CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

Muntpunt has a need to handle better email requests that come through their "general question" email.

I'm working on an extension that will make it easier for them to handle these requests. The goal:

- store the email requests as "helpdesk requests" with status scheduled and that you can modify (unlike "inbound emails").

Having a simple helpdesk dashboard with the list of unscheduled/not handled requests and make it easy to
- assign to someone (ie if it's a financial question, assign it to the accountant)
- reply using template emails.
- close the request as being finished.

https://github.com/TechToThePeople/helpdesk
very much work in progress right now, but always happy to receive suggestions, and even happier to receive suggestions with budget/patches

X+

Hi,

Indeed, that might be a 3rd option to create a case.

However, in most of the requests, it's not going to be a complex workflow and it would be too much to start a case to simply reply that we are open from 9 to 5 and give a map to those asking "when are you open"

X+

It seems to me like a lot of places could use something like this, tbh.

Although definitely not a complex workflow it'd be interesting to see how well this could integrate with the CiviCase module. Perhaps a helpdesk ticket could be morphed into a case, or a case could create helpdesk tickets?

+1

Is the 'General Question' email coming from a webform? And you are going to send it to a CiviCRM processed inbox, and instead of creating a general Email activity you are going to filter on subject line or something locked down by the webform and create a special Helpdesk Activity instead that is scheduled rather than complete and that is automatically assigned to all users in a HelpDesk group or something? Sounds useful.

One benefit of using a very simple Case approach over just Activities would be the Case Report which helps determine how well cases are proceeding according to schedule.

You can already add a "lonely" activity to a case, so it'd work the same here

trying to understand how and if an incoming email can trigger the opening of a case?

i might have looked down the drupal option eg using MailHandler to suck email in as a webform submission and use those existing solutions

not sure i have come across a recipe for making webform submissions from an email, as opposed to make nodes or comments, but would think Rules or something might handle it easily