Customer Service Portal
I’ve been posting in the forums about my customer service portal that is designed for integrating shopping carts with backend inventory/accounting/tracking systems. I’m trying to make this a very generic messaging system, and as such, it is not highly specified to any one particular backend system. The only shopping cart that it is planned to work with currently is Magento.
The main goals of this application are:
1. Take orders from a cart and store them as messages.
2. Automatically route messages to other queues based on rules.
3. Automatically convert messages into tickets.
4. Allow human acceptance/rejection of tickets.
5. Allow exporting of approved/rejected orders into any format.
Currently, there is a need to have all orders vetted by humans, so there are no automatic rules to directly convert an inbound message into an outbound message, but this should be relatively simple.
The human interaction portion sorts tickets by date, allows status changes, keeps track of internal notes (only seen by customer service people), and allows for locking of tickets to avoid workers clobbering each other’s changes. Here are screenshots of the customer service portion:
http://niftyphp.sourceforge.net/cust_serv/customer_service_portal_01.png
http://niftyphp.sourceforge.net/cust_serv/customer_service_portal_02.png
(I’m not sure if you can click these or not. If not, copy and paste them into a browser).
There will be an official page for this customer service portal soon (sometime this week)
1RoyRubin posted Mon, February 18, 2008
Very interesting project Mark. I look forward to learning more
2Mark_Kimsal posted Mon, February 18, 2008
I also plan on forwarding “contact us” input, RMAs, and RFQs (just a variant of contact us) to the ticket system.
I think the benefit of this type of system allows for larger companies to have lots of people watching the orders without lots of people clobbering the Magento back-end. This results in less traffic on the server, and greater visibility of the customer service reps’ work (more stats on orders processed, complaints handled, etc.)
3Greven posted Mon, February 18, 2008
This is what we need. It looks great, and please do keep us informed.
4dan_w posted Tue, February 19, 2008
I love this one. I cannot tell you how many wasted man hours (not to mention mistakes) we have during peak times just from employees asking redundant questions to each other about who was contacted, what the order status was/is, etc… I think this one is going to be a huge asset for our cs reps. As stated, please keep us updated.
5Mark_Kimsal posted Fri, February 22, 2008
I’m working on putting up the files for release and making some install documentation right now. I know I said “this week”, but it wouldn’t be fun if I didn’t push the boundaries. Check back in a few hours or Saturday.
6nafnaf1000 posted Wed, April 2, 2008
I got an error when installing..
/bin/tar: This does not look like a tar archive /bin/tar: Skipping to next header /bin/tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers /bin/tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
any idea??