An important aspect of selling gadgets is what comes next: customer support.
As I’m shipping out RECAP to my Kickstarter supporters, and am launching the RECAP store where anyone can buy this device that let you record cell phone calls into a Computer, it’s now time to give my customers (and me) a convenient way to handle technical issues.
A way to enter and track issues. osTicket is a great platform to provide that customer support. Especially because it comes free with Bluehost, which is the webhost I use.
Side note: if you not yet have a web hosting service and thinking about getting one I can personally recommend Bluehost. I’ve been using for 2-3 years now…
So in order to do that, I setup a ticketing system using Bluehost’s osTicket.
This is what it looks like:
In case you are a gadget maker are trying to setup similar, you may have like me get stuck at making osTicket retrieve your mailbox. Since I spend a bunch of time getting that to work right, I decided to put this quick tutorial on how to setup a cron job for osTicket in Bluehost cPanel
The default configuration of osTicket in Bluehost does not retrieve emails from the server, meaning that if customers reply to your response. you’ll never findout. Their response will be in limbo, and they may get up set.
Now that I provided some backgournd, let’s get started:
Set up Cron Job for osTicket in Bluehost cPanel
Most of the process is shown in this page
https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/411
What that page does NOT tell you is the osTicket specific configurations. Well let me tell you what they are:
Step 0 (optional)
Create an archive folder in RoundCube.
In RoundCube click in settings. It should be straight forward. Example folder name ArchivedTickets
Step1.
command: php public_html/…./api/cron/api
Step2:
observe port 143, and syntax of archive folder. The proper syntax is:
INBOX.foldername
- observe systax
Now you know how to setup a cron job for osTicket! Good luck!