I’m launching the Beta of Support Hub today to coincide with the launch of the new Envato Support Policy.
Support Hub is a free WordPress plugin that will (eventually) help you answer and track your support questions over various networks ( Envato Comments, Twitter, bbPress, Facebook, Email, HelpScout, Github, etc… )
There will be fancy graphs showing how long you spend on support and tools to give support staff access to certain products (without giving them access to all your accounts).
There will also be a way to request encrypted password details from customers, and a way to accept small payments for custom modifications.
Happy to hear any suggestions or feedback. It would be even more amazing if a few people could try out the beta and let me know if it works haha
Here’s a screenshot of the current beta, which only supports Envato Comments and bbPress at this stage.
The first two support messages are from Envato Comments, the third is from a bbPress post
The users purchase history (and total price) is shown in the sidebar next to the message
The users other messages are shown in the sidebar (see the 3rd bbPress post)
Can clearly see if a user has Purchased an item, or if it is a Pre-sale question
Can clearly see when the users Support pack for that particular item expires
Very lovely plugin. I used to make pretty similar plugin and presented it in a WordCamp but yours is much more completed.
Some ideas:
Notify to staff over email, page title changes (show unread messages on browser tab) maybe with an alert sound.
The main page (Dashboard) should go with latest unread messages, not the statistic stuffs, you can put the statistics to a new submenu. It will help staffs access the Inbox page more quickly.
When I press “Archive” button for a message, “Message Archived. Undo” message should disappear after a few seconds to save space, and a new message will need to pull up to fill enough for example 10 messages.
On the sidebar, allow staff to click on customer’s username to go to his/her profile.
I’m using bbPress on the support site, and it’s annoying to force me use it as a remote site by dealing with XML-RPC thing, there should be a way for local/internal method to connect with bbPress.
I have no idea what “Outbox” does. I’ve sent some replies using your Support Hub and the Outbox is still empty.
Keep up the great work with this awesome plugin. Support is always the most important thing for every online business.
Yes the xmlrpc was quite tricky to deal with, local would be much easier. Adding as an option should be possible. Might do that when looking at importing blog comments to support hub. Cheers
One thing that bugs me is, its working inside WP Admin. I wish it worked on front-end, So that once logged in, we can keep that tab opened. When its inside WP Admin, I feel I’m configuring something not using it.
It’s easier (for the developer) to run it in wp-admin because it’s an isolated area (no clashing with theme styles), not to mention that he can make use of admin ui components.
Looks great can’t wait to give it a try and read through the code! Awesome stuff!
Will it always be provided for free?
AJ
ps: Does anyone know if Envato is ever going to add support for “private” comments so customers can post wp/ftp info and “hide” it from everyone except the support staff?
Private comments would be good. That’s one reason I created support hub, to give a “private comment” feature to existing networks that don’t have it (bbpress, Facebook, Envato, etc)
New “Load More” button added at the bottom. Not automating just yet as I had some issues loading automatically from my mobile.
This might have improved now.
When you send a message it goes into the “Outbox” straight away, and the system processes the actual send in the background (so you can keep getting on with replying without waiting for message to send).
If a message fails for whatever reason it will show up in the Outbox and give you the option to re-send it.
I will probably hide outbox unless it contains a message in the next update.