Introduction

Welcome to another part of our WHMCS General Settings tutorial. This tutorial will review another tab from the General Settings, namely, the “Support” tab. Offering adequate, fast, and reliable customer support is a crucial aspect of any web hosting service. The settings located under this tab will help you polish your support system and make it more functional for both your agents and clients.

Of course, WHMCS has plenty of configuration choices under the General Settings, and we will examine them in the rest of our WHMCS tutorials in the series.

Getting Started

To access the General Settings, please log inside your WHMCS admin area. After you log in, please point your attention to the top right corner. There you will see the wrench icon. Please click on it, and then click on the "System Settings" option from the revealed icons. 

This action will redirect you to the "System Settings" page, where you will see all the available WHMCS settings. 

To access the "General Settings," please click on the "General Settings" content box, which will be the first option under the "All Settings" title.

Support Tab

To access the "Support" tab, please click on the "Support" tab on the right side of the "Mail" tab. It will contain settings relevant to your support department, such as Tickets, Replies, and type of access, depending on the user (logged or guest).

Let's check out each option individually and see what they do.

• Support Module - Please use this drop-down menu to select a third-party support system module if such is installed. Otherwise, please leave the default one used by WHMCS.
• Support Ticket Mask Format - Please use this text field to customize the support ticket number format for new tickets. You can use the examples below the text field to generate a unique structure that best suits your needs. An example is "%a%a%a - %n%n%n - %y.%m.%d : %i", which will result in abc - 123 - 2022.10.28: #1234512. "%a" will represent any lowercase letter, "%n" can represent any number from 0-9, "%y" means the year, "%m" represents the month, "%d" represents the day. Finally, "%i" will represent the ticket ID.
• Ticket Reply List Order - Please use this drop-down menu to select the order in which the communication in a ticket is displayed. You can choose either descending(newest to oldest)order or ascending (oldest to newest).
• Ticket Reply Email Limit - Please use this text field to enter the number of messages you would like your ticketing system to receive from clients when submitting a ticket within 15 minutes. This setting is handy when dealing with customers who have set up auto-responders, which may create an endless loop of sending and responding to messages.
• Show Client Only Departments - Please use this tickbox to enable or disable "Client Only Departments". When enabled, guess users (non-logged-in) can see your support departments and submit tickets under them. We highly recommend keeping the default value which is "disabled".
• Client Tickets Require Login - Please use this tickbox to disable/enable tickets for visitors that are not logged in. By default, this is enabled, meaning only logged-in visitors can access the ticketing area. We recommend keeping this setting as such.
• Knowledgebase Suggestions - Please use this checkbox to enable/disable relevant suggestions to the client's case from your knowledge base. This setting can be helpful when you have a rich knowledge base with many common cases explained.
• Attachment Thumbnail Previews - Please use this tickbox to enable/disable thumbnail previews for the user's attached screenshots.
• Support Ticket Rating - Please use this checkbox to enable ticket ratings. Customers may use stars (1 to 5) to rate their experience with a specific support agent.
• Auto Add Carbon Copy Recipients - Please use this checkbox to add the customer's address to the "cc" field if he submitted a ticket via an email instead of the ticketing area.
• Prevent Email Reopening - Please use this checkbox to prevent/allow ticket reopening via email. WHMCS will automatically close tickets after a set period. When enabled, customers can reopen their tickets by answering the last message received for the specific case.
• Update Last Reply Timestamp - Please use this radio button to select when a ticket's "Last Reply" timestamp is updated. 
• Every time a reply is made - Choosing this option will update the "Last Reply" timestamp every time the customer updates their ticket.
• Every time for staff replies, only on a change of status for clients - Choosing this option will update the "Last Reply" timestamp every time a support agent adds a reply or the ticket's status changes.
• Disable Reply Email Logging - Please use this checkbox to enable/disable reply ticket response logging. We believe this is unnecessary, as a record of the reply is already present within the ticket itself.
• Allowed File Attachment Types - Please use this text field to list which file types are allowed to be attached to your ticketing system. Note that PHP file extensions are not permitted for security reasons, and even if you add this extension, it will not work. 
• Service Status Require Login - Please use this tickbox to allow or disallow guest users (non-logged-in) from viewing the server status or network issues page. We recommend keeping this enabled.
• Include Product Downloads - Please use this tickbox to allow or prevent product downloads. Note that the customer must own the plan to be able to see the relevant download material.
• Allow Insecure Imports - Please use this checkbox to allow insecure imports into a specific ticket. By insecure uploads, we refer to email replies that are from unregistered users. This option could be helpful if the customer communicates with a third-party service and your support agents investigate the case together.
• Reopen Existing Tickets if Importing Fails - Please use this checkbox to allow or disallow the reopening of closed tickets with unimported replies. If a ticket is reopened in such a manner, the status will change to "Customer Reply", and you will be able to view and import replies manually. Note that the "Allow Insecure Imports" must be disabled for you to use this.

Once you have chosen the desired settings on this page, please click on the blue “Save Changes” button located at the bottom of the page. Otherwise, please click the grey “Cancel Changes” button on the right side of it to revert them.

This covers all the configurations under the WHMCS “Support” tab. Hopefully, you found our explanations useful and applied some of our suggestions within this tab to enhance your WHMCS support system.

Conclusion

Please follow our next tutorial in line, which will go through the “Invoices” tab.  It contains settings related to the way WHMCS generates invoices and allows you to fine-tune them in a way best suited to your needs and customer preferences.