Nicereply Blog

We’ve found yet another one helpdesk system that integrates perfectly with Nicereply. Desk.com, formerly Assistly, has some pretty impressive features and a very well thought-out user interface. Here’s an example on how to make these two work well together.

Let’s say we run a hypothetical company that cares about their customer satisfaction, uses Desk.com and wants to use Nicereply for getting customer feedback on it’s agents’ emails.

• Our company is called Fat Cat, ltd.
• We have two user agents, John Garfield and Betty Kitty.
• We already have an Desk.com account at http://fatcat.assistly.com
• We have set up emails in Desk.com
• We’ve already signed up for Nicereply and created accounts for both our agents.

Setting up Nicereply

First we have to edit user IDs of our agents to match those at Desk.com. Over at Desk.com, the user ID can be found in user settings in the Admin (Team -> Users ) and it’s called Integration User ID. Enter this number to field ‘Username’ at Nicereply profile in Settings -> Edit Person. Repeat this for every agent.

Next, we have to activate the Ticket Link feature (Settings -> Ticket link) to link every rating to a case at Desk.com. We put the ticket URL into “Ticket system URL” field, in this case it’s http://fatcat.assistly.com/agent/case/<TICKET_ID>

Setting up Desk.com

Now for the Desk.com part. We’ll set up our rating link by editing the Email Reply Template ( Admin -> Channels -> Email -> Reply templates). Please note that this will work only if you have a custom template. Let’s choose your custom template.

Desk.com has a powerful variable system, allowing you to do some serious kung-fu. The email template contains the whole case communication, but we’re going to insert the rating link only after the most recent message to customer. Since you are able to customize your HTML and plain emails separately, let’s have a look at both of them.

HTML template

We want to include the rating link just after the email body, represented by the {{email.new_html}} variable. However, in the HTML templates, there are two occurrences of this variable, one for emails from your agents, the second one for customer replies. The one we’re looking for is the first one, at this exact location:

It’s the place you’re going to insert your code:

{% if forloop.first %}

------------------------------------------------------
Please, rate my message here:
http://www.nicereply.com/fat-cat/{{ sender.id }}/{{ case.id }}

{% endif %}

Note: Don’t forget to change the “fat-cat” for your company name from Nicereply.

Plain template

Plain template is a little different from the HTML one, there’s only one {{email.new_text}} variable. We’ll therefore have to be more specific in our conditional and check if it’s an email from our agent. Just paste the following code here:

{% if forloop.first and email.agent %}

------------------------------------------------------
Please, rate my message here:
http://www.nicereply.com/fat-cat/{{ sender.id }}/{{ case.id }}

{% endif %}

Note: Don’t forget to change the “fat-cat” for your company name from Nicereply.

And that’s it!

We have now successfully connected Nicereply with Desk.com. Your customers will now be able to rate your helpdesk emails and you’ll have the ability to easily evaluate performance of your helpdesk team AND see what case every rating relates to. Don’t forget to try out the integration thoroughly, and if there’s any problem, please let us know.

We’re looking forward for your comments and feedback. If there’s any other ticketing system you use and want to have connected, drop us an email!