Halo Implementation Series – Video 5 – Email Templates

hey everyone and welcome to the next installment in the Halo implementation series um you know what I'm going to say now with me today I have my favorite Halo person Mr Halo himself Morgan aspinel um and today we're going to continue talking about um you know setting up Halo We're specifically going to talk about um email templates so uh hey Morgan how you doing and uh thank you very much again for joining me hey again Chris yeah always a pleasure really is um yeah Mr Halo um I like it it's growing on me I'm gonna do that on every call so as people are listening to the series they're going to get bored of me saying that um I won't don't worry and it's uh it's gonna become my tagline right where um um I actually just just sort of I have to say this so I do a podcast with one of my colleagues and every time she mentions something I always go that's my favorite topic to talk about and and so it's kind of almost become a tagline and I think we're going to make this a tagline as well for you that we're going to call you Mr Halo from now on I can work with it yeah yeah absolutely yeah so yeah um let's let's talk about um let's talk about email templates you know what they are when to use them how to set them up where to configure them absolutely you know and maybe talk about any kind of caveats you know things we maybe need to look out for um that kind of stuff when setting up these templates so yeah over to you cool yeah um I mean email templates are an incredibly important part of this system um it's gonna be the primary way that you interface with your customers right so it's a it's important to make sure that those templates are presented in a way that that you uh want them to be presented in the you know the customer experience is as professional and personalized is uh you would hope it to be so I mean I'll sort of I'll start off just by mentioning that we do pre-load a series of templates into the system they're rather vanilla um but there's there's certainly sort of functional and they should provide at least enough information to get you going uh but yeah if you really want to take it to the next step and you want to uh make the customer experience even more personalized then you're going to want to go in and amend these so this is true throughout the system in that pretty much every email I think every email that is sent in Halo is sent using a template and you can find all of those email templates again in configuration and this time into email and then within here we have our email templates section so these are all of the default email templates that we have um templates for events such as the new ticket acknowledgment when the one of your agents is sending an email from an existing ticket when the ticket's closed off all of that stuff and so they're all in here and if we just click into the new ticket logged for example we can see that we're sort of really we're really built up from just two core aspects we just got the email subject and the email body now when you're in here um oh I've just lost my screen we all good uh yeah let's come back yep okay nice nice um yeah sorry so within within our email templates um we can of course sort of configure these as we need we can pop pop a table in if we want to sort of format um some specific information in a certain way it's also worth mentioning here that uh for the sort of HTML Savvy individuals we can click the code View and we can actually sort of transfer our email template directly into HTML so we can format that however it is that we want to format it okay I I often find with these and I think it's the same in in any PSA tool um you know if you are going to use HTML I'd always recommend using a third-party HTML um product because you know a lot of these um these don't format them as as well as they should do so I would say go into you know some kind of third-party HTML product generate your HTML code in there then come back and copy it in here and it'll kind of format correctly and look nice yeah no I absolutely agree um oh now within our email templates as well um we can see a couple of sort of strings of text prefixed with a dollar sign so these are also a very important Concepts throughout Halo PSA um namely dollar variables and a lot of variables are a means of um inserting tickets or inserting specific information regarding the entity that you're you're working with and we'll use ticket as an example here so inserting ticket specific information into our email of course without having to change the email every single time um so you know for example dollar fault ID in Halo PSA refers to the ID of the ticket in question dollar data code is when the ticket has been logged and so on and if you want a full list of those variables from within a template you actually have this small paragraph just above with a link to go to all of the variables that you can use within your email templates so that includes options such as you know um the account number for a site account manager title um the the assigned agent of a ticket and so on so you can get uh you can get quite creative with the the variables that you can put in here and you know the format of your your email templates okay now sorry Chris was there gonna be a question there no no I was gonna say no that's that's great the um the dollar variables um and setting those up so and as you say there is a list of of what those dollar variables are based on um oh yeah and there they are there yes yeah um it's worth mentioning at this point that this page is not the list of every single variable in Halo PSA um there is a lesson in the service desk course of the Halo PSA Academy that lists all of the different places in Halo and their respective URLs where you can find variables for for different entities such as like invoice templates invoice PDF templates for example uh has a slightly different variable list from those that you would include on on emails so yeah check out the the Halo Academy for for a full list of every variable that you can have in the system and the respective URLs okay and I'll put a link in the description below on how to access the um the Halo Academy awesome cool nice um so I guess we'll just mention a couple of places a couple of core places where some of those email templates can be applied um firstly if we're thinking about our new ticket logged email template so the the sort of ticket acknowledgment email we can change that Within our ticket type specifically um via the defaults tab for our ticket type configuration we're in here we can use the default email template which is just going to be the the new ticket log template that we saw or at this point we can actually override the the template that is going to be sent out um now we don't see any options in here believe that's because we haven't actually created any email templates yet and this this is probably the first uh the first gotcha the people should likely consider when they're first coming into Halo and first setting these templates up I've certainly had many questions in the past about where do we actually find our custom email templates so for example I could create a new email template by clicking new in the top right okay but then in this list if I go to search for this I can't actually find it yeah and so there's a question that comes up quite often where do I find my custom email templates and it's not very obvious but what you need to do is you need to hit the drop down at the top here from standard messages and switch that over to custom templates and now we can see that custom email template that we just created a moment ago so watch out for that one okay yeah and I mean and that's something I see quite a lot as well when when I'm Consulting on this is um you know there's there's that little tiny sort of Arrow at the top and I think people miss that a lot and don't realize that that's actually a drop down list so it sure it might be worth you know having something where there's um either making it more clear or having an option where they can select both maybe like a tick box or something yeah yeah yeah no no for sure um it's it's probably one of those like small but significant quality of life improvements that will include in the future release yeah sure um and just to wrap that up we can now see that in our acknowledgment email template we can use the default or we can use our custom template that we have created um the next place to consider about uh sorry the next place to consider when thinking about manipulating the emails that are sent from Halo it's probably going to be your actions so we've seen how we can change the email template when a ticket is logged and you can also via an action change the email template that is sent out from a particular action so you might have a specific action um that uh you know might um an example that comes to mind is that the self onboarding form uh at Halo PSA specifically um we have we have a manual button to resend a welcome email if the initial email wasn't sent out and that loads up a custom template that we have created and sends that template to the customer so um yeah if you want a specific action to send an email of a specific format all you need to do is change the email template in here for the action in question okay now those are two rather specific use cases but what I would say is far more common is is actually thinking about changing the entire collection of email templates um an example might be uh you might have a co-managed it configured within Halo PSA and you might want to send emails with a particular footer to certain customers based on the customer that you're interacting with you know again a prime example of this is going to be our internal Halo is going to send a Halo PSA footer or PSA customers versus a Halo itsm but for itsm customers or the CRM footer for CRM customers and and that's all based on message groups within Halo so again if we go back to configuration email we see next to our email templates we have this message groups option so message groups are our collection of email templates and that includes our custom templates so you might um you might want to consider instead of hitting that drop down from the email templates instead actually going into the message groups and going to custom templates at which point you'll get to the the same location but you know it's just another way of getting there one that is slightly more obvious than that drop down so in your message groups you can quite easily see there's custom templates there um and so what you can do at this point is you can create a new message group um just call it other message group for now and what that's going to do is that's going to load up all of the default email templates from the standard messages message group it's going to load them up in a totally separate list so now you can come in here and you can manipulate these email templates without affecting any of the email templates in any other message group so if we go back to standard messages I go to my new tick acknowledgment that hasn't changed but the ticket acknowledgment in the the message group that I've just created is totally different and I must admit far less useful and cool so the next place to or sort of tying tying this back to sort of the user experience in a functional senses okay we've got this new message group well how do we actually apply this message group to emails that are sent out of Halo so there are a couple of places that you can actually set your message group um one such place would be at customer level so again this is what we do internally in our um in our live system um against each customer record we have the ability to override our organization details at which point in here I can change options such as the the default from address so again if you're sending emails from different domains you can pick the domain that the email is sent from provided the mailbox is connected in Halo and you can have that sent out on a per customer basis and then just above that we have our message group so we can set um we can set message groups per customer of course this is our override organization details option which would indicate that within our organization config we also have the ability to set our message groups so you can set your message groups per organization you can set them per customer which should override the organization um I believe okay so if you set the map at organization then unless you override them they automatically just but I guess inherit down to all the um all the companies all the all the customers sorry can you say that again yeah if you send them at the organizational level say okay these are the message groups I'm going to use for um yeah at an organizational level then all customers automatically get that message group unless you override them that's correct yes yeah okay yeah yeah that's it um and then you can also set it per team as well uh and what I don't know is if that overrides the customer level I'm adding I'm gonna get I'm gonna guess and I'm gonna say no but I actually have no idea I'll be perfectly honest with you um but I suppose I suppose the idea would be um pick a philosophy and stick to it right um if you want to have your template set based on the team um you know an example could be the you want your emails from the sales team to be different globally then uh you can change the message group per team alternatively uh if you want the if you want email templates to be set per customer then you could go into the override organization details section against the customer settings and set it in there and I suppose the different options cover different use cases so yeah and I guess it would be if you had multiple sales teams right maybe you had one team selling telecoms and one selling RT or something then you might say you know those teams that are selling telecoms you want specific messaging to go out from those teams yeah yeah you know and and it is going to be a completely different different kind of email that goes out so so that would be the use case for kind of doing a at a team level um but yeah I mean I I agree you know pick a philosophy kind of either either do it at a global level um or or a team level but what I think is is good here is the ability to be able to override a at a customer level because you might say you know you might only be the the the first line or third line whatever support for that customer and you want to send it from their own domain name so they send it to you know supported ABC um and you want the email to come back from supported ABC so it looks like you're part of their organization rather than a you know within a third-party outsourced company so I think having it at the company level at that and in that respect would is a really good thing and then so there might be some of those instances where you where you kind of need to do that as well for sure for sure yeah this is um the this is the place that I see uh most affected um in that the majority of implementations uh when this has been a requirement this is the best place to set that it gives you the um the sort of the it gives you the most granularity in terms of exactly what types of emails what do you want those to look like on a per customer basis so yeah um nice I think I think that's all there is to it um I I mean I suppose just one one quick point I mentioned in the uh the S the service level agreement uh session that I was going to mention the the particular emails that are relevant to our SLA hold reminders um and those are research SLA in our description we've got SLA hold reminder message so this is the the email that is sent out on on you know every other work day or however you configure it so this is your reminder email and then if the customer doesn't reply um you get the ticket closed automatically brackets SLA message saying uh we've tried to contact you you haven't replied so we're closing it off see you later exactly and for those of you who are watching this video that um not sure what Morgan's talking about here if you watched the previous video where we talked about slas and talked about the um you know the SLA hold and automatically um you know alerting customers throughout the process that that's where that's what these emails are that uh Morgan is talking about at this point that's it that's it and I I suppose I would just wrap up by um by saying um what are the most important email templates to consider in the system it's quite a common question that comes up in an initial implementation msps would say oh God there's 65 email templates does that mean I have to go in and configure 65 different email templates well um you know the most thorough answer is yes however for an initial implementation you don't need to consider every single email template those that I think are the most important are the new ticket logged so your acknowledgment email your ticket update so this is going to be the default email template that's sent out with any action that is configured to email the customer so that's an important one uh your ticket closed email template those SLA hold reminder email templates I just mentioned given that you uh you know provided you actually have that option enabled um and that's that's probably it some of the other ones might be the welcome email so this is the email that new users will get if you send them the welcome email from Halo um depending on whether or not you're going to be sending that to users you might want to consider uh you know tweaking this um and the other ones I would I would change and I guess from a from a ticketing perspective is is like we said you know if you've got the these could be your your Global ones Senator um you know in the organization level if you then had that scenario where different customers had different branding of these then at that point you might want to you know copy these and create them as as custom messages um and and send those out from there rather than kind of just using these these generic ones yeah exactly yeah as soon as you start thinking um I need to I need to change the the look and feel of emails for a particular customer as soon as that comes to mind create a new message group you probably want to call that message group either the uh the organization that is sending uh those emails or the customer if it is specific to a customer and then configure the email templates within that message group and then apply that message group to the customer as we as we saw yeah absolutely yeah now that makes sense and I think um you know and and a lot of them those are really I think certainly from a tickling perspective you know definitely the the sort of five or six top ones you can see there on on the the ticketing side the race change as and when you need them but if you don't need them for for now then you know don't don't bother too much about necessarily changing them yeah exactly I mean for everyone down the line you're going to want to start thinking about the quotation message email templates is the email template sent out whenever you're sending a quote proposal from Halo your um invoice email template uh I think it's that one yeah of course this is making the assumption that you're you're using um you know Halo to to generate the quote and also using Halo to generate the invoice if you were yeah you know if you were sending your invoice into QuickBooks and sending it from there then you don't need to worry too much about the the invoice one same thing with with quoting a lot of msps will use a third-party quoting tool um although the quoting tool in in Halo is pretty good so um you know if for for Halo users it probably less likely to be using a a third-party quoting tool um but you know yeah so so if you're in that position as an MSP where you're using third-party stuff to do it then don't worry too much about those particular emails just really focus on the stuff that is is to do with the service desk absolutely yeah um yeah completely correct like you say the majority of people will not go all in uh with the the sending of quotes the sending of invoices you know from uh from day one of go live but what they certainly will be doing for day one of go live is uh sending emails from tickets sending emails fatigue acknowledgments closing tickets off so uh yeah those those are an absolute must-have if if you're not um if you're not happy or you know if you want to change the email templates those top three are really the most important ones um so yeah yeah absolutely excellent that's been really really useful um you know around kind of setting up email templates um so once again Morgan thank you so much for your time really appreciate it um and I look forward to seeing you on the next video always a pleasure yeah see you soon thanks cheers bye-bye