Hey there,
lets begin with the pain-points:
Scenario:
You as an agent have to plan an appointment with the customer out of a ticket.
Customers have these days more and more one “single-point-of-truth” where appointments
have to be: Their calendar. What’s not in this calendar: isn’t existing.
What is the workflow now in reality for the agent:
- Write an article in the ticket that you plan an appointment with the customer
- Copy that ticket-number or ticket-link in the clipboard
- Go to your team-calendar-tool, create an appointment
- Paste ticket-number / link to this appointment
- Go back to the ticket and copy the customers email-address / name
- Go back to the appointment-mask and paste the customers email-address
- Write a subject to this appointment and send it out to your customer
- Go back to the ticket and write down the appointment date/time out of your brain into an article
What happens if there are changes/rejects/confimations of this appointment?
You send this out of your calendar-tool (not Zammad) and what is the sender of this appointment?
You got it: Your personal agent-email-address! So all the updates to this appointment go to your
personal email-inbox and from there into your personal calendar.
Did anybody of your agent team members got/know these updates to? What if you as an agent getting ill? No one of your team is aware of these changes!
Now my idea to end with this pain:
New article type: Appointment
This article has to have following fields/infos:
- To
- CC
- Date (Datepicker)
- Starttime (Timepicker)
- Endtime (Timepicker)
- Subject (Ticket-number is automaticly added like your system settings are)
- Note
- Location
- Timezone
New workflow to plan an appointment with the customer:
- Create a new article in the ticket with type “appointment” (Maybe there is a button to open your calendar tool directly)
- Fill out the fields (some are prefilled with customers email-address, subject, a.s.o.)
- Click “Update”
- 1: In the backgound Zammad sends out an email to the customer (to + cc’s) with all the data in it and a .ics file attached for their calendar tools
- 2: In the backgound Zammad sends out an email to the agent (without an owner: to the group) with all the data in it and a .ics file attached for their calendar tools
- 3: In the ticket stays an article with the appointment-data in it
So the customer and the agent has now appointments in their personal calendars.
What is now the sender of these appointment-mails? You are right: Zammad-sender-address!
What happens now if there are changes to this appointment? You are right: Zammad gets now all updates!
Zammad can show / distribute these changes automaticly in the ticket (for the complete team)
Updates to this appointment should be done out of Zammad with some buttons “reject/update(postpone)/cancel”.
Sometimes the customer invites you to an appointment. These appointments now triggers the described distribution worklow (show infos in the ticket and sends out .ics via email to the agent or sends info only to the agent-group (when there is no ticket-owner)). Maybe there can be global/agent-individual settings to change the behavior of some automations. E.g.: to prevent sending .ics-emails automaticly to the agent when a appointment is created/changed.
Please comment your ideas/enhancements to this feature-request.
Have fun, happy hacking