Note: This feature is only available on Freshdesk Mint and is currently in Beta. Please drop an email to support@freshdesk.com if you'd like to have it enabled for your account.
With Freshdesk, you can now quickly schedule events on Google Calendar from inside the ticket page. This is similar to how Gmail detects dates and time periods from an email and gives you an option to add an event to Google Calendar by clicking on the date/timestamp. In Freshdesk, the date/time mentioned in the customer’s latest response will be available as a clickable link. You can click on the link to schedule the event on your calendar from inside the ticket page itself.
For this to work in your Freshdesk account, you need to enable the Google Calendar integration. Here is how you can integrate Google Calendar with your Freshdesk account.
How to use this feature:
The time and date detection would work only on customer responses and not on agent replies or in the main message/description of the ticket.
That is, when a customer reaches out to your company’s support via email, this email would be the main message/description of the ticket. You wouldn’t find the option to add an event here. However, if a customer sends you a reply with a date/timestamp to schedule a call, you’ll have the option to create an event for that response.
Hovering over the date/timestamp on the response will give you the ‘Add an event’ prompt:
Clicking on the mentioned time will open the ‘Add an event’ slider from the right. You can provide a description for the event in this slider:
If you have added any events on other tickets inside Freshdesk for that day, the same will reflect under the ‘Other events linked with Freshdesk’ panel in the slider.
Timezone conversion:
When you create an event, the timezone of the customer will be taken into consideration. The time mentioned in the customer’s response will automatically get converted and show up according to the agent’s timezone in the slider. This saves time for the agent who, otherwise, will have to convert the mentioned time accordingly and update their calendar.
If in case the contact does not have a timezone associated with their profile, then the helpdesk timezone will be considered for the contact and the conversion will be based on that.
Additionally, if the customer mentions a specific timezone in their response, the feature will smartly detect the same and the convert it to the agent’s timezone.
When and where will the prompt be displayed?
The prompt will be available on the most recent customer response, always. If there are multiple customer responses containing a specific time/date asking for a call or session, then the smart time detection will only work on the most recent customer response and not on any of their previous responses. Smart detection will not happen if the time has already elapsed.
Recognised date and time formats:
The feature recognises the time/date for the following formats:
today at 5pm
2020-10-01
the last Tuesday of October 2020
the day before labor day 2020
third monday after christmas 2021
Feel free to shoot an email to support@freshdesk.com if there are other frequently used formats that can be incorporated, we’ll assist you further.
Note: This feature only works when the language associated with the agent profile is English.