One feature we're really excited about in IP.Nexus is the Support Desk. Many administrators selling products on their site will need to offer support services to members.
In this blog entry, we'll go through some of the settings available allowing you to control the Support Desk.
Please note, the design of some areas shown in the screenshots shown are not finalised and subject to change.
Departments
IP.Nexus supports any number of departments. Each department can be:
- Private - members cannot submit support requests directly (for example, an "advanced support" department).
- Public - any member can submit support requests (for example, a "sales" department).
- Package associated - members who have purchased selected products can support requests (for example a "general support" department).
Staff
You can control which staff can access which departments. For example, you could have your customer service staff only see the sales and customer service departments, and your technicians only see the support departments.
You can define a member or an entire group's access. If a member is in a group which one access level, and they also have their own access level, their own will override the groups.
Statuses
IP.Nexus allows you to customise the statuses for support requests. A set of standard statuses are in by default, but you can customise, remove or add your own.
There are a number of settings allowing you to control the behaviour of a status, which you can see in this screenshot:
Stock Actions
One thing we really like about the Support Desk in IP.Nexus is something we call Stock Actions.
Many Support Desks feature stock replies or canned responses. We find when we do technical support, than often a stock reply comes with an action. For example, if a support request needs to be escalated to Tier 2 support, we will give a stock reply, change the department to "Tier 2", change the status to "Open", and release control.
Stock Actions in IP.Nexus allow this process to be automated. They can give a reply, and at the same time, set the status, department and assigned staff member on the support request.
Incoming Emails
IP.Nexus not only allows a member to reply through the client area, they can Email a new request or a reply to a request and IP.Nexus will process it.
We will discuss a little more about the requirements for this feature and how it works in a future blog entry.
You may have noticed in the earlier screenshot showing the department settings that each department can have an incoming Email address. For example, you could set IP.Nexus so Emails to "sales@example.com" go to your sales department, while EMails to "support@example.com" go to your support department.
IP.Nexus also allows you to define rules to filter incoming Emails. For example, if you are receiving spam from a certain address, you could instruct IP.Nexus to discard that Email.
