Adding and editing views

Rather than having to wade through a list of every conversation in Kayako, it's often useful to look at just a subset of them. For example, just the conversations assigned to you, or to a particular team. Conversations of a particular priority. Conversations that are waiting on replies or in breach of their SLA deadlines. There are many ways you might need to divvy them up. In Kayako, you'll do that using views.

You can use views to display any subset of conversations that meet the criteria you choose. They can be simple, like the examples above. But you can also define views using complex sets of criteria. For example, you could use a view to display only pending conversations submitted by a specific organization that have been assigned to the sales team and are within an hour of their SLA deadlines.

Overall,  views give you a lot of flexibility in how you look at your workload, which makes it easier to stay on top of everything that you and your team are juggling. 

In this article we'll introduce you to the predefined views that Kayako starts out with, and then we'll walk you through adding, modifying, and deleting views to customize your team's filtering options.

Understanding how views work

Kayako comes out-of-the-box with several predefined views. In the admin area, if you click on the Views link in the sidebar, you'll see a list of all of the predefined views. 

Below is a list of the default views and what they display:

Inbox (System)	The inbox displays every new or open conversations that either has been assigned to you or your team, or has yet to be assigned at all.
Your incomplete conversations	This view displays any conversations assigned to you that are not in 'Completed' or 'Closed' status.
Unresolved conversations in your teams	This view displays any conversations assigned to any teams you belong to that are not in 'Completed' or 'Closed' status.
Conversations that have breached SLA	This view displays any conversations that have breached one or more SLA deadlines.
Pending conversations	This view shows any conversations set to 'Pending' status.
All unresolved conversations	This view shows all conversations that are not set to 'Completed' or 'Closed' status.
Suspended messages (System)	This view is a little different than the others — it shows any messages that Kayako has identified as spam or other type of automated message. Kayako automatically suspends these messages, without processing them into their respective conversations. From this view, you can review these messages and choose to accept them into Kayako, or delete them permanently. Learn more in our article about suspended messages.
Trash (System)	This view, the last system view, displays any conversations that have been deleted.

With the exception of the '(System)' views, which cannot be edited, you can tweak any of the views above to suit your team's needs.

But on top of these predefined views, you also have the flexibility to build out custom views to suit your team structure, conversation tags, and overall workflows. It's useful to sit down and map out the sorts of views that would be most useful to your team. Think about which teams will need their own views. Identify any specific priorities, organizations, or tags that you might want to monitor. Sketch out your workflows so you can build views for points along the path. Then, you'll be in a great position to start creating custom views, which we'll walk through step-by-step, next.

NOTE: Closed conversations will not appear in views, but you can search and filter for closed conversations using the 'Advanced Search' option on the search bar.

Adding or modifying views

To give you an example of a view that might be useful for your team, we're going to create a view for looking at conversations that have been escalated. We don't want the whole team to be able to see it, so we'll restrict its visibility to the team we've created for just admin users. Plus, we'll be relying on the SLAs and escalations we've set up already, which we'll use to track the escalated conversations. Finally, we only want to see escalated conversations that haven't been resolved yet, so we'll need to exclude any that have been closed.

NOTE: To add views in Kayako, you will need an administrator account with the 'Manage views' permissions.

To add a new view:

1. Sign in to your Kayako and go to the admin area.
2. In the sidebar, click on Views.
3. Here, you'll see a list of all of the views that have been created. Click the New view button to create a new, blank view.
   NOTE: You can also click any of the existing views to edit them, and refer to the instructions below for help making your changes.
4. In the View Title text box, enter a name for your view. We're going to use 'Escalated Conversations'.
5. Since we want to restrict our view to admins, under 'Make this view available to' we're going to select Specific teams and then select the name of our admin team from the dropdown.
6. Next comes the important part: defining the view criteria. In the next section, click the Select a condition drop-down to expand it.
7. As you can see there's a huge variety of conditions to choose from, but we want to filter for conversations been tagged as 'escalated'. Start typing 'Tags' and select 'Conversations: Tags' from the list.
   NOTE: This step depends on us having an SLA-based automation set up to tag any conversations that have breached their deadlines to be tagged with 'escalated'. You can read more in our article about creating SLAs and escalations.
8. Click Select an operator to open the dropdown and select 'contains all of the following'.
9. In the empty text box that appears, type in 'escalated' to specify the tag.
10. Click the +AND button to add your next condition, which we'll use to exclude any conversations which have been resolved already.
11. Click the second Select a condition dropdown to open it.
12. Start typing 'status' and select 'Conversations: Status' from the list.
13. Click Select an operator and select 'is not equal to'.
14. From the dropdown that appears, select 'Completed'.
15. That covers our conditions, but views also give you a lot of control over the types of information they display. Under the 'Configure columns' heading, you'll see a list of conversation attributes, each of which represents a column that will appear in your view.
16. Click the Select dropdown to open it, and select any other columns you'd like to include. For our escalated conversations, we want to see which team they're assigned to, so click on 'Assigned team'.
17. We also want the date the conversation was last updated to appear in the first column, so click and drag that to the top of the list.
18. We're also not that interested the 'Status', since we already know they're escalated, so want to remove that column. Hover over 'Status' and click the - button that appears to the right.
19. Last thing to do is select a column by which to sort your view results, under the 'Sorting' heading.
    NOTE: You can sort and resort your views by any column, on the fly, so there's not a lot of pressure here.
20. For escalated conversations, it's important for us to see the conversations that have gone the longest without a reply, so select 'Last Updated (timestamp)' and 'Descending' to put the oldest at the top.
21. Click the Save button at the bottom of the page to create your new view.

And that's it. Now that your view has been created, switch back to the agent area, and you should see it in your sidebar.