New contacts feature in 3.5.1

[nitro]

I'm loving the new contacts features in WHMCS 3.5.1, but am a little unclear as to how things work. All of my clients currently have a since point of contact as per the previous 3.4.1 installation. I have added additional billing contacts for a couple of clients now and was wondering if I have set this up right:

 

- main client card, left billing contact to [Default]

- new contact, enabled the 'billing' checkbox

 

Does this mean that the email address on the main client screen will get copies of all system emails, and the new 'billing' contact will get additional copies of all billing related emails?

 

On another card I have added two contact - one for the main account contact as a new contact, and set them to receive all emails (enabled all checkboxes). I have also created a new billing contact for the account and set only the 'billing' checkbox. On the main account card I set the billing contact select option to the new 'billing' contact.

 

Does this mean that the billing contact will be getting duplicated emails for all billing related matters, and that the other 'main' new contact will get a copy of all emails sent by the system?

 

Or - to make this simpler is there an FAQ / cookbook explaining the best way to use these new features? I've not managed to find anything as yet.

 

Thanks.

[Matt]

Try having a look at the "Contacts" section in the manual.

 

http://v3manual.whmcs.com/

 

Matt

[nitro]

Ah - I see a new "Alternate Billing Address" section in the manual which explains how that works. I've updated my system to work as i think I understand the instructions.

 

I'll send out the reminders I was going to process and will report results here in case anyone else is confused.

 

Thanks for the update Matt.

[nitro]

After doing some testing with adding new contacts and support ticket importing I see some unexpected bahaviour:

 

test account: mydomain.com

test account owner: owner@mydomain.com

 

additional contact: someone@anotherdomain.com

This contact is set to receive all email types

 

I sent an email to my WHMCS support address from someone@anotherdomain.com and WHMCS correctly picked up that the message was in relation to mydomain.com. However the unexpected behaviour was that WHMCS sent any emails with details of my ticket responses from within WHMCS admin to owner@mydomain.com and not the address where the original enquiry came from (someone@anotherdomain.com)

 

should the ticket response not go to the email address of the person who initiated the original support request?

[nitro]

OK I see what was happening here - related to my recent bug report, the new contact I had created didn't have the "support" email "Email Notifications" checkbox set - so they didn't get responses to the ticket. It seems that WHMCS sends out email responses to tickets according to the "Email Notifications" preferences assigned to contacts, not the original sender's email address.

 

The account owner gets copies of all ticket responses regardless. I guess that the trick here is to set up the main support contact at the client company as the contact details on the main account card, then set up any additional support people and account owner details as new contacts with appropriate "Email Notifications" checkbox settings.

 

To get invoices to be addressed to the company owner / someone other than the main account contact details, I need to set the appropriate selection in the "Billing Contact" select list on the "Profile" tab of the "Clients Profile" screen.

 

Hope that makes sense.

[nitro]

I have discovered a new problem with the way I have the system set up. For one client I have the main account set up with the owner details and an additional

contact set up for billing notifications.

 

WHMCS sent out an overdue account warning this morning and this went to both people as expected.

 

However when I go to reply to the enquiry the accounts person will not get the message as they are not the primary account contact (who gets all emails from WHMCS) or marked as a support notification contact.

 

I'm beginning to think that the support departments need additional configuration fields on them where we can specify which "Email Notification" type they relate to.

 

Or have I got this all completely wrong?

[Matt]

You seem to be making this more complicated than it needs to be.

 

If the contact is not assigned to get ticket responses then I think it is the correct behaviour that they don't. They could easily be set to receive them if that's what is wanted by the account owner but with tickets it's not the contact a ticket is assigned to but the user, so it's not possible to email the opening contact unless they are set for ticket notifications as they are unknown.

 

Matt

[nitro]

As you describe it is how it is working, but that is complicating matters for in our setup. I need to be able to send a response to the person who opened the support ticket, as in the case where the bookkeeper from a client's business has sent in a response to notification that WHMCS sent out. Either that or specify in Support department configuration that all responses to a specific type of ticket only get sent to people with that type of notification preference set.

 

At the moment the only way for me to respond to the bookkeeper is to reply via email which defeats the whole purpose of having the ticketing system in WHMCS.

 

Otherwise if I want to reply from within WHMCS I need to set the other support contacts in WHMCS to not get support notifications, set the bookkeeper to get support notifications, reply to the ticket, set the bookkeeper to not get support notifications, set the previous support contacts to receive support notifications again.

 

I can't set the bookkeeper to receive support notifications permanently otherwise they are going to get desensitised to emails from WHMCS and start ignoring the invoices and billing reminder notifications.

 

Can you advise any simpler way to do this?

[nitro]

Just wondering if anyone else is using the new contact features in 3.5.1 and if they have come across any issues such as the ones reported in this thread.

 

I have posted a feature request relating to this and was hoping that others would be able to review and add their comments.

 

Thanks for stopping by!