Tutorial / Managing your systems

1. Understanding systems
2. Adding and managing system
3. Assigning email addresses to a system
4. Allowing users access to a system
5. Per-system settings

SupportByEmail.com allows you to create multiple systems within your account. Each system has its own Inbox so you can separate messages sent to different email addresses and allow different groups of users to work with different Inboxes. Furthermore you can choose whether each system in your account has its own knowledge base or shares it with another system.

Some of our customers use separate systems to

• For an ecommerce site, allowing separate advisors to deal with messages to sales, billing and tech support. Each system has its own knowledge base with keywords weighted specifically for sales, billing and tech support enquiries.
• For a franchise network, allowing each franchisee to keep their own separate identity. Each franchisee has their own email address and mailbox but queries a central knowledge base when answering questions.
• For a community site, giving a priority email address to premium members that is guaranteed a fast response. The questions received to either address are of the same nature so the knowledge base is shared.

Click the Manage account button in the menu on the left. Underneath your company information you will see System Information followed by the name of a system. A default system is set when you register and is given your company name as the system name. You can update the system name and other properties by changing the values on this form and pressing Update. The individual selections are covered in detail below.

The drop down box to the right of the displayed system name is the system selector. Select the system from this box to change the system that you are currently viewing or making changes to. To add a new system, select Add new system from the dropdown. Enter a name and press Create system to add the new system.

Click Manage Emails in the menu on the left to bring up a list of your registered email addresses. Make sure the name of your new system is selected in the system selector drop down in the top right of screen and add a new email address by entering the first part of the address and selecting a domain name from the domain library. If you want to use your own domain name then contact support@supportbyemail.com for full details.

Remember, email addresses can only be assigned to one of your systems so always make sure the system selector shows the right system name before adding a new one.

Users who are administrators automatically have access to all systems within your account. Moderators and users can be given access to each specific system as necessary.

Click Manage users in the menu on the left and make sure the correct system name is showing in the system selector. Alongside each user that is not an administrator there is a checkbox. Simply tick the box to allow access to the selected system or untick the box to deny access. When the boxes are all ticked and unticked appropriately, click Update to save any changes.

• The display name of the system
• Whether email alerts are sent each time a message is received, or every hour or every day when there is a message waiting to be answered
• Which users receive the email alerts
• Whether to save sent messages in the Sent folder
• Whether to send a carbon copy of sent mail to another email address
• Whether to use an autoresponder message

The display name is how the system is identified in the system selector and is never seen by your customers.

The system can be configured to send an email alert to an address outside of the SupportByEmail.com system when a new message is received so you know to go to your SupportByEmail.com Inbox and read it. Rather than an alert for each message, this can be set to an alert each hour or each day when there is a message still waiting to be answered in your Inbox. You can also select which users receive these alerts by ticking the appropriate checkboxes.

You can choose whether or not to use the Sent folder to store every message that is sent to a customer. If you do not store sent messages this way you may want to use the carbon copy function so that a copy of each outbound message is also sent to your email address that is external to the SupportByEmail.com system. You can use both the Sent folder and carbon copy facilities if you wish.

Finally, you can set up an autoresponder message that is sent to your customers whenever they send an email. Click the set message link to enter the text of the autoresponder message and check the box to turn this option on or off.

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