New Templates for E-mail Correspondence

It is always important to note all of your communication with an end user in your incidents with helpdesk.  Some people send the e-mail and then later copy and paste their information into an incident.  However there is a great feature on incidents that can send an e-mail to an end user and note an incident at the same time. 

At the top of the incident edit screen is the little mail envelop to send an e-mail when this incident is saved.  This great little feature works much the same way a Notification rule would work, but it does not require any of the special criteria to be met and you can change who you’re notifying with your e-mail.  Perhaps you don’t want to e-mail the customer, but another team or worker to ask them to provide some input or update the status of a request you made to them previously, that is also available. 

When I initially approached our team we ran into a lot of people who were not all that impressed with the way the e-mail looked.  I set out to configure a new template and thought I should share an example of what I have done.

Under “Admin > E-Mail Templates > List E-mail Templates” you can view the default template for this function named “Incident Correspondence”.  A quick glance will show this is not a typical e-mail template, but one with the type “E-mail action”.  If you view the item you will notice there are some tags here for the MODIFIED_BY_WORKER. 

By looking at our database we can see a list of valuable items that can be used with this macro including, worker_company, worker_department, Worker_location, worker_phone and more.  After reviewing this information we can create a much more standard signature to be used on our e-mails.  I have the advantage of working at an organization that has standardized that information.  By applying allowing the e-mail to be interpreted as HTML we also have a number of other formatting options.

Our custom template’s body looks like this:

WORKITEM(workitem_email_message)

 

<p>

MODIFIED_BY_WORKER(worker_full_name) <br />

MODIFIED_BY_WORKER(worker_company) <br />

Address Line 1<br />

Address Line 2 <br />

MODIFIED_BY_WORKER(worker_phone) <br />

MODIFIED_BY_WORKER(worker_email)<br />

</p>