Support System Emails -- Per Department

[Ken]

Currently all support departments use the same set of email templates.  Would you guys be interested in adding the ability to set different email templates for different departments?  Rather than just indicating that we got their ticket I'd like to add other useful information that pertains to that department.

 

This would also allow the system to respond back to the client from the email address of that department.

[Michael]

Yeah good idea, maybe like the products page where you can set up a welcome email?

[Ken]

I edited my post a couple times but yea.  Originally I meant just the Ticket Created email which the Weclome Email system in packages would work out fine.  But now I see problems where all tickets from all departments are going to end up coming from set of email templates with one email address.  I'd like them to be isolated so that if someone emails billing they get emails from billing.  Not email billing and then get replied to by support.

 

Reason is clients may want to route their incoming email within the organization or even on their email client.  I'm not sure if it'll throw people off getting emails from support when it was a billing or sales question, etc.

[Michael]

I edited my post a couple times but yea.  Originally I meant just the Ticket Created email which the Weclome Email system in packages would work out fine.  But now I see problems where all tickets from all departments are going to end up coming from set of email templates with one email address.  I'd like them to be isolated so that if someone emails billing they get emails from billing.  Not email billing and then get replied to by support.

 

Reason is clients may want to route their incoming email within the organization or even on their email client.  I'm not sure if it'll throw people off getting emails from support when it was a billing or sales question, etc.

 

We can do that by the department email addresses mate I think. We do need signatures per department or staff though. The guys are working on that for the Support Manager updates I think.

[Ken]

We can do that by the department email addresses mate I think. We do need signatures per department or staff though. The guys are working on that for the Support Manager updates I think.

 

We can set the incoming mail per department but not outgoing.  If you have a department called Billing and set the email to billing@yourcompany.com the client can open a ticket by sending an email to billing@yourcompany.com.  Then the Billing department will use the universal set of templates for all departments.  Even though the client started the ticket with billing@yourcompany.com all updates will come back as support@yourcompany.com (or as specified in your template).  Now the client is sending replys back to support@yourcompany.com instead of billing@yourcompany.com -- make sense?

[Michael]

We can set the incoming mail per department but not outgoing.  If you have a department called Billing and set the email to billing@yourcompany.com the client can open a ticket by sending an email to billing@yourcompany.com.  Then the Billing department will use the universal set of templates for all departments.  Even though the client started the ticket with billing@yourcompany.com all updates will come back as support@yourcompany.com (or as specified in your template).  Now the client is sending replys back to support@yourcompany.com instead of billing@yourcompany.com -- make sense?

 

Ah I see yeah we'd need each template per department.

[Paul]

We can set the incoming mail per department but not outgoing.  If you have a department called Billing and set the email to billing@yourcompany.com the client can open a ticket by sending an email to billing@yourcompany.com.  Then the Billing department will use the universal set of templates for all departments.  Even though the client started the ticket with billing@yourcompany.com all updates will come back as support@yourcompany.com (or as specified in your template).  Now the client is sending replys back to support@yourcompany.com instead of billing@yourcompany.com -- make sense?

 

It's true that the email comes from the same address, but the reply-to address is set to that for the department. When a user replies to a ticket email, it should go to the correct department.

[Ken]

It's true that the email comes from the same address, but the reply-to address is set to that for the department. When a user replies to a ticket email, it should go to the correct department.

 

Tickets are being routed properly so it's not a problem from the Staff side but rather the client side.  If the department's email address is billing@ then updates should come from that email.  As a client, what if I wanted to setup a folder in my email client that routed all emails from Billing into a folder -- or an organization who wants to route incoming emails from billing to their billing staff?

 

And of course that's aside from the fact that custom email templates per department.  For example if Support is 24 hours but Billing is 9-5... it'd be nice to let the client know in the ticket opener of brief information for that department such as operating hours, alerts, etc that pertain to that department.

[Ken]

Is it possible to add a tag in the email field of the templates that calls the department's configured email?

[Abhineet]

I thought Blesta has already this feature.

 

Anyways, I'd like to get it implemented.

[Paul]

Email template address fields do not have tags available to them, but this may be a viable option.

 

Assuming that additionally the department is available to the body of the email template, you could use conditionals to customize the email as well on a per-department basis. This part *might* be possible now, if so the variables for the department should appear if you send out an email with {% debug %} in it. If nothing is in there to distinguish the department, it's something we should be able to add.

[Ken]

So if debug were to produce:[department_name] => Billing

 

Can we make an if statement out of this?

[Tyson]

It'd be easier to look at the Support Manager documentation which lists all of the tags available to each of the email templates.

 

You'd want to use one of the {ticket.department_email}, {ticket.department_id}, or {ticket.department_name} tags. And yes, you can use conditionals as described in Customizing Emails.

[Ken]

It'd be easier to look at the Support Manager documentation which lists all of the tags available to each of the email templates.

 

You'd want to use one of the {ticket.department_email}, {ticket.department_id}, or {ticket.department_name} tags. And yes, you can use conditionals as described in Customizing Emails.

 

I'm sorry.  I completely overlooked this.  That's exactly what I'm after... and a far better method than my original request.  I will test this out and report back if I have any issues.