Why your HaloPSA self service form saves blank tickets until you flip one setting

Connor: Hello, it's been almost a week since my last video and it's been on my mind that I am letting the community down. I've gotten some feedback from my last videos. I've been told to slow down. I will definitely try that, that is a sticking point that I always struggle with. And the second one was to change my accent. I was gonna do a comical impersonation of another accent but I failed miserably, so I thought, you know what, I'm not doing it.

So I want to talk today about the service catalogue. Now, this is kind of a big area, a big topic. I'm going to start with a very simple sort of request form and we'll sort of go through how that works, and maybe in another video I will go through sort of monitored services and that type of thing.

So first of all, what do I mean by the service catalogue? Well, the idea behind the service catalogue is kind of multi-use really, but the short answer is it's a way for your customers to engage with your company and either log service requests, monitor services, or subscribe to services that they want to know information about. So I used to use the service catalogue kind of differently. What we have is basically a few areas that you can subscribe to and this basically was like I'm signing up for your mailing form, et cetera. I want to be informed about the latest security trends or the latest backup trends or whatever your heart desires.

So I'm gonna go today and show you how to make a very simple service request form. So let me show you very quickly how it comes out of the box. Now I might regret this very quickly as it's not enabled on my sandbox. Yes, it's not. Bear with me a second. I'm just going to go to configuration, the self-service portal, and I'm just going to quickly turn on the log a service request. Actually, let me just do service catalogue, actually, and we'll do it that way. Let me do that. Service catalogue. Okay, cool.

The idea behind the service catalogue and what I'm going to be doing today is basically showing you that you can go onto the service catalogue. A customer can go into the service catalogue, they can click onboarding, they can request a new starter request, and then this will generate a form they can fill out. This won't work in mine, they were deleted, but then they can generate a form to fill out that will hopefully get half of the work done for you before having to ask them twenty questions. So let's go ahead and start building one of these out.

So there's a few areas of this and it can get a bit complicated. This is kind of why I've removed it from my sandbox to actually make us go in, learn how it works, and then start getting that ball rolling. So there's a few elements. So I'm just going to go ahead and go to users and service. I'm just going to make a new one and I'm going to call this new Office 365 user. Okay.

I'm then going to say this is in the area service category users and service. This is basically where it appears on the self-service portal. I can do estimated delivery days. Let's just type in there three. And the summary could be, please fill out this information if you require a member of staff to have an Office 365 account. Probably English, but you get the idea. Business owner not relevant, technical owner not relevant, compliance owner not relevant. Relevant work day not relevant. And the service description, I'm just going to put the same information in here and click save.

Again, just going to save this at each stage so we don't end up in a picker when I refresh it by mistake and lose it all. Is this a monitored service? This basically means we can have a monitored service. This is what I talked about at the start of the video where you can basically monitor an inbox for, like, backup alerts. Basically, so it'll say you could have a service per customer or a general service, say monitoring. I don't know, a Cronus. And if you get a failed backup ping, you could say the service is down. It will automatically let your customers know that. But we're not going to touch on that today.

Is this a monitored service? Yes. Do we want to show it in the service catalogue to our end users? Yes. You just can subscribe to this service? Sure. Allow subscribers to log incidents? No. I want this to be a one-time you subscribe or you fill out the form and then it's done. I don't want you to be able to log incidents when you've made that form. That's what the service desk is for in my opinion.

Allow users to log service requests again after subscribing? Okay. Show service in related service catalogue? Not relevant. So screen after a ticket has been logged. So after they've basically done that service request, where do you want it to go? Do you want to navigate them back to the home screen of your portal? Do you want them to go to the root of the service catalogue? Or do you want to put them in the new service request screen? Again, I'm just going to say, after they log that service, put them back at the root of the service catalogue.

The next thing is then going to be essentially request this service. I'm going to put here, new Office 365 request. This is just basically the button icon, and then you've got a few items you can do. I'm just going to pick an icon. I'm going to pick, oh, so many options, so many options. Let's just go ahead. I'm going to pick the, oh, this is always the hardest part of doing anything. I'm just going to pick the calendar. Awful choice. I'll let you guys pick you out in your own time. And then basically you say when they click this, what does it do? Does it form a ticket type? Does it start a new template? Does it basically spin out a custom URL? I'm just going to say, ticket type in this one. And currently I don't have a ticket type for this, so I'm going to go and make that in a minute and show you how we tie all this together.

Show the new ticket screen I'm requesting this service? Yes. Actually, no. I don't think we need that. Do we need that? I'm not sure. We'll see. We'll come back. Ticket type, I'm just gonna pick incident for a minute, but we'll basically go and configure that together.

Then there's a few extra things in here. You know what? Could what are they allowed to click on here? We're just going to say, oh, that's perfectly fine. User access, we're going to say inherit from service category, which basically means we could limit this to a company, to a user, to a level. But you can essentially add in here a user, a department, a job title, et cetera.

Subscribers. This will show you who's basically requested this. And so again, I used to have this where people would subscribe to areas, they would all populate in this list here. I would then run a report, pull all that into MailChimp, and then mailshot them with information that we need. Users can unsubscribe? Sure. Create a new ticket when you subscribe? Don't worry about that. And that is all we need to worry about.

Now, tickets will show you what open tickets you've got for this new Office 365 user request. So now we've done that, I'm going to go to the end user portal, service catalogue, users and services, because that's where we put it, and we should see new Office 365 user.

New Office 365 user. Please fill out this information if you require a member of staff to have an Office 365 account. This will be available in approximately three days. And that's that. They would then click new Office 365 request.

Unable to save data. Summary is mandatory. Details is mandatory. That is because I didn't give them the ability to basically open the new ticket screen. So if we just jump back in there very quickly, go to Office 365 configuration. And I want to say, where did we put this setting? Here. Show the new ticket screen. We'll just go and click save, and hopefully that should now spin us out to that new screen.

Here we go. So currently this is taking the template of my incident template. Now we don't want this form, so we're going to start building our own. So what I'm going to do, as you know that incident is working, I'm just going to go ahead and clone this, and I'm going to give this ticket the name of that service item. So I'm going to call this new Office 365 user request. And then it's as simple as going to the field list and we need to basically pick what we want. So I don't want ticket categorisation, I don't want opportunity, manage service, cost, default charge rate, followers. Don't want asset, don't want agent, don't want priority. And I think that might do for the minute.

Again, if there are things you want to capture that are unique, so we could say department. What you would do is you would go to custom fields. Again, we're in ticket. We would make one called department name. Make this a text field. Click save. And then what we would do on that ticket is basically add that field here. I'm just going to put it in this new starter details form. Department name. And you should see what that looks like.

If you need to jump back into our service catalogue, we need to go to new Office 365 user. We need to go to the configuration page, and then we need to change this ticket type to new Office 365 user request. New ticket screen hint. Please fill out all the information accurately. That doesn't look right, but we're sticking with it.

I've not seen this option before. I want log into service request option services like to give other services at the same time. This could be charged to the service request. Not relevant for this. Okay.

Brilliant. So if I go to the end user portal, I go to the service catalogue, I go to users and services, I then see the new Office 365 user. I can now click new Office 365 request. And there you go. You will see that this is now starting to take shape.

Now, the reason that the first name, last name isn't showing is because this is a massive tutorial. I appreciate that. But if you do have my sandbox, it's good for you to know this. In my new starter details list form here, these have restrictions in place. So I'll just go ahead and remove all these visibility restrictions for now. I will have to fix this off camera later on.

However, now that should be about done. So when your customers log in, it will automatically pick the contact, so they'll obviously log it as themselves. Summary. New Office 365 requests. James is starting on Monday. And again, you can make these fields that you desire. You might not need summary and details. You might just want to basically capture this form of data. First name, Connor. Surname, Fagan. Employee ID, 567. Starting date is the first of January. Department name is going to be HaloPSA consultant.

Then I'm going to click submit. New ticket ID logged. So what we should see, if we go into my issues and requests, you will see that there is a ticket for the end user and obviously able to see the status of their ticket from the agent perspective.

In service desk, they should just see one new unassigned ticket with the new Office 365 request. And if they're looking at the additional fields page, because that's where I've started it up, it will have all the information required to make that Office 365 account.

So that is a very, very short one down. I hope this has been useful. I realise it hasn't been that clean. I don't script these videos. These are kind of when I get time, and I'm very busy at the minute. But yeah, that is how you can start to use the self-service portal to drive tickets. Hope this helps you. I've been Connor. I hope I've spoke a little bit slower this time. Any questions, you know how I am. Have a good day. Bye-bye.