Setting automatic ticket follow-ups

Staying on top of every ticket in your queue is a difficult task. With follow-ups, you can offload some of that pressure by scheduling ticket replies or updates at any time you specify. 

Let's say, for example, a ticket needs a response from your engineering team. You can reply to the ticket saying you'll check and get back to them, and then create a follow-up to automatically re-open the ticket in a few days' time. Or say you've resolved a ticket, but you want to make sure your user is getting on alright. You could set a follow-up to automatically email your customer a week after closing their ticket, to make sure everything's going smoothly. 

In this article, we'll walk you through the different options available for follow-ups, and then go step-by-step through creating your own.

Understanding what you can do with ticket follow-ups

You can set a follow-up from any support ticket's 'Follow-up' tab: 

You'll start with choosing a time for the follow up, either by setting it to fire in a certain number of minutes, hours, days, etc. or simply by selecting a specific date and time. 

Once you've set a time for the follow-up, you have your pick of actions that Kayako Classic can perform: 

• Under the 'General' section, you can make changes the ticket department, owner, type, status, or priority.

• From 'Add Note' you can tell the follow-up to add a note to the ticket, user, or organization.

• The 'Post Reply' section will let you save a ticket reply that will be sent to the user when the follow-up's target time is reached.

• Finally, the 'Forward' section gives you the option to forward the ticket to any email you specify, optionally accompanied by a message.

You can create a follow-up with any combination of these actions, and Kayako Classic will perform them when the ticket's time comes due. 

Creating a ticket follow-up

You'll create follow-ups from the individual tickets you want them to act on. You can do a lot with follow-ups, but we'll walk through a specific example here. We'll create a follow-up that, after 2 days, will reopen the ticket, set it to high priority, and add a note reminding us where we left things.

NOTE: To set ticket follow-ups in Kayako, you will need a staff account with the 'Ticket follow-ups' permission.

To set a follow-up on a ticket:

1. Sign into the staff control panel.
2. Open the ticket you want to follow up on.
3. Click the Follow-up tab.
4. Here, our first step is to set the timeframe. Select 'In days' and enter '2'. 
5. Check the General box.
6. Set Status to 'Open' and Priority to 'High'.
   NOTE: Remember, you can set these options however you like, we're just going through one example of how you might use follow-ups.
7. Check the Add Note box. 
8. Add an explanatory note to remind yourself of what attention the ticket needs from you. Something like, 'User is waiting on response from engineering team' for example.
9. When you're happy with your follow-up, click the Update button on the top toolbar to save it. 
10. You'll be able to see, at a glance, whether you've set any follow-ups on a ticket, as well as what they'll do, and when:
    
    NOTE FOR DOWNLOAD CUSTOMERS: If you are using the self-hosted version of Kayako Classic, you'll need to set up an external cron on the server for Follow ups. For help, have a look at our user guide article on setting up a server cron or scheduled task.