Queues and canned responses

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Queues decide where tickets land and who picks them up. Canned responses, which the console also calls macros, are replies a technician inserts with a shortcut. This page shows how to set up both. To change tickets automatically, see Workflows.

Before you begin

Your plan must include the service desk: Enterprise or MSP. See Plans and limits.
To manage queues, you need ticket:manage. To manage canned responses, you need automation:manage. See Roles and permissions.
To give a queue a default SLA policy, create the policy first. See Service level agreements.

Set up queues

Every ticket is in a queue. A ticket raised without a queue goes to the default queue, and exactly one queue is the default.

Select Tickets > Queues, then New queue. On the MSP plan, open the client first.
Enter a Name and a Description.
To make it the queue that unrouted tickets land in, select Make this the default queue.
Under What a ticket landing here picks up, set the values a ticket gets when it arrives without its own:
- SLA policy: the SLA policy to apply, or None.
- Group: the ID of the group to assign.
- Assignee: the ID of the technician to assign.
Leave a box blank to set nothing.
Optional: enter a Sort order to place the queue in lists.
Select Save.

Deleting a queue does not move its tickets. They keep pointing at it. You cannot delete the default queue or the only queue: make another queue the default, or create another queue, first.

Automate tickets

Changing tickets automatically, such as raising the priority of anything left untouched for a day, is done with workflows. See Workflows. Automation rules created before workflows keep running and are listed and edited on the Workflows page.

Create a canned response

A canned response posts a reply and can change the ticket at the same time, such as “Close as duplicate”.

Select Tickets > Canned responses, then New macro.
Enter a Name, such as “Close as duplicate”.
In Shortcut, enter what technicians type to find it, such as dupe. Use lowercase letters, digits, dots, underscores, and hyphens.
Choose a Body format: Plain text or HTML.
Write the Body. You can use {{requester.firstName}}, {{requester.name}}, {{ticket.reference}}, {{ticket.subject}}, {{endpoint.hostname}}, and {{tech.name}}. An unknown placeholder is left in the text so the technician sees it before sending.
Optional: under Field changes, select Add action and choose Add a tag, Set status, Set priority, or Set assignee.
Optional: enter a Sort order.
Select Save.

To use one, type // in a reply or note and choose the canned response. Its field changes are made when the message is sent, so choosing one and then deciding against it changes nothing.

Responses marked Built in come with Outpost. Responses marked Private belong to one technician.

Verify

Create a test ticket with no queue. It lands in the default queue with that queue’s SLA policy.

Next steps

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