email-only eSupport with replies & "notes"

[PeteV]

We would like to replicate (and then improve) our current customer support workflow.

Currently, we receive e-mail messages from clients at support@company.com. This e-mail is then forwarded to a group of experts. One of the experts can reply to the client and CC the experts, or start a discussion among the experts first (by removing the client from the list of recipients). Once an answer has been formulated, one of the experts replies to the client by adding their name back to the list of recipients. That is, we are exclusively using email to create replies and notes for our tickets.

During the last few weeks, we set-up eSupport for internal "clients" (that is, one expert asking the group of experts for advice) to gain experience with eSupport. There are plenty of buttons and knobs to play with! So far, eSupport has worked pretty well for us.

Now, we are ready to use eSupport for "external/regular" clients too. However, we are at a loss how/if we can implement our "old" email workflow with eSupport.

Specifically, how can we take a client "out of the loop" of emails temporarily, without creating a second Ticket thread? That is, we would like to use the Reply and Notes functionality, without using the eSupport Staff CP (and just email instead).

The problem is that email from eSupport appears to be from a client, but is sent via eSupport's e-mail address (that is, client's name but eSupport's email address). Therefore, it is not possible to simply remove the client's email address from the list of recipients.

An obvious solution would be to use the eSupport Staff CP, but some of our experts are very senior and computer-illiterate, and would not be comfortable learning how to use yet another software package (especially since customer support is just a minor part of their job).

We are currently trying to figure out some clever way to manipulate Mail Queues and Rules to accomplish what we need, but so far without success.

I realize that this may be a difficult question, and perhaps we are asking too much from eSupport. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[PeteV]

Possible solution:

We are currently thinking about using two Mail Queues: support@company.com which is published to our clients, and discussion@company.com which is company-internal only. Then, we can use "support" to reply to our client and the experts, while we can use "discussion" to reply only to our experts.

Of course, some type of Mail Rule that looks for a certain text-string in the Subject or Message would work too, but would be less obvious (and it would be more prone to typos).

But the big question still remains of course: Is there some way to remove the original sender (the client) from the list of recipients when replying?

I suppose that (mostly for transparency reasons) it would be possible, when replying, to change the e-mail address "support" to "discussion", and remove the Ticket ID from the subject line to create a new Ticket thread. If someone forgets to change "support" to "discussion", this would simply create a new Ticket thread in "support"; confusing, but not a big deal. If someone forgets to remove the Ticket ID, then the "discussion" Mail Queue could catch that with a rule perhaps (!?).

As you can probably tell, we are brainstorming, and not sure which knob/button combination can give us the desired results.

... just wanted to share this with you, to clarify our problem...

Thanks!