April 6, 2009
Notifications and escalations generated by Rulemanager are an integral component of the Clarify/Dovetail system. Traditionally, email and in-application notifications are the most common notification delivery mechanisms. Digital pagers were popular years ago, but are pretty much non-existent today. With mobile devices (iPhones, Windows Mobile, BlackBerrys, etc.) becoming almost ubiquitous, we can look to using these devices for notification delivery. And they all share a common communication platform - SMS. SMS (Short Message Service) is commonly referred to as text messaging. So let's look at how we can use SMS as a delivery mechanism. A while back, I detailed how to use Twitter as a notification channel, and then use Twitter to send SMS messages. If we don't want to be coupled to a service like Twitter (which doesn't have guaranteed delivery, SLAs, etc.), we can use a very similar process, but instead…
April 13, 2009
When new cases come in we have many ways of having our support team notified so we can provide speedy assistance to our customers. We get an email Twitter sends us direct messages Our campfire (chat) gets notified Recently we needed a better way to notify on-call support agents of new cases. Our existing notification mechanisms work great during office hours but at night a spam email getting past my filters better not wake me up at 2am just because it might be a new support case. We needed something better. The simplest thing we could think of was to have our CRM make a phone call. Phone calls are cross platform. No special smart phone client application beats a phone call. Better yet spammers don’t place calls at 2am pitching “Enlargement”. At night I can…
April 8, 2009
In one of our recent blog posts we wrote about how important great customer service is to keeping your current customers during these difficult times. Our just completed first quarter speaks towards the importance of great customer service. We had a record first quarter for Dovetail Software. Customer Service had a lot to do with this. First, we had a 100% renewal rate with all our current customers. Added on top of this, we secured a number of new support customers from one of our competitors. Why were we able to achieve this? Two reasons: 1) We offer great customer service (in fact, superior to our competition) at a lower price; and 2) This competitor (I will refrain from naming them) doesn’t care about their customers. Let me elaborate. Our philosophy in our company is to do whatever it takes to…
March 3, 2009
The abilities to have global users and a centralized server is an important feature of Dovetail Agent. Making localized date handling for all of the users is an important part of getting the right date format displayed to the users, and making sure the dates are stored correctly in the database. Dovetail Agent recognizes the computer and browser settings for each user. Dovetail Agent allows each user to input dates in their localized date format, and relies on Dovetail SDK to convert the dates into a consistent format for storage in the database. Regional Options From the Control Panel for each client, the Regional Options tab of the Regional and Language Options has a big impact on Dovetail Agent functionality. Dovetail Agent uses the standard Visual Basic FormatDate routine, which uses the Regional settings to determine the client's preferred…