Using Tender for a website contact form manager

George's Avatar

George

15 Sep, 2009 03:26 PM

Hello,

Tender is for customer support. But as I use it, I find that it would be great to use it for our website contact form requests for our agency website http://www.area17.com/contact

I know it wasn't made for that purpose, but do you know of anyone who has used it in that way?

We'd probably have to make everything private (maybe one public for fun). I even see a use for the FAQ's for people who submit resumes or ask us repeat questions.

The only drawback I would see is that it might be weird for people who contact us (especially new clients) to get an email from us that says that "you need to reply above this line".

We currently use Sproutit Mailroom. Have been for a few years. It was good at first, but it hasn't seen an enhancement in years, it delivers mails poorly via email (used to be good), they take weeks to get back to you for support (they used to be good) and worst of all, it is soooo slow. I am assuming they are slowly killing the app and we depend on it so much so we need to move to another solution soon.

If you think Tender would not be right ... do you know of another solution.

Thanks!
george

  1. 1 Posted by rick on 15 Sep, 2009 05:39 PM

    rick's Avatar

    You could do this with using the Tender API.

  2. 2 Posted by George on 16 Sep, 2009 11:56 AM

    George's Avatar

    do what with the API?

    my question is more "presales" and whether Tender things their app could accomodate a use that wasn't customer care (but just website contact form)?

    thank you!

  3. 3 Posted by rick on 16 Sep, 2009 03:44 PM

    rick's Avatar

    You can integrate a 'web contact form' into Tender using the API.
    We've even had some customers that would instead send an email (before
    Tender had a public API).

    We use Tender for stuff like this at ENTP. It tracks incoming emails
    from prospective clients, and even invoices from employees. It's
    slowly evolving into a group email server...

  4. 4 Posted by George on 27 Sep, 2009 08:33 AM

    George's Avatar

    I've been reviewing the idea of switching to tender for all of our contacts and two things that I think are necessary before this could happen:

    1. Email address (from, reply to, etc.) needs to be our company email address (optionally with the ability to show the support staff members name also).

    2. Need the ability to edit the "reply above this line" text or remove it altogether if desired.

    Basically the conversation needs to look like a straight email conversation (especially for sales emails) but on the admin side, we want all the features of organizing, assigning, commenting, etc. Everything Tender has to offer.

    I saw that #1 might be in the mix as a future enhancement. I'd like to recommend #2 also :-)

    Thanks!
    george

  5. 5 Posted by vzaar Chief Gee... on 27 Sep, 2009 02:31 PM

    vzaar Chief Geek's Avatar

    We do this at vzaar for our contact page. - http://vzaar.com/contact

    If the user is is logged in we replace the name/email field with the user details and use the SSO feature of tender app.

    If the user is not logged in, we switch this for the email/name fields.

    The “query type” field is pulled automatically from Tender App via the API and cross references the categories field. This is actually working remarkably smoothly for us and a great integration. From then on, it’s as if the user had just started a private discussion.

    I reckon it would be a great feature for Tender to offer as a widget, but from our side it was a day or two’s work and gives us seamless integration with tender.

  6. 6 Posted by rick on 27 Sep, 2009 03:22 PM

    rick's Avatar

    > 1. Email address (from, reply to, etc.) needs to be our company email address (optionally with the ability to show the support staff members name also).

    You can technically do this now, but using your address in the From
    field counts as email spoofing. We want to let people specify their
    own SMTP servers for this reason.

    > 2. Need the ability to edit the "reply above this line" text or remove it altogether if desired.
    >
    > Basically the conversation needs to look like a straight email conversation (especially for sales emails) but on the admin side, we want all the features of organizing, assigning, commenting, etc. Everything Tender has to offer.

    We've talked about this a bit. There are a few features you get from
    the current email template that are important: Users that are
    subscribed to categories get a message stating why they're receiving
    the email update, for example. We will be implementing custom email
    templates at some point though. I don't have a timeline for this yet
    though. I'll post an update when we're ready for beta testers.

  7. 7 Posted by George on 29 Sep, 2009 05:58 AM

    George's Avatar

    Thank you Vzaar Chief Geek. I just contacted Vzaar via your contact form and it integrated perfectly. However when I received an email from the Vzaar, it had 'tenderapp' in the email addresses and a "reply above this line".

    Interesting product by the way ... I'm looking into using it for one of our clients.

    Rick, thanks for your feedback. You are super helpful as always. I look forward to these enhancements. Until then, if you or anyone hears of a service similar to Sproutit Mailroom that can handle nonsupport email form requests, please let me know.

    Thanks!

  8. 8 Posted by George on 29 Sep, 2009 03:48 PM

    George's Avatar

    Hey Rick,

    In speaking with a few others re: "spoofing" (eg. email masking), I hear the same thing:

    "It is the same technique that spoofers use, but you are not spoofing because you are using a real email address. It should not be considered spam, especially if you are replying to an email."

    So it seems others are fine using this technique with no problem. Anyhow, just wanted to bring that up. I don't know myself ;-)

    Best,
    George

  9. Nicole closed this discussion on 04 Dec, 2009 09:22 PM.

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