Email customization for notifications

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Introduction

Service Desk email provides an efficient way to enhance your service team's communication. It allows for collaboration with your users on incidents and service requests and notification updates regarding request status. They also help you maintain a positive user experience.

Advanced and Premier customers can customize service desk emails to match your corporate branding.  This includes:

• Customization of all emails throughout the incident lifecycle

• Global and personal email settings for:

  • Subject
  • Header
  • Footer
  • Signature

For more information, see Notifications.

Navigation

Setup > Service Desk > Notifications.

Use cases

• A service organization can:
  • Name service interactions as tickets instead of incidents.
  • Customize a call to action for specific communications.
• Publish a general How to Contact Us in the email header or footer.
• Use email templates to communicate important service announcements to customers, for example, hours of operations surrounding holidays.
• Standardize email footers to include compliance, confidentiality, or other legal notices.

Best practice

By using the email customization options you can modify system-generated emails to align with your corporate branding and usage guidelines. In addition, personalization helps drive adoption by your service requesters and increases productivity and usability.

Personalize signatures

Administrators can personalize their company's signature through a global, company-wide setting or per email template. They can also let users change their own personal signatures.

Global email

See Email sections settings.

User personal signatures

Allow users to create personal signatures (Administrators)

Administrators can allow users to customize their personal signature. To do so:

1. Navigate to Setup > Global Setting > Email Signature.

2. Under Global Sections, hover over Signature, and then click the pencil icon.

   Email Signature and select Users permitted to customize their personal signature.

After the global setting is established, users can follow the instructions below to customize their own personal signature.

Create a personal signature (Users)

1. Click on your avatar on the top right of your screen (often displays your initials, avatar or profile picture).
2. Select Profile.
3. Select the Settings tab.
4. Edit your text.
5. Click Save.

Email templates

Service Desk includes a number of templates that can be used to notify assignees and/or requesters of an event on corresponding incidents and/or changes. Administrators can use the out-of-the box templates or customize to meet your organization's needs. For a list of out-of-the-box email notification templates, see Email notification templates.

Email notification templates allow for seamless alerts of ongoing workflow processes. In addition, you can quickly customize your own email template and include any of the variables provided on the right of your screen.

Behavior of the Assignee template vs the Requester template

It is important to select the correct template based on who you want to receive a notification. For example:

• If you want to Include users who triggered the notification, use the Assignee template.

• If you want to include the requester who triggered the notification, use the Requester template.

You can modify notification behavior by following these instructions for the Assignee and Requester templates.

1. Navigate to Setup > Service Desk > Notifications.

2. Open template for Incident changed for Assignee.

3. Directly under the first paragraph, select or deselect the option to Include users that triggered the notification.

4. You can do the same in the Incident Changed for Requester template

5. Save & retest.

Email variables

System variables can be used in any email. When you select a tab a list of the system variables displays on the right. From there you can copy any variable by hovering over the variable name and then clicking Copy to the right of the variable.

System email variables can be used in email notification templates. They cannot be modified.

The following system variables are available:

• {{assignee_full_name}}
• {{attachments}}
• {{change_number}}
• {{change_title}}
• {{change_type}}
• {{department}}
• {{event_initiator}}
• {{event_initiator_email}}
• {{event_initiator_phone_number}}
• {{event_initiator_title}}
• {{hardware_asset_status}}
• {{hardware_category}}
• {{hardware_name}}
• {{hardware_owner}}
• {{hardware_tag}}
• {{hardware_technical_contact}}
• {{hardware_warranty_status}}
• {{incident_category}}
• {{incident_description}}
• {{incident_number}}
• {{incident_number_link_to_incident}}
• {{incident_origin}}
• {{incident_priority}}
• {{incident_title}}
• {{integration_info}} *
• {{last_updated}}
• {{main}}
• {{main_event}}
• {{main_wo_action}}
• {{process_integration_validation_error}}
• {{received_at}}
• {{requester_email}}
• {{requester_full_name}}
• {{requester_last_name}}
• {{requester_phonenumber}}
• {{samanage_link}}
• {{service_desk_logo}}
• {{servicedesk_name}}
• {{site}}
• {{solution_number}}
• {{solution_title}}
• {{state}}

* The integration_info system variable includes:

• The integration URL
• The HTTP return code
• The sequential number of the automated workflow step from which the integration was called
• The integration complete response (up to 32K), typically the JSON response