Nicereply's Smiley

Inspired by 37Signals' Smiley, we have created our own version of this app to demonstrate the powers of our API (read the blogpost). Our smiley is a small, standalone PHP application made for inserting new ratings into Nicereply. It is intended to be copied via (S)FTP onto your server, where visitors of your site can access it and rate your helpdesk team. It uses Nicereply API, so your customers don't need to leave your server to rate your agents (rating links inside emails will contain your domain name).

Smiley installation

Smiley is connected with Nicereply's API, therefore you'll need a company administrator account in Nicereply. You'd also need to create accounts for your helpdesk agents.

Next step is to download Smiley. Smiley is distributed in form of .zip archive. Upload the contents of this archive to your server via (S)FTP. Feel free to choose any suitable location for these files, but don't forget that location affects the rating links.

Go to your API control panel in Nicereply & copy the private key to clipboard. Open Smiley's index.php file in text editor and paste the key on line 4 between apostrophes.

Next, put rating links into your helpdesk team email signatures. As mentioned before, location of Smiley on your server pays role in the final shape of URL. In general, you can follow this simple formula:

 http://YOUR_SERVER_DOMAIN/SMILEY_LOCATION/AGENT_USERNAME/TICKETID

Note the TICKETID at the end is optional, use it only if you are using some kind of ticketing system like Zendesk connected with Nicereply. This way ratings will be connected with tickets in your ticketing system.

Finally, test the rating by visiting the rating link and creating some dummy rating. If everything went OK, you can find the new rating on your Nicereply ratings list.

We're all done, Now you can start tracking the quality of your helpdesk team on your own server, Smiley-style.