Introduction

The most crucial aspect of a good web hosting provider nowadays is their support capability. As WHMCS is a leading application for managing billing and support, it naturally has a seamless and intuitive way of structuring support departments and enabling your customers and support agents to use it with ease.

In this tutorial, we will review the methods of creating support departments, categorizing them, and designing them to represent your web hosting company's support capacity.

Without further ado, let's begin!

Getting Started

To start creating support departments or managing existing ones, please log inside your WHMCS admin area. After doing so, please move your mouse cursor over the wrench icon on the top right side of the screen.

Performing this action will reveal a drop-down menu. Please select the "System Settings" option.

Upon selecting this option, you will be redirected to the "System Settings" page, where you will see a search bar on the left side of the screen. 

Please use this search bar and type in "Support Departments". After doing so, WHMCS will filter all the results and show the "Support Departments" content block in the middle of the screen. Please click on it.

After clicking on the "Support Departments" content box, you will be redirected to the "Support Ticket Departments" page, where you will see a brief page description on the top.

WHMCS has two ways of dealing with support tickets. 

1. You can configure your ticketing system to only be usable within the Client Area. Customers can only communicate with your support agents from within their Client Area.
2. You can configure an IMAP/POP3 server to pipe customers' emails and import them into your ticketing system. This method will allow customers to communicate with your support agents from their email, and they won't need to log inside their Client Area.

We recommend the first option since this will make communication between your customers and support agents more reliable. Sending tickets/replies from the Client Area will guarantee that your support members will see it immediately. If you use the pipe method and there are issues with your incoming email or the customer's SMTP server, there could be delays or failed deliveries.

Create Support Departments Without Email Piping

To start creating your new support department, please click the "+ Add New Department" button, which you can find on the "Support Ticket Departments" page we discussed earlier.

After clicking on the "+ Add New Department" button, you will be redirected to the page allowing you to start adding new support departments. Please focus on the configuration options beneath the "Add New Department" section.

Let's go over all the available options there.

• Department Name - Please use this text field to type in the name of your department. It would be best to use a name your customers can easily distinguish and select when they have a specific request. For example, "Website Transfer" is a good name for a support category that your support team will use to perform migrations for your clients.
• Description - Please use this text field to type in a description for your department. It can include a few sentences that will give customers a bit of context behind what kind of support cases this department handles.
• Email Address - Please use this text field to type in the email address customers will see when they get a response from agents that replied to tickets from this category. We recommend using [email protected] for all categories so your customers are not confused.
• Assigned Admin Users - Please use this checkbox to enable these admin users to access tickets in these departments and perform various actions with them, such as deleting, replying, opening, and closing. 
• Clients Only - Please use this tickbox to allow only existing customers to use this department. We recommend always enabling this option unless your ticketing system is publicly available and you have a "presales" category.
• Pipe Replies Only - Please use this tickbox to allow customers to respond to existing tickets via their email. Your clients may only open new tickets via the Client Area.
• No Autoresponder - Please use this tickbox to prevent WHMCS from sending customer notices that we received or replied to a ticket. If this option is unchecked, you can configure WHMCS to inform customers that their ticket has been received or responded to.
• Feedback Request - Please use this tickbox to send customer feedback requests after a ticket has been closed.
• Hidden? - Please use this tickbox to hide or show this customer support department. This option can be useful if you have internal categories for your support agents and don't want customers to see them.

Since we are going over the method without email importing, you can skip the "Mail Importing Configuration" here.

Finally, when you have typed in and selected all the required information, please click on the "Add New Department" button at the bottom of the page.

Create Support Departments With Email Piping

Before we proceed with configuring a new support department with email piping, we need to configure two cron jobs that are crucial for this method to work. You may find these cron jobs on the "Support Ticket Departments" page above the "+ Add New Department" button.

After you locate these cron jobs, please configure them using our tutorial on creating cron jobs in cPanel. If you are having difficulty doing so, please contact our support team via our ticketing system - they will be happy to assist you with their setup.

When you finish adding the cron jobs, please click the "+ Add New Department" button to proceed with the rest of the setup. Once redirected there, please fill in the required information under the "Add New Department" section. 

We have gone through all the settings in the paragraph above, so please refer to it if you need help with what to add here.

The setup is completely analogical. However, you also need to perform the "Mail Importing Configuration". 

Let's go over all the settings below:

• Mail Provider - Please use the available tabs to select an email provider to handle the email piping. The options are a personal IMAP/POP3 server, Google, and Microsoft. To set up Google, please visit this article for more information. To set up Microsoft, please check this article. If you use your own email service, please continue with the configuration below.
• Hostname - Please use this text field to enter your email server's hostname.
• Mail Server Port - Please type your email server's port in this text field. Usually 995 (POP3 over SSL), 993 (IMAP over SSL). We recommend using only the SSL ports for these services.
• Email Address - Please use this text field to type in your email address. Use your support @ domain.com email address here.
• Email Pass - Please use this text field to enter your email address's password, which will be used for authentication.

Once all the above information has been submitted, please click the "Test Connection" button to confirm it works. If that's the case, please click on the "Add New Department" button at the bottom of the page.

Conclusion

There you have it! A straightforward and quick method of adding new support departments to your WHMCS and configuring them with direct ticket submission from the Client Area or via email piping! We hope you found our tutorial helpful, and if you need more information about setting up various aspects of WHMCS, please check our tutorial section about this application here.