SPI EmailDesk is a full fledged email help desk solution, featuring:

* Full look&feel customization
* Web-based or email-driven (no need to login to reply to tickets)
* Auto-reply
* Canned responses
* FAQ / Knowledge base
* Escalation
* Email aliases
* Full attachments support via Amazon S3
* Smart message-content parsing
* Multi-lingual support
* API for third-party integration



This weekend we've incorporated a few changes to this service:
* Support for messages of unlimited length
* Message-body templates, and
* Better handling of unicode characters.

If you notice anything out of the ordinary, or have any questions, please contact us.

In a previous post, I explained How to Edit Order details, updating the shipping-address, price, credit-card or product for an existing order.

Today, I'd like to cover How to Add a new Order under an existing customer

This is helpful when you're looking to -

* Process orders offline
OR
* Credit a customer with a "Free order"

-

Step 1: Access Customer Manager

Login to your SPI account account and click on the Customer Manager. Search for the customer, for whom you'd like to add the new order.

If the customer doesn't exist yet, use "Add Customer" to add a new customer record.

Step 2: Click on New Order

Scroll down and click on the 'New Order' button.



Step 3: Edit Order Details

Select the product, store and shipping information (if applicable)



Turn-on the 'Free Order' checkbox to designate this order as a free one, for which the customer will never be charged.

Note: Orders added using this interface do NOT credit affiliates any commissions.

Step 4: (Optional) Charge customer

If you'd like to immediately charge the customer for this new order, complete adding the new order, then click on the order ID to enter the 'Edit Order details' screen.

Follow steps 4 and 5 here, to process the charge.



Note: If the new order caused the customer to have an outstanding balance and you don't process the charge yourself, the charge will be processed daily when the recurring-payments script runs.

Order confirmation emails are delivered to your customers upon a successful order.

You can configure SPI Shopping Cart to send customers a single consolidated receipt with a breakdown of all products they've ordered, or you can send one order-confirmation email per every product ordered.

Catalog-style stores (such as Amazon.com) typically use a single consolidated email receipt, while Infomarketing sales-letter type sites typically use one order-confirmation email per every product ordered.

Option 1: Setting up one Order Confirmation per each Product Ordered

Login to your SPI account, click on System Branding - Emails - Orders, and create a New message.



A good template you can use is:


Once you have your message, use the Product Manager - Select product - Process flow, to associate Order Confirmation messages with individual products, so that every product generates a matching Order Confirmation email, providing customers with details on how they can access their product (if electronic) or when to expect it (if physical product).




Option 2: Single Order receipt with a breakdown of all products ordered

Order receipts are emails that include a summary of all products ordered. The predefined order receipt email ("NewCustomerOrder") follows this format:


Notice the {%shoppingcart%} dynamic tag. This is replaced in run-time, with a breakdown of all products ordered.

Order receipts are defined on a per-store level. Whenever a customer places an order, the store-specific receipt email is used.

To modify, login to your SPI account, click on Product Manager - Stores - select a store and update the Order Confirmation select box:

Step 1:

Login to your SPI account and click on the Order Manager



Step 2:

Select the Date Range, Referring Affiliate, Products and Order Status to filter by.



You can choose to download All Orders, Canceled Orders, Abandoned Orders or Test orders.

Step 3:

Select which fields to include in the report (you can also set the order of fields), report format and title



Saving this report as a template will allow you to schedule it to run automatically once a day, once a month etc.

You can also specify an email-address where this report will be emailed to upon completion.

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That's it! Your report will be generated and show up under the Reports screen as soon as it's ready for you to download

SoftwareProjects is growing rapidly and as any company experiencing rapid growth, we are going through some "growing pains".

One area we know we have to improve upon, is email response times.

Instant response times used to be one of our key differentiators and we're committed to bringing that back.

In favor of complete transparency, attached is the full copy of an email that was sent today to the dev team:

Subject: New system to monitor & enforce Communication response times

Hi,

We've had a few complaints lately from clients about the time it takes us to -
* Reply to project questions
* Reply to general emails
* Set project deadlines

This new problem needs to be addressed immediately.

The SPI offering has always been positioned as "the Ritz Carlton of Software Development" and it is important we stay true to this core value.

As we continue our massive recruitment efforts, adding new engineers and account managers, opening shops in more locations and bringing in droves of new clients, it is becoming more and more challenging to monitor and maintain our target threshold of how quickly we want to respond to emails, how quickly we want project deadlines to be set etc.

With everyone working on multiple things at the same time, simply asking people to "try and reply to emails and set deadlines as soon as you can", no longer cuts it. It's human nature to intuitively respond to "the easy emails" first and forget about other things, until we are reminded about them by frustrated clients.

Our clients love us and know how much we care about their business. SPI's contribution in helping our clients generate hundreds of millions of dollars is unparalleled in our industry. But not responding to emails as quickly as humanly possible, violates the trust clients place with us.

We need a fully automated system, that will enforce the target SLAs and help all of us meeting and exceeding our customer's expectations. Such a system has been in development for the last few months and will be introduced over the next coming days.

This is a "Carrot & Stick" system, whereby people are compensated for replying to emails within 30 minutes or less, setting a deadline within 6 hours from the time a project is approved etc., and penalized when emails sit around for days without being responded to.

While it is going to take a few days getting used to the new system, I am confident everyone understands the incentive we all share in coming up with a systematic methodology that will help us continue to WOW our clients.

A happy client refers 1 friend to SPI.
An unhappy client tells 5 friends to look elsewhere.

Thank you everyone for your hard work so far. I'm very excited about the big changes ahead as we embark on the second half of 2009.

I've been invited to speak at Affilicon, the largest International Affiliate Marketing Conference, on the topic of helping affiliates grow their online business by using outsourcing.



It's an honor for SPI to be acknowledged as an industry leader in helping businesses sell-more-online and I'm sure this will be a great conference.

Affilicon is an International event running in China, Mumbai, Israel, Scandinavia and London.

My presentation will include specific examples showing how we've helped some of the world's greatest online marketers, generate $100m in new sales over 15 days.

I'm looking to share my experience, motivate and leave you with a few take-away tools & tips you can put to use right away.

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1,500 attendees & over 70 Exhibitors are already confirmed for the upcoming event.

I'm looking forward to meet-up with old friends and engage in a week of non-stop networking. Will be sure to post a video of my presentation as soon as one becomes available.