New and Enhanced Product Features – 1st Quarter 2018

February 8, 2018 | New Product Announcements, Release Notes

Its February 2018, barely 5 weeks into the year and we're set to deliver a variety of updates to many of our add-ons.  If you have a license that has not expired then you should automatically receive these updates via your WordPress dashboard.

We also delivered two new add-ons to kick off the year:  Service Level Agreements and Issue Tracking.  Now its time to focus on the core engine so for the rest of the quarter we're going to direct most of our energies on the next version of the free Awesome Support engine.

Enhancements To Awesome Support Extensions

Below are details on the latest updates to Custom Fields, Gravity Forms, Smart Agent and more!

Custom Fields

The big news here is that you can now include some core custom fields in the SORT order.  This means that the order of fields such as product, department and priority can be controlled.   Awesome Support 4.4.0 (which is tentatively set to be released at the end of March 2018) is required to make this work.

This module had some great additional features added in the 4th quarter of 2017 too.  These included:

The ability to set up rows and columns on the ticket form using BOOTSTRAP 4 features

You can learn more about how to use this feature in the documentation.

Specify your own CSS classes to help style each individual field.

You can also use pre-defined classes such as those from BOOTSTRAP.

Additional attributes were added to control where the fields would display - front-end list, front-end form, back-end etc.

Business Rules Engine With Zapier Integration

This uber-powerful add-on gets more power with each passing day.  If you're not already familiar with it you really should check out what it can do!

  • Added option to change or set a priority whenever a rule evaluated to true.  This can be useful when trying to manage tickets for certain classes of issues or customers.
  • Added option to change or set a department whenever a rule evaluated to true.  Use this new feature to determine which department will get a ticket based on the contents of a ticket or who the ticket belongs to.  You can even set a department based on what date it is when the ticket arrives.
  • Added option to change or set channels whenever a rule evaluated to true.  You can use this new feature to get more control over recording where a ticket originated from.  By examining the contents of tickets you can go from "email" to "email-from-gmail-account' for example.
  • Fixed a few quirky bugs (see the read-me file with the plugin)

Periodic Rules (Cron)

The Rules Engine now has the ability to run rule checks on a recurring periodic basis.

This opens some interesting workflows - for example you can:

  • Send reminders of open tickets with a particular status or priority to agents and users
  • Escalate open tickets if they’ve been open for too long
  • Send reminders to agents if they haven’t responded to an open ticket in a while

Gravity Forms

We revamped the way new tickets were handled internally.  The revamp makes it easier for other add-ons to hook in and act on the incoming data.

We also added a new feature to allow you to control whether or not admins and users receive the standard WP new user emails.  Usually, when a new user is added to WordPress, the user receives an email with a link to set their password and the admin receives a notification about the new user.  However, in prior versions of our add-on, these emails were suppressed.  Now, however, you can control who receives them instead of them being disabled all the time.

Smart Agent

  • We added a new option to prevent algorithms from running for specified channels.  This will allow you to prevent the module from trying to assign agents when tickets arrive from sources such as Gravity Forms or Email - where you might want to use specific functions in those modules to direct tickets to a very specific agent.
  • We added internal support for a smart-agent-bypass flag. If a metavalue is set to 1 or true in a meta field called _wpas_bypass_smart_agent on the ticket, the smart agent algorithm is not run.
  • We added internal support for an algorithm override flag on the ticket. If a metavalue is set in a meta field called _wpas_smart_agent_algo_override, that value will be used as the algorithm value ( currently valid values are 1 - 5 )

The last two options above are usually paired with our GRAVITY FORMS bridge and CUSTOM FIELDS add-on.  They are handy for very sophisticated situations where you want to control the algorithm that is used to assign an agent based on the specifics of the ticket being processed.  GRAVITY FORMS can perform conditional logic to set the algorithm number to be used when assigning an agent.

Guest Tickets

We added two new features to this extension along with a single bug fix.  You can now control exactly who will receive a notification / password reset message when a guest user is first added to your system.  You can specify that the emails are sent to the user, the admin or both.

You can also specify whether or not the user should remain logged in after submitting the ticket.  The default is to log the user out and show them the THANK YOU page.  But now you have the option to keep them logged in and, by setting the THANK YOU page to the MY TICKETS page, they can go straight to their support account.

We also made the extension more stable when running on a multi-site configuration of WP.

Recently Updated

Email Support / Email Piping

This add-on was recently updated with the following enhancements and fixes:

  • New: Added option to turn off automatic clean-up of email footers
  • New: Option to specify one or more regex functions to clean up email footers
  • New: Option to specify one or more regex functions to replace data in incoming emails. This is useful if you want to mask credit card information for example
  • Fix: Properly flag email replies that are from other agents instead of tagging them as unknown
  • Fix: When converting an unassigned email to a ticket or ticket reply, make sure that attachments are attached to the ticket and not left unattached in the media library
  • Fix: Issue with emails getting cut off when the word "on" was encountered. It was an issue with attempting to clean the footer in gmail messages
  • Fix: When adding users there were some instances where the firstname would be blank causing email imports to fail
  • Fix: Incorrect description under the public/private flag in the inbox rules configuration screen
  • Fix: Grammar label issue on rules screen

Public Tickets

This add-on was recently updated with the following enhancements:

  • If user is logged in then display their name if they have an interest in the ticket/reply even if name is set to be hidden.
  • If agent is logged show their name on the ticket even if name is set to be hidden (the agent can see the ticket on the back-end so there's point in hiding their own names)
  • If admin is logged in always show all names even if name is set to be hidden in the settings (admins see everything so there's no point to hiding the names)

Other Updates

The following add-ons had recent updates as well:

  • REST API
  • EASY DIGITAL DOWNLOADS
  • PRIVATE CREDENTIALS

 

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