Hi,

We have been using email manager over the past few months within our IT helpdesk and it works great.  Recently we've implemented helpmaster within another team and are due to go live this week.  This setup is a little different in that it involves a lot of external contractors.  The jobs are assigned to them but in reality they only ever see the email or fax request to do the job - they don't log into helpmaster (and probably never well).

The problem I have is that for each contractor I have their email address setup which might be something such as service@plumbing.co.nz.  When a job is assigned to them we send to this email.  When they reply to a job via email they often use their own email address either on it's on or on behalf of the main address.  Becuase this  reply email comes back with paul@plumbing.co.nz my email profile will pick it up as it recognises it's to do with an existing call (based on subject line information) but it won't log it becuase I don't want a new client added and it has a problem with the client not existing.

So my question is why does a profile that is looking at updating an existing help desk call care about the client.  Can't it just ignore the client match??

Thanks

Joanne

Hi Joanne,

Thanks for explaining the workflow behind your question.

The reason why the Email Manager cares about the person who sent the email is because when it adds an action to an existing job, it needs to set the "Actioned By" field to someone in the system.  This is why the "New client" screen in the Email Manager configuration allows for the creation of a new client when it cannot find a match with an existing client.

Perhaps there is a case for further options here?  Maybe to add the action, but use a known person - perhaps the primary client for the site the job is logged under, or maybe the logged by person etc?

Any ideas?

Best regards,

Rod

Perhaps this is where the Client TYPE option can come in. When we create a new client we have an option to select Internal or External. Is it possible to map the External option to the RHS of an email address, i.e. the domain, so that flagging a new client and email address as external will reference only the RHS? Therefore any emailed replies with a matching RHS will have their subject scanned and then added to the mentioned job#.

Clear as mud, I bet.

Joanne's issue sounds like something that has recently been addressed in the HelpMaster Pro Email Manager.  When the Email Manager finds more than one clients matching the email address, it tries to locate the client by matching its first AND last name.  The problem is not all email addresses contain both the first and last name and as a result the search fails to find the client when only one part name is provided as in the case with the email address "jo@xyz.co.nz". 

The workaround to this problem, until the next release, is to make sure that you do not have more that one client with the same email address, OR make sure both the first and last names are provided for the email addresses (eg. "Joanne Crang" <jo@xyz.co.nz> instead of "Joanne" <jo@xyz.co.nz>.

That's correct - it sounds like we'll need additional options in the "New Client Options" screen in order to resolve your original issue.  The fix to resolve the clients having the same email address, as mentioned earlier, is not going to solve it.