Glossary
Glossary of terms for the Emson system.
A
- Action
A request for someone to do something to move a case on. Only available within the case management module.
- Actioner
A person that is able to perform actions against a requested action. Actioners do not require a user licence and can perofrm actions by clicking a link within an email sent to them.
- Admin
An admin(istrator) is a user in Emson who has extra permissions. Admins can configure all aspects of the inbox and case management. They can also administer tickets and create new users.
An administrator would usually be the department leader like a customer support manager.
- Agent
An agent is user type in Emson who processes threads and responds to them. Agents are the everyday users of the system. They can do everything with threads and cases but cannot do any configuration.
- AI Key
An AI Key is a secret key generated on the OpenAI platform and used within Emson to provide AI capabilities. At the moment each user of the system has to set an AI key within their profile if they wish to use any AI features.
- API
API stands for Application Programming Interface and is an online connection that allows you to read or manipulate business objects using code. Emson has an API that allows various operations like creating threads and escalating threads into cases.
- Auto Response
Emson can send automatically generated responses to customers during various events, like when creating a thread or escalating a thread into a case. By default this is not configured so you don’t get responses sent to customers that you have no knowledge of. Your admin can configure these during onboarding or at any time after.
- Avatar
An avatar is a graphical representation of a user. Emson pulls avators from gravatar automatically using your email address. You can also change the avatar manually within the system by visiting the profile page.
B
- Branding
Your company has it’s own identity and Emson accommodates this by allowing you to design your signatures freely and your company logo.
C
- Channel
A channel is the way customer get in touch with you. Basic channels in Emson are email, embedded form, phone and in person. All threads are marked with whichever channel created them so you can report on which channels are most used.
- Conflict Warning
When two users work on the same thread at the same time it can cause problems from duplicate replies to overwritten information. Emson helps you to avoid this with its integrated conflict warning. When other users are working on a thread their avatar is displayed so you know they’re there.
- Custom Fields
Emson allows the creation of custom fields within each inbox. These fields are defined by an admin and can be used to take extra input from customers when using an embedded widget form or by agents when working on a thread.
Custom fields can be basic text, number or date inputs or a drop list of predefined values.
- Customer
A customer is a person that you communicate with from within Emson. Every customer has a profile page where you can see extra information about them as well as all threads and cases they have raised.
D
- Dashboard
Each type of user has their own type of dashboard. The dashboard is the first page a user sees after logging on. Dashboards show a summary of what is currently happening in the business. These summaries can include number of threads raised within a period of time, how many have not been responded to, the latest threads and cases. They could also have a number of actions the user has outstanding.
E
- Escalation
An escalation is what happens after the deadline for a ticket has passed and, for example, no update to the customer has been created. The ticket is marked in red in your taskbar and the overviews and everyone else who is involved in its process gets very sad. So don’t let tickets escalate! Also, in order to prevent escalations, you can use our SLAs (see SLAs).
- External Authentication
External authentication is an easy, one-click option for your users to log into Emson. It has various benefits: not only is it faster but it also means that your users will have to remember fewer passwords. Emson currently supports more than ten login providers, such as Facebook, GitHub, GitLab, Google, or Microsoft / Office365.
F
G
- GitHub
GitHub is a service for the version management of software development projects. It uses Git, a software that tracks changes in file sets. Here at Emson, we use it to maintain our repository.
- GitLab
GitLab is similar to GitHub. Here at Emson, we use it for our internal development.
There is also an integration that allows users to connect GitLab to Emson so that all their issues and their corresponding changes are reflected in both systems.
H
I
- Issue-tracking system
Issue trackers are usually systems that track processes on a technical level. Two of the best-known examples are GitHub and GitLab.
Emson is also often referred to as an issue-tracking system. However, as a helpdesk, it focuses on communication at the customer level rather than the technical level.
J
K
- Knowledge Base
Think of a very extensive set of FAQs - that’s exactly what the Emson knowledge base is. It collects all important information: definitions, processes, how-to’s, organigrams, etc.
Knowledge base articles can be either internal or external, so you can either show them to the world (good for information on your product or service, for example) or keep them for your team (e.g. for internal processes or team info).
L
- LDAP
A Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) helps provide information about your users within Emson. Authentication of users against the LDAP and LDAP role mapping to Emson roles are also possible.
M
- Macro
A macro is a series of actions. By starting the macro, the actions are also triggered (like a domino effect), so users don’t have to work through each individual step separately. It saves an enormous amount of time and ensures that no step is forgotten.
An example of this is declaring a ticket as “spam”. The manual way here would be to assign an owner, set a status, and add the tag “spam”. Using a macro, all this can be done in just one action. Macros can be used in the ticket zoom or within an overview (using multiple selection).
- Mentions
Mentions are a Emson feature that allows you to tag another agent in a ticket. Just type
@@and the name. The selected person will be notified and will be watching the ticket from now on.- Merging Tickets
If you have two (or more) tickets about the same issue, you can merge one of them into the other. By default, Emson performs checks if a message from an external party belongs to an existing ticket. However, if your customer for example writes a completely new email instead of answering the auto response, Emson can’t assign the message to the existing ticket but creates a new one.
- Message
This is an individual part of a thread, e.g. an internal note, an external email an action request. Threads are made up of mupltiple messages.
N
- Notifications
To avoid overlooking new messages (e.g. from a customer) Emson notifies you about every relevant change by default. You can adjust your general notification settings in your user profile. You can even mention other users or subscribe to a specific ticket if you are interested how it proceeds.
O
- Organization
An organization identifies a grouping of customers that operate under the same roof or within the same customer group. If a customer whose organization is “sharing” logs in to the customer interface, this user has access to all tickets of his organization.
- Owner
The owner of a ticket is the person responsible for it and ensures that it is processed in the best possible way. Of course, ownership can be transferred to another agent. In this case, it is recommended to leave a handover note on the ticket so that the new owner knows what is expected of them.
P
- Priority
Every ticket gets assigned a priority. By default, the priority is 2 (normal). But it can be changed to either 1 (low) or 3 (high).
Priorities can even be adjusted or extended to fit your needs. Your administrator can find more information
Q
R
- Reporting
The reporting helps keeping an overview over stats and numbers (e.g. created tickets per month). There are two types of reporting: the reporting functionality integrated in Emson and the reporting with external tools.
- Role
Everyone who logs into Emson has a predefined role. There are four types: admin, agent, actioner and customer.
Admins have the most rights: they can define roles, permissions, and settings for the entire team and instance.
Agents can view and edit tickets, but not change any settings other than those of their own profiles.
Customers can view their tickets’ processing status in their individual Customer Interface.
Actioner a user that can only perform an action and enter the outcome of that action.
S
- Sidebar
The sidebar on the left side contains all relevant places and object you might need. Depending on the configured channels and your permissions, it might not include all sections which are listed below:
Search bar
Notification section
Dashboard
Overviews
Knowledge Base
Customer Chat
Phone
One or more open tickets
Bottom section:
Avatar
Reporting
Admin settings
Button for ticket creation
- Signature
The signature is your footer in an outgoing message. Your customers may find contact details and the name of your company/department there. It can even contain your
- SLA
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contract between an end-user and a company that defines the minimum expected service requirements including quality, availability, and punctuality. They are used to set expectations and hold companies accountable for keeping their promises.
You can easily set up SLAs in Emson and define parameters such as the time for the first response, an update, and a solution. Once the deadline has been reached, the ticket will escalate.
- Splitting tickets
In case a ticket contains more than one issue and you want to handle it in a separate ticket, you can split the ticket. Emson creates a new ticket then based on the selected article for splitting.
- SSO
Single-sign-on (SSO) allows you to access all your systems and devices with just one login. There are various providers that make this process easy and secure. Emson currently supports SSO via SAML and Shibboleth.
- State
Every ticket has a state. You can change it once you’ve updated the ticket. There are four types of states, and they are all color-coded.
T
- Tags
Tags help you to categorize tickets. You can define them based on your use case. For example, if you’re a retail business, your tags could be based on your product categories to help you organize tickets by the type of product they refer to. But they could also be based on the type of request, e.g. refund, delivery issue, missing…
- Templates
If you find that you send the same answers / text bits over and over again, you can save yourself a bunch of work and create a text module. This way, you just need to type
::shortcut and the pre-defined paragraph will automatically appear in your article.- Thread
Each correspondence with a person or customer is called a thread. Threads have messages which can be internal, so only logged in users can see them, or external as in an email to your customer.
- Ticket
A ticket is referred to as a thread in Emson.
- (Ticket) Template
If you create many similar tickets or write many similar texts, you can create a template for them. This is helpful for introductions to your product/service or for drawing up an offer. It’s a real time-saver!
- Title
The title of a ticket is different based on the channel it came in. You can find the title in the sidebar and in the top area in the ticket view. If the title is not very meaningful, you can change it by clicking on the title in a ticket view.
U
- User
A user is any user of the ticket system. Each user is assigned certain permissions, which allow them to access certain areas and information. Users can have various roles, with the standard options being agent, admin, and customer.