, I've made a new rule called priority customer. And all I've done in here is quite simply put it to be the first precedent. I want this to always apply first. I want other rules to match after it because, you know, it's just changing the colour, I don't want to mess anything else.

So we've got set up, it's enabled, it cool. I don't want to display any notifications when it's matched, although you could do that as well if you wanted to. If you want to get spammed by notifications. And also what we need to make sure we have is the criteria set up for is an important user. So to do that, click add, find the field name important user, and we basically say rule type is equal to yes.

Then if we scroll all the way down, you will see a checkbox that says set ticket list colour. Click the button and either add in a hex code or pick a colour and press save. And what that means is it will change the colour. Now you be slightly confused at first as to why mine hasn't changed. And that's because the rule isn't continuously reapplying. Something needs to change with that ticket for that to reapply, as I understand. So if I just change my user to this person over here and then change it back to Alex, that rule should run again. And now it has changed to blue.

And that's it. That is basically everything I would do if you want to super, super, super, super ensure that your VIP important customers are highlighted as much as they can to your engineers in HaloPSA.

So to recap, we've set their VIP which changes their SLA to be whatever level we set. We set them as an important contact which puts a little star on the left hand side and also gives us this popup in the bottom left which says end user is a VIP. You can add the flag column by going to edit columns and adding Flags in. So columns, edit columns, edit your column profile and add in the column to view as flags. And then lastly we can make a ticket rule by going to configuration, tickets and rules. And we can say priority customer yes, set the ticket colour to be blue.

And that's it. I hope this video has been enjoyable. I hope you find some value out of it. As always, I've been Connor Fagan. We are Renada Solutions and I hope to see you all soon. Take care, goodbye for now.