If you are a Serio user, at some point you are almost certainly going to want to exchange emails with another support system. There are generally two cases that we see being met:
- You have a supplier you wish to exchange information with via email as part of Supplier Management.
- You are a company that deals with external customers, and one or more of your customers has their own support system.
By exchanging emails, I mean that when you send them an email from Serio it is added to the correct ticket and processed efficiently, and likewise when the supplier or customer sends you an email from their system that Serio picks it up and places it with the right ticket.
Things like this usually work seamlessly, and I'll explain how they work. Most support services use something called a Reply Reference (in Serio's case), or a ticket id, or an email reference code. It's something that
- uniquely identifies the originating ticket
- is unlikely to come-up in normal email exchanges by accident
The main thing to understand is that there is short text string that can be used to identify the best ticket to add the email to.
If you are just using Serio, all you need to worry about is that the Reply Reference is quoted, which normally means putting it in all outgoing emails, so that when customers or suppliers reply it is automatically quoted back, and the email is handled correctly.
When you start to deal with an external system, all of a sudden have 2 Reply References to consider; your own, which you are familiar with, and theirs - your supplier or customer. I'll call this the 3rd Party Reference.
Here's what you need to do to make this work.
Logging an Incident for a Customer who has their own support system
In this case, you might be acting as a support supplier or 2nd line support service.
- In either case, ask your customer to quote your own Replay Reference on all subsequent emails they send.
Assigning an Incident to a Supplier
In this case, you are logging the ticket and assigning to a Supplier.