System-Wide Databases - Am I dreaming?
Written June 11th, 2008 by Aaron HolbrookAlright, so I know I have a tendency to ask more often than tell/inform on the blog, but I like to provoke people’s thoughts and responses. In the future I might revisit my studies in usability - but until then, you’re stuck answering my industry-provoking questions.
This question has less to do with our websites that we manage and more to do with some of the internal processes that we all face at one time or another.
Do you have a way of creating cross-system databases that people in different departments can access? For quite some time I’ve been in need of some way to track emails that come in from the website and that are routed to different people/departments in order to ensure follow through and quality in our customer service. The best idea I’ve come up with is an Access database that key people use to input their responses to said emails. Reports could then be pulled up, and once a week I’d be able to go through and make sure nothing was getting neglected.
How do you cope with this issue? Have you even run across this issue? Am I creating more work for myself, or am I on the right track?
June 12th, 2008 at 9:58 am
In regard to emails that come through….. I have the emails set to automatically forward to certain people depending on the words found in the email or subject line. When I set up the auto-forwards I asked the people to cc the webmaster email on their responses so I know it was taken care of. Once I receive that cc, I move it into the responded folder along with the original email. If I don’t get a cc, then they’re stuck in my inbox, so I follow up with the person it was automatically forwarded to in order to make sure the email was taken care of properly.
June 13th, 2008 at 5:15 am
It’s not cheap, but RightNow Technologies has a solid product that Web site’s use to track questions and answers. Multiple people within the organization can be tagged for answers. The answers go back into the product (essentially a database) for display to the visitors of the Web site. The answers are posted automatically to the site and are listed by popularity.
The Inova Health System Web site uses this project through their call center as an integrated solution…
http://inova.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/inova.cfg/php/enduser/std_alp.php
http://www.rightnow.com/products/response.php
June 16th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
We have a number of contact forms for visitors to use, and their input is gathered by our CMS and a little e-mail tickler goes out to appropriate editors. The tickler shows the message, with a link to login to the CMS to respond. In the CMS there’s a “Reply” action on each collected feedback, and the response is stored in addition to being e-mailed to the visitor.
This system works well for the questions the Web editors answer, but we haven’t extended its use to other departments. We just forward the feedback to the appropriate person. At that point we lose the ability to track the response that was sent.
A slicker system could act as an intermediary for these e-mails. It would send the feedback to you (the Web editor) via e-mail, using an e-mail address like “computer@yourwebsite.org”, and you could then reply directly to that via e-mail. The system would forward your response to the visitor, in addition to logging it to a database. There are a few edge cases that might be tricky, but it could work.