What’s Been Happening at JitBit This Year?

It’s fair to say that 2020 has been kind of crazy so far.

While the pandemic has impacted us on a global scale, it has been a unique and often worrisome environment for all affected. Our team here at JitBit have been taking precautions along with everyone else, but of course we’ve also been able to continue working.

We thought this would be a good time to catch you up on what we’ve been up to. We know you don’t always have time to view every update and there have been many already! We’ve added some cool new features and updates to existing features that you may find useful - here’s what you should know:

Built-in screen capture

Have you tried this nifty new feature with your help tickets? Built-in screen capture means that videos and screenshots can be added to tickets to provide an extra layer of context and clarity.

The idea is that this should make it simple for your users or customers to provide you with a screenshot or screen share video - they don’t have to find a different program and figure out how to use it. This should help prevent those long waits when you ask for a screen shot but don’t get one from the customer.

Our tool is super-easy for your users. They simply click on “capture screen” on a new help desk ticket and it will take them through the steps to do so. We recommend that recording the “application window” is a better option than “entire screen” because it creates a smaller file.

Dark theme for help desk

As of late May, we’ve gone dark! It wasn’t without a few challenges, especially because we needed to be able to display user-generated content from emails without the many ugly formatting variances that come from that channel.

To deal with that we had to introduce a client-side color-parsing algorithm that searches user content for "color" and "background-color" CSS properties, calculates the color's "lightness" and if that lightness is below the threshold, we remove the styling.

The dark theme is available on our hosted version and has to be enabled by the user. Just go to your helpdesk user profile, switch to editing and enable the "Dark UI theme" switch.

Subtickets

How many times do your users submit multiple, unrelated issues on one support ticket? This can be tricky to manage, especially if different people work on different issues and separate conversations happen around each. It’s easy for something to slip through the cracks and to find that you didn’t address every item on the original ticket.

This is why we introduced our subtickets feature. While we already had a number of other options to deal with this situation (splitting and merging tickets, converting tickets into replies to other tickets, and converting replies into separate tickets assigned to different people), subtickets make it easier to split a big task into several smaller ones.

Customer satisfaction surveys

We’re always interested in receiving your feature requests, and customer satisfaction surveys were a popular request in our internal backlog. You can now survey your customers via the automated “ticket has been closed” emails.

All you need to do is add #RatingLinks# in the "Ticket closed" email template in "Administration - Email". Make sure you have "ticket closed" notifications enabled as well. Also make sure the "CC all subscribers" setting is off to enable this feature, otherwise the app would be sending the rating prompt to everyone on the ticket, not just the originator.

Dependent custom fields

Dependent custom fields work by “if X is selected in field A, the Y options will be shown in field B.” So for example, let’s say field A asks for the make of vehicle, field B could then show relevant models dependent on the A pick.

This can be useful when you need to further categorize help tickets, so that they go to the appropriate person for follow-up.

Support ticket search improved

One of the features that is very important to a help desk ticketing system is the ability to search for tickets. This can be very useful for things like checking if a similar issue has been logged before.

We’ve added a small improvement to our search function - the ability to search for custom fields as well. So now you can search:

• search - enter a keyword to search for.
  The application will search for the keyword in ticket subject, ticket body, and the submitter email/name
• Date from - return tickets within a date interval
• Date to - return tickets within a date interval
• From - return tickets from a particular user
• Assigned to - return tickets handled by a particular technician
• Category - return tickets in a particular category
• Status - return tickets in a status (or NOT in a status)
• Ticket ID - search for a ticket by ID
• "Has Tags" - search for tickets that have these tags
• "Doesn't have tags" - search for tickets that DO NOT have these tags
• Custom fields - search by custom fields
• Show latest entries from the log - return a number of the latest ticket comment from the log

Power Bi integration

How useful is it to be able to build custom reports and visualizations? This is exactly what the new Power Bi integration allows you to be able to do. This integration is currently still in Beta, so we’d love for you to try it and share your thoughts.

The instructions for enabling the Power Bi integration are found here.

Custom status permission

As you know there are three user roles in Jitbit Helpdesk:

• “Regular user” creates tickets and expects support, they have access to tickets other than their own
• “Technician” a tech support person who helps users with their tickets, they can see all tickets from all users in their permitted categories
• “Administrator” can do everything
• There's also “Managers” – they can see other people's tickets, but only within the same "company"

With our custom status permission feature, you can now set tickets to “for managers only.” This can be useful when you want to do things such as set up an approval process for your tickets.

See who last updated the ticket

Here’s another popular option from our request list: being able to see who last updated the support ticket! It’s just practical, right? Sometimes there are good reasons for needing to know who updated what, when and why…

Redesign

We’ve recently updated all of our anonymous, user-facing pages to look more modern. Your users will notice a sleeker design and friendly interface. Check out some of the examples in the screenshots below…

Final thoughts

We hope you are all keeping well during this time. We’re working hard to bring popular feature requests and fixes out and we’d love to hear any of your ideas.

Our own ideas forum is where you can suggest ideas and people can vote or make comments. We take a lot of our new features from those ideas, especially if they are practical and popular across many users.

Here, we’ve highlighted just a few of the new features we’ve added this year, but you can see a more exhaustive list of features and fixes here.