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Displaying extras info in emails and queues

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Christophe

04 Sep, 2013 03:19 PM

Hi,

we are proposing different support plan to our customers. As our support site (tender) uses SSO, we are getting extras info in the discussions. We are now missing some functions :

1) is it possible to send in each email (to the support staff) some extras info ? (for example through your Email Templates) [useful to be aware of the support plan at anytime]
2a) is it possible to display some extras info in the queues (eg the pending queue) ?
or
2b) is it possible to do some automatic triage in different queues depending on some extras infos?
3) also it would be nice to get some extra info for discussions created with the "forward mecanism" (ie without any connection by the customer) through a webservice to be provided by the SSO server?

I listed the needs with the more important first (in my opinion) and of course, there are certainly other needs or way to answer similar need...

christophe

1. 1 Posted by Julien on 04 Sep, 2013 07:39 PM

   

   Hey Christophe,

   #1. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Though I can see this info being useful for supporters, it also comes with a very big risk: replying to this email and/or forwarding it to the wrong person could leak information. That could also happen with a client misconfigured for which we would not parse the reply correctly and show the whole body instead. So, I don't know.

   #2a. Can you expand on that? Do you want to see the extras info directly on the dashboard? As things are, I'm not sure where we woud put it.

   #2b. It's already possible and it looks like you have filters already in place for this.

   #3. I sort of always wanted that as well: a simple API to implement to get extra info about users on a pull model. It's on the roadmap for the future, but I'm not sure when. It could be a small feature, but I'd rather make it a full feature of Tender rather than just one more hack. So it will require more time to think it through and actually implement it. For now, you would have to push that info to us in the extras hash. Depending on the size of your users table, you could just have a cron push it to use every night.

   Let me know what you think.

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2. 2 Posted by Christophe on 05 Sep, 2013 07:53 AM

   

   Hey Julien,

   thanks for your reply and insights.

   #2b : I implemented some filters based on extras infos. They work nicely and this **also**solved #2a because the queues of each discussion are displayed in the queue (and specially the pending queue)

   #2a : see above, solved too

   #3 : I understand, but a nightly cron will not solved the issue : we need to know the support plan some minutes after receiving support request. But as #2a is solved, our support staff may change the queue just after forwarding an email to tender...
   TRW, is it possible to know the "new" discussions through the API (eg discussion created during the last hour)?
   However #3 may be useful anyway...

   #1 : I do agree with your point about info leak... This could be annoying. Maybe a way to implement #1 would be through email header properties (tender-extra: blablabla). This would allow any email reader to either tag or sort automatically the email... This solution would even be better!

   christophe

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3. 3 Posted by Julien on 05 Sep, 2013 06:29 PM

   

   Hey Christophe,

   So for #3, if you want "instant" feedback, you should just use a webhook: this would call a URL of yours when a discussion is created (or a comment is created, you choose), and you could then react appropriately by adding the discussion to a queue, updating the extras hash, etc. Many of our users actually do that: they use a webhook to sort using complex rules on their side.

   Regarding #1 and the headers, I guess that's an option. I'll discuss it with Courtenay.

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4. 4 Posted by Christophe on 06 Sep, 2013 06:35 AM

   

   Hi Julien,

   I already read the doc on webhook. But I only found infos on webhook to 4 different services (campfire, app notifications...) but nothing on calling a custom server.
   do you have some doc on that?

   christophe

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5. 5 Posted by Julien on 06 Sep, 2013 05:01 PM

   

   Hi Christophe,

   Here is the current KB for webhooks: https://help.tenderapp.com/kb/api/webhooks. If there is anything missing or unclear, let me know and I'll update it. It's really quite straightforward though: you get the same JSON payload you would get by calling the API, except it's pushed to you instead of having to ask for it.

   As for the headers, neither Courtenay nor I is too hot about it. It's not technically difficult to do, but that would be a solution just for you, and I'm not sure it brings anything to Tender. I think using webhooks to move things into queues or update metadata is a better approach at this time.

   Cheers.

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6. 6 Posted by Christophe on 10 Sep, 2013 11:05 AM

   

   Hi Julien,

   Thanks for the link to the webhooks doc page. This must be fine.

   About the info to be added to emails, the purpose is to allow some sort from the emailer.
   Without such info in the email, the only way to know the queue of a discussion is go our tender site, or to remember the license status of each discussion (but i am not able ;-) )

   christophe

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7. 7 Posted by Julien on 10 Sep, 2013 03:51 PM

   

   I'd like to understand a little more the real problem with email though: would having that information influence how you respond to emails/discussions, or is it more useful to archive all emails in the right directory in your client? And what kind of platform do you run your email on (Google Apps for example, or your own server)?

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8. 8 Posted by Christophe on 10 Sep, 2013 05:15 PM

   

   Hi Julien,

   Our need is to influence the way we respond to our users. Our product is
   available for free (with some missing functions and no official support).
   Thus:

   - We want to reply quickly to “ENTERPRISE” level customers

   - We want to reply a bit less quickly to “PRO” level customers

   - We want to reply only if we have time to “FREE” level users. Our
   idea is also that other users may reply assuming FREE users are only posting
   “public” discussion.

   With current emails, it is not possible to know in which case we are;

   If we got some info (about the license level) in the email header, we can
   use it to either sort the email in different mailbox, or tag the email or
   whatever is possible in email client.

   BTW: of course if someone on the support change the license level of the
   discussion, mails send previously will not be sorted or tagged correctly in
   the email client. This is a limitation of license level in the mail header…

   Christophe

   From: Julien
   [mailto:[email blocked]]

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9. 9 Posted by Julien on 18 Sep, 2013 07:13 PM

   

   Hey Christophe,

   Sorry I didn't get back to you earlier. I don't have a good solution for this at the moment. I'm unsatisfied with the headers thing, but I don't have much better. If I come up with something, I'll let you know.

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10. Julien closed this discussion on 19 Nov, 2013 07:50 PM.

11. Julien re-opened this discussion on 25 Nov, 2013 06:26 PM

12. Julien closed this discussion on 25 Nov, 2013 06:54 PM.