soon, we launch our (magento) store in a second language and our new employee will start in sales and support, mostly via email.
I am wondering how we best would handle the emails in two languages.
Shall we seperate them like one info@ and one service@ or shall we just use one and have an internal rule like: You only English and you only German?
We use Thunderbird (will continue with it for a while) so we don’t have a professional helpdesk or whatever on hand.
I would have thought it was easier to have two e-mail addresses, one for each language. I’d also use the two languages for the two addresses e.g. enquiries@… and hilfe@… (sorry - my Deutsch is schlecht. :))
I’d install a basic helpdesk tool right away. Some are free, others are just a few hundred dollars.
Customers don’t always inquire in a linear way and once you’ve got more than one person on, managing their emails, viewing their history and communicating the same message becomes essential. Furthermore people come and go [on your team] and people take time off even if they don’t go. Support makes businesses – and breaks them – so while it may take a little work to get going, it’s really not an option.
So do you have any recommendations for a software?
Open Source, best ran in Browser (PHP + MySQL would be nice) and should be very good with emails.
Very important: E-Mails that are sent by customers have to be automatically a ticket in the system (seems not all open source options can handle this).
We were working with SugarCRM before which is huge but good.
I just had a look at Bartley Helpdesk … seems to be a bit … basic.
Had a look at LynxHD as well. Seems a bit better but a very silent forums.
EDIT: Continued on searching and stumbled over http://www.otrs.com/de/open-source/ which looks - well - professional
(Edit doesn’t work - I’m too late)
One that we have been recommending to most of our customers is Kayako. Its a little expensive, and the script is a little bloated but it works very good as a support system when you have multiple staff handling the requests, and also it support multilingual, so you can show it in German to your German customers etc.
I just saw this as well and you’re right, a bit expensive.
More over, I’d like to not show my customers at all this system. I’d be happy if they use their normal email way for everything.
The system supports creating tickets from emails, though you might reconsider not showing the people the system. As for example with Kayako you can have knowledge base, and as people type their support request it will show them any possible matches with a knowledge base record. This would possibly lower the amount of support requests you receive.
You can use 1 email, as long you are using for same shop (only different store view…) You can chose under"Current Configuration Scope: e.g.: English => System=>General => Store Email Address: Sender Name English Shop
