When a customer submits a new ticket or question via your InstantKB support site it's often helpful to trigger an email notification to the right person within your company who can respond & deal with the question in a timely manner.

To achieve this InstantKB offers a powerful rules engine that allow you to automatically assign & categorize incoming questions. In addition you can use the InstantKB rules engine to trigger an automated email notification to specific people if the incoming question meets specific criteria.

For example you may wish to send an email notification to Joe if a customer selects the "Sales" department when submitting the question or you may wish to send an email notification to Leo if the customer selects the "Support " department when submitting a question.

Configuring Rules

You can configure create & manage rules from within the InstantKB Admin CP.  You'll need to click the More button on the left...

With the admin navigation expanded you'll need to locate the "Tickets" tab and click this to expand the various options you can configure rules for tickets as shown below...

NOTE
The Tabs shown within the navigation may vary if you've configured and created custom tabs. You'll need to click the tab name you wish to modify rules for.

Adding a New Rule

To create new rules and edit existing rules click the Manage Rules link shown above. By default this page will be empty for a fresh installation. You'll need to click the "Add Rule" button as shown below to get started...

Our Example Rule

From the Add Rule page for now we'll create a simple rule that will send an email to "sales@instantasp.co.uk" whenever a customer opens or replies to a support ticket. The email will be sent for all new tickets and all replies to existing tickets submitted via your InstantKB support site. .

You would of course replace "sales@instantasp.co.uk" in this example with the appropriate email address for your organization.

To trigger an email for all new customer tickets and replies wewould provide the following values for each of the various rule options shown on the Add Rule page. We can leave most options as default as we want to catch all new tickets and replies with this rule.

So lets get started. On the Add Rules page provide the following values...

Rule Name

New Ticket

Rule Conditions

Exclude

To ensure this rule is only ever triggered for new customer tickets & replies you'll want to ensure you check the "Exclude New Staff Tickets" & "Exclude New Staff Replies" options.

This will ensure the rule is only triggered when customers open or reply to tickets.

If you leave "Exclude New Staff Tickets" & "Exclude New Staff Replies"unchecked the rule we are creating will also trigger whenever a user who belongs to a InstantKB Staff Member Group also opens or replies to a support ticket.

Username Contains

Leave as default. You can leave this value empty as we want to catch all new tickets & replies. If you wanted to only trigger this rule when the ticket authors username matches a specific value you could provide that here.

Email Contains

Leave as default. You can leave this value empty as we want to catch all new tickets.

Subject Contains

Leave as default.You can leave this value empty as we want to catch all new tickets.

Body Contains

Leave as default.You can leave this value empty as we want to catch all new tickets.

Departments

Leave as default. You can leave the departments un-selected as we want to ensure this rule triggers regardless of which department the new ticket was directed to.

SLA Plan

Leave as default. You can leave this option empty as we want to ensure this rule triggers regardless of which SLA has been assigned to the ticket.

Rule Actions

Tag With Image

Leave as default. You can leave this option blank as we don't wish to assign an image / icon to new tickets.

Assign To Staff

Leave as default.You can leave this option blank as we don't want to automatically assign the ticket to any particular staff member.

Move To Work Flow

Leave as default. You can leave this option blank as we don't want to automatically move the ticket to any particular workflow step.

Move To Category

Leave as default. You can leave this option blank as we don't want to automatically move tickets to a specific category.

Move To Department

Leave as default. You can leave this option blank as we don't want to automatically move tickets to a specific department.

Change Ticket Status

Leave as default. You can leave this option blank as we don't want to automatically change the status for tickets.

Change Ticket Priority

Leave as default. You can leave this option blank as we don't want to automatically change the priority for tickets.

Optional Email

To trigger the email notification when this rule triggers you'll need to ensure the "Optional Email" check box is ticked. Once checked you'll see options to provide a recipient email address and a subject & message for the email that will be sent to the recipient(s).

You can separate multiple recipients with a comma. The values would be as follows...

Email Address(s)

sales@instantasp.co.uk

Subject

[ApplicationName] - Rule {[RuleName]} Triggered

Body

Save Your Rule

Once you've configured and saved this rule the next time a customer opens a support ticket or responds to an existing ticket an email will be sent to sales@instantasp.co.uk with information on the ticket.

Test Your Rule

Ensure you receive the email for your new rule. You'll see below an example of what the final email notification will look like based on the above settings....

That's It

This is only a simple example but we hope it helps you get started using rules within InstantKB. Don't forget you can create any number of rules within InstantKB and have these execute in a specific order to ensure multiple people can be informed of new questions.

We hope this helps you configure email notifications using rules within InstantKB. As always if we can ever assist with any questions don't hesitate to open a support ticket or contact us.