IP.Nexus contains a powerful support desk allowing staff members to provide support to customers. In IP.Nexus 1.1 we are adding an enhancement to this feature called Support Severities.
Severities allows members to mark the importance of their support request. This allows support staff to triage incoming requests and give priority support to particular customers.
You can create multiple severities, and specify which ones can be set by customers.
Here I have set up two severities: one is for regular requests, and one is for critical issues:
Each severity can be configured to display an icon and be displayed in a particular color when viewing the support request list in the Admin CP so that staff can easily identify important requests. You can also choose for each severity if members are allowed to select it.
User-selected severities
When a user submits a new request they will be prompted to select their severity.
The selection box will only show if there is at least 2 severities for the user to choose between, and if there is only the default and one other, it will automatically change to a checkbox:
You can also configure in the Admin CP a message to display below the severity selection:
Support requests will be sorted in the Admin CP by severity in the order you specify - so in this example, critical support requests will display above normal support requests.
When viewing a support request the staff member can of course change the severity. They can also click the icon to the right of the severity selection which will revoke the member's permission to set severity in future (instead, all support requests will have the default severity) - this is useful if a member abuses the severity feature.
There is a setting in the Admin CP to allow members to view and edit the severity after their request has been submitted - if this is on, they will see a selection box when viewing their request to change the severity.
Auto-selected severities
In addition to having severities that the user can select, you can also create severities which are automatically selected when the user submits a support request for a particular package.
I have created a new severity called "Priority Support". Under the settings for packages, you will notice a new setting called "Support Severity". I am going to create a new package and set this to "Priority Support".
Now, when a user with this package creates a support request associated with this package, the severity will automatically be set to Priority Support:
By Mark