There are various roles you can assign to your staff members and customers. In other words, you can upgrade or downgrade everyone's level of access to various functions within your Helprace. This article explains how to change the role of your Helprace participants.

Go to   People, to the right of your user click on the ⋮ button and select Change Role.

Owner

The "master" of your Helprace account. The Owner is usually someone who created the account, having access to areas of Helprace that other team members do not (such as billing information, invoicing and payment options). The Owner can add additional Owners.

Admin

Admins are just below the Owner in the hierarchy and otherwise have full control over all aspects of your Helprace. Admins are able to set ticket rules and access all settings, with some exceptions:

Agent

Agents are ordinary customer service support staff. They are able to interact with customers to answer questions, resolve tickets, create knowledge base articles and moderate the community.

User

Users are customers and site visitors that interact with your Helprace. Users can participate in communities, submit tickets and track their requests. They do not have any administrative privileges in Helprace.

Managing users

Adding

Click the + button and select   User. Depending on your privileges, you can add staff this way too.

Inviting

Inviting and Importing with an email address sends a link to the specified email addresses which, when clicked, will lead them to their profile to set their own password.

Go to   People, click on ⋮ beside the search bar & Invite. Learn more

Users can sign up by themselves or login via social accounts (e.g. Facebook, Google, or Twitter). Those who sign up by themselves are assigned the User role by default. Staff members can change their role if needed.

Changing roles

Go to   People, to the right of your user click on the ⋮ button and select Change Role.

As an agent, you can edit user details including data that users see in their profile.

This can be accessed by:

•  Tickets: In ticket view, clicking on the user's name in the sidebar in ticker view, user profile
•  People: Right clicking on the ⋮ button to the right of the user and selecting Edit Profile
•  User profile: Clicking the pencil icon by User Participation

Users can see and edit the following information in the user portal:

Name, Emails, job title, organization, organization website and time zone.

Agents see can that and a lot more in the admin panel:

Change desired details in the user profile and click Save.

Agents can also edit their own profiles in the same fashion.

How to merge users

Go to the user profile page in the Admin Panel.

Select Merge from the ... menu on the upper left panel.

Click on the field in the Merge User dialogue and start typing a user name, email or phone.

Select a desired user from suggestions.

Click Change if you wish to select a different destination topic.

Merge only when you're ready. Once you hit the merge button, there's no going back!

Tip: You can also open the Merge User dialogue by selecting Merge from the ⋮ menu in the users list.

What is merged

When you merge users together, all their profile data, ticket history, community activity – including started topics, votes and comments get combined into one profile. When profile data is merged, fields that allow multiple values (e.g. emails, phones, websites, social networks, instant messenger handles) are combined, while fields like name or address are preserved in the profile you're merging into.

Go to   People, to the right of your user click on the ⋮ button and select Block.

Blocked users cannot login to your Helprace portal, participate in discussions and vote in your community. If they send an email, it will not be converted to a ticket. Users will get a message saying their email has been rejected.

Deleting a user

Go to   People, to the right of your user click on the ⋮ button and select Delete. This will open a Delete dialog with the following options:

• Delete tickets: deletes all tickets where a given user is the requester, along with all ticket replies, images, and attachments.
• Delete topics: deletes all topics where a given user is the author, along with all replies, comments, images, and attachments.
• Delete topic replies and comments: deletes all topic replies and comments added by the given user, along with all images.
• Wipe personal data from user profile: deletes all personally identifiable information from the user profile. Only these fields are preserved: organization, organization website, city, state / province, country, note.

There is a counter next to the first three items showing how many tickets/topics are going to be affected. Clicking on a counter opens a preview list of relevant tickets/topics.

Deleting a user without selecting "Wipe personal data from user profile" will mark the user as deleted, but their personal data will still be preserved. Such user will be moved to the Deleted filter in the People page and disappear from searches on other pages.

Wiping a user profile

If "Wipe personal data from user profile" option is selected, the user will disappear from the system and their personal identifiable information (e.g. email, name, etc) will be removed. The user has the opportunity to contact you again in the future. This will create a new user account, as if the user never existed in the system.

You can remove user profile details later by selecting Wipe Profile from context menu of a user marked as deleted.

Wiped users won't show up in the Deleted list and can't be restored.

Restoring a user

If user data hasn't been wiped, you'll find the deleted user under the Deleted list in the People page. To restore a user click the ⋮ menu next to it and select Restore.

Please note that there is no way to restore a user whose data has been wiped. A new account for such a user can be created, however.

Go to   People, click on ⋮ beside the search bar.

Inviting

You can invite many individuals at the same time, but they all have to be of one role (eg. User). The green circle beside the avatar identifies staff members (Agents, Admins and Owners).

An invitation email will be sent to the user. The user will display the Invited badge until he or she takes action to confirm the invitation. You can resend an invitation.

The user needs to click the link within the email to accept the invitation to remove the Invited status.

The newly added agent can now update their profile with an avatar, company, etc. 

You can resend an invite by clicking ⋮ beside the user in the list and selecting resend invite.

Importing

Same as above. Please note that there a limit on how many users can be imported from a single file at once. If the number of users in your file exceeds the limit, no users will be imported.

If you need to import more users than allowed by your plan, you can split the import file into smaller files, or contact us to increase the limit for your account.

That's a valid concern - an empty community isn't much use to anyone.

Yet a vibrant, active community is going to to offer customers answers throughout their relationship with your brand - from discovery, to purchase, to set up and support questions. You'll be  able to collect and track legitimate concerns and update customers about company decisions. A community then becomes a bastion of relevant discussions that constantly attracts new users.

Here ways you can promote your community to encourage participation:

• On your website:
  • in your menu
  • product tutorials
  • static FAQ site
  • contact pages
• Through your media:
  • newsletters
  • blog posts
  • site updates
  • press releases
• During support interactions:
  • add a link to email signatures
  • link to discussions in your emails
• In your social media accounts:
  • Twitter tweets
  • Facebook posts
• Seed it with your own content:
  • best practices
  • common issues
  • community guidelines
• Be friendly:
  • use positive words of encouragement
  • offer value to every discussion
  • be up front in difficult situations
• Follow up:
  • always respond quickly
  • don't backtrack on decisions
  • own up to mistakes
• Reward participants:
  • run contests
  • host exclusive giveaways
  • reward top participants

Tip: Helprace also offers a feedback widget, allowing you to collect feedback from anywhere on your website. Learn more