Polite users skewing stats?

[davidszpunar]

Not that I like to complain about polite users, but if I fix a problem while someone is out of the office, say on Friday night, and I update their ticket and close it, but they reply to say “Thank you!” on Monday or Tuesday, it reopens the ticket. I can re-close it (although the status is back to Active so I have to remember what it was before) but I can’t delete their extraneous info (a way to delete/edit post history for administrators would be great, if for nothing else than to fix spelling errors, which are driving me nuts!) or get the post close date back to where it was. So now the ticket shows up as being resolved in three or four days when it was resolved just fine the first time and the reply is not furthering the issue.

I know I could have the reply open a new ticket, but this makes things even harder to keep track of.

I know there are probably a few possible solutions to this, and I’m not sure which is the most elegant, but is something planned to help deal with this, for version 2 maybe? Maybe an “undo last action” function that gets rid of the thank you and/or closes and changes the status and close date back (or leaves the thank you there and resets the status and close date/time). I know that’s specific…and I just said there are multiple ways to handle it perhaps

[ian]

This is a tricky problem. There’s no delete function, nor will there be. It would be handy for this situation, but it’s far too dangerous. Also, HelpSpot’s goal is to keep an accurate representation of the correspondence and deleting history items would make all histories suspect.

Something we’re thinking about in a future version (probably 3) is the idea of being able to mark a request history item as “the resolution”. The date of the resolution history item would then be the one used to calculate resolution times, etc. It will also tie into to some other features we’re looking at for 3 (can’t mention those yet though!)

[ian]

Ah, yes you seem to have found something odd there. I’ll need to check that out.

For now you can strip out the HTML if you prefer. In Admin->Settings->System there’s an option to strip HTML rather than escape it. That should leave you with just the 4 words and not all that HTML.

No granular perms in 2.0.0, but should be in the 2.x somewhere. In any event, the problem with editing is that you change what actually occured. So you can edit the word Voicemail, but in fact that misspelled word has already gone out to the customer in an email. Since you can’t take back that email it’s better to leave what actually occurred in place. Of course, you’re free to hack away on the DB as much as you like

It would be trivial to build a little page that asked for a history ID, showed you the text and allowed you to edit it.

We’ll look at that time tracker idea, but I’d be worried that it would hurt consistency.

[ian]

You make a good point. I’ve got it down for consideration. We’ve never received that request before. If we move to being able to mark a history item as the resolution that will help you here as well though. You won’t need to be so quick to close for your reporting since the time will not be based on the close date, but on the resolution date.

[matthiaslooss]

I am fairly new to HelpSpot, but I second David on the uncessary re-opening of tickets, and the need to add time after a resolution.
So that makes it two requests now, just in case you need to hear it from more users

The more I use HelpSpot and the more I like it so far.

[matthiaslooss]

David are you testing v2 beta?

I have not been able to access my HelpSpot from my BlackBerry, did I miss something?

I am looking forward to get a reason to get the iPhone finally, accessing HelpSpot from it would be awesome.

[ian]

Thanks Guys, noted!

Matthias, it probably hasn’t worked because you’re trying to use the standard login. For mobile access you should be clicking on the world icon just below the login information. That’s the mobile interface. This is “fixed” in v2 by explicitly saying mobile.