Customer Service

PrestaShop enables you to centralize all the customers' request within its confines. This helps you keep track of which discussion threads needs answering, rather than having to check with all the recipients of the mail to see if someone did answer it.

In practice, the contact form of your shop, available under the "Contact us" link at the bottom of your front-office, presents the customer with two contacts by default: "Webmaster" and "Customer Service". The customer only has to choose who to contact, and then fill the rest of the fields. The message is then recorded in PrestaShop's customer service tool.

Discussion threads are only included in the customer service tool if the contact has the "Save Message?" option enabled. You can change this setting, or add more contacts, by going to the "Contact" page, under the "Customers" menu. This page is explained in detail in the next section of this chapter of the PrestaShop User Guide.

If the option is disabled for the contact that the customer chooses, the message is simply sent to the contact's e-mail address, and is not stored in PrestaShop.

You also need to properly configure your IMAP settings, so that PrestaShop can retrieve the customer's answers to e-mail that were sent from the customer service tool. This is done in the "Customer service options" section.

On this page, each contact has its own box, where you can quickly see if a there are new messages (meaning, those that have not yet been read). By default there are two, and adding more contacts will move the "Meaning of status" and "Customer service: statistics" boxes further to the left and down.

These two last boxes are handy when you need to handle new messages daily:

Meaning of status. A simple reminder of the color codes that your team can apply to a discussion thread.
Customer service: statistics. An overview of the global activity of your customer service since the beginning.

Further below is the list of received messages, both old and new.

You can edit a couple options at the bottom of the page, which apply to all contacts:

Allow file upload. Whether the customer can attach a file to the message. This can be useful in case of visual issues on the front-page, as the customer can send you screen captures.
Pre-defined message. The default template for your employees' answer. Keep it simple, so that it can adapt to many situations, even if it needs a little editing for each case.

Finally, the bottom of the page features the "Customer service options" section, where you can set many options pertaining to your mail (IMAP) server.

Handling Customer Service Messages

Each conversation with a customer can be entirely handled through PrestaShop's complete interface, without having to use an e-mail client such as Outlook or Thunderbird.

In the conversation list, click on a row to view to view the conversation's details:

Forward this discussion to an employee. From the moment an employee has started replying to a customer message, he becomes in charge of the customer's request. If during the discussion it turns out another employee should handle it instead, you can use that drop-down menu to attribute it. That other employee will receive a notification about it.
Change status of message. You can apply a handful of color-coded status to a discussion, in order to quickly sort them and thus handle them quicker. There are 4 available statuses:
- Open. The issue is still going, or has not yet been answered.
- Closed. The issue is been resolved.
- Pending 1 and Pending 2. These two statuses are internal: their meaning is up to your team. You may even choose to not them, and only rely to "Open" and "Closed".
Essential details are available:
- Customer name (used as section title) and ID.
- Sent on. Date of the latest message in the discussion.
- Browser used. This can be very useful when having to debug an error on your front-office.
- Subject. The default subject for a new discussion thread is the one chosen by the customer when choosing a contact. If it turns out it was not the right choice, you can change it using this drop-down menu. For instance, the customer chose to write about "Customer service", whereas the discussion is mostly about "Webmaster" issues.
- Thread ID and Message ID. These help you count the number of exchanges needed to reach a conclusion for the customer's issue.
- Message. Finally, the message itself.

Clicking "Reply to this message" will display a form with your default message. The default message is set in the "Contacts" page as set in the "Contacts" page.