This week, we’re excited to share a feature update that makes merging tickets a breeze, a couple of awesome Groove integrations built using our API, and a brilliant hack that one customer shared that uses Grasshopper and Groove together to turn voicemails into support tickets.
Merging Enhancements
When customers submit two requests for the same issue, or submit a request that fits under a previous ticket, Merging lets you combine the tickets into one. This helps you avoid having multiple conversations going on with a customer at once, and keeps everything tidily in a single thread.
We just made some cool updates to the way merging works in Groove.
In the right sidebar of any Groove ticket, you’ll see the five most recent tickets from that customer. 
Now, to merge the ticket you’re viewing with a previous ticket, you can simply hover your cursor over the ticket, and a Merge button will appear.
If the past ticket you want to merge isn’t in the five most recent tickets, just click Show More to see the rest.
Check out more detailed instructions in the Groove Knowledge Base, and happy merging!
Featured Integration: Beanstalk
Beanstalk, an app for hassle-free, hosted version control and deployments used by more than 70,000 companies, just released an integration that lets you to associate your Git and Subversion commits with Groove tickets. Read more about Beanstalk and their new Groove integration here.
Want to build your own Groove integration? Check out our API docs to get started.
One Customer’s Brilliant Groove/Grasshopper Hack
One resourceful customer, who asked to be identified only as “an elated Groove customer,” was generous enough to share a great hack for integrating Groove with Grasshopper.
Here’s how he did it:
We set up a 1-800 number with a main greeting and a menu of extensions: 1 for support, 2 for sales, etc… The extensions are very flexible, and there’s no extra charge for a sizable phone tree if you need one.
We send every extension directly to voicemail, but you can configure extensions to forward to arbitrary other numbers if you prefer, or to forward certain calls selectively during business hours.
Every voicemail left for an extension triggers a Grasshopper notification to an email address you specify; that email contains an auto-transcription and an attached MP3 recording.
It’s trivial to set up the Groove integration — we just set our support@ inbox as the destination for voicemails on the support extension, and so on for sales@, info@, etc…
Groove requires no extra configuration once you’ve linked it to an inbox, list, or alias. The MP3 recordings are attached to tickets in the Groove client; Chrome plays MP3s in-browser; and we use notes to update a ticket after we return calls. Soon, we’ll set up a fax line that pushes scanned documents to the correct Groove inbox, too.
The result: every email inbox, every phone call, and every fax is sent to the correct Groove inbox; support & other calls can be triaged by the right people; and no one has fielded 3am support calls from Singapore on a personal cell. The latter is a miracle for small & globally-distributed teams, at a trivial monthly expense.
The actual setup took less than 15 minutes, including the custom voice recording, after waiting about 2 days for a custom 1-800 number to propagate. It’s even faster if you select a local or non-vanity toll-free number.
Got Groove hacks of your own? Let us know and we’ll share them with the world 🙂
