Today, it marks another remarkable achievement of SmarterTools – SmarterTrack 10.x Beta is officially released for public download to try out the cool features. Let’s take a quick walk through of what’s new in SmarterTrack 10.x ….
SmarterTrack Community
Having a centralized location to communicate with customers and end users is key to any business. With that in mind, SmarterTrack 10.x introduces a new Community area. The new Community can replace existing customer communities, like forums or other services that are designed to allow users to interact with each other, as well as communicate with you and your agents. The SmarterTrack Community allows users to post comments and suggestions, ask questions or offer other feedback, and even has a voting system where users can vote up or down things like feature requests or answers to questions.
When creating a new Community thread, users can specify whether a specific thread is a Question, an Idea or a general Discussion item. Community threads are fully searchable and search engine friendly, adding an additional layer of search engine optimization to your customer portal. In addition, Community threads are organized using a simple tab structure so that the Most Recent or any Unanswered threads are easily found, and users can organize threads by score or even see their own activity when they’re logged in. When coupled with the included Knowledge Base, the Community provides users with a full complement of self-help resources to find answers to questions, interact with others and truly centralize all of your customer communication into one area.
Redesigned Customer Portal
Completely redesigned, from the ground up, the customer portal in SmarterTrack 10.x offers users a streamlined, modern and more organized interface. Built
with a responsive layout, the new portal scales well to any sized desktop browser and even looks great on tablets, phablets and smartphones while significantly decreasing the footprint and page load times. Not only does the new portal look great, it’s also faster and much more agile.
Features such as custom links are still available, and the new search feature allows users to search for knowledge base articles, community posts and even news items right from the front page. Each section of the portal is easily accessible and laid out on the homepage so that all of your important information is right in front of your customers. Using External Feeds, you can even tie in your blog or other RSS feeds so that pertinent industry news, informative articles and items from any other resource are readily available.
End users, agents and administrators can all log in quickly, and a new notification system allows agents and admins to see when certain items require attention. For example, if there are broken links in any KB articles or news items or if any feedback was left on an article. Speaking of KB articles, agents who have permissions to manage articles can easily edit articles right from the portal, to ensure information is as up-to-date as possible.
With the new layout, simpler navigation and a more responsive design, the SmarterTrack portal is truly your new hub for consolidating all customer communication into one area.
Improved Text Editor
A new text editor means that users have the tools they need to create richly formatted messages, without a lot of unnecessary code in the background. Cleaner code can help keep delivery, receipt and viewing of tickets fast and efficient. In addition, the editor is also included for creating knowledge base articles and canned replies, meaning that users can format key elements such as addresses, highlight important points, include links to Web pages or addresses, easily insert images and more. The new editor is more efficient, more accurate and creates much better-looking, and faster performing, back end code.
Improved Search Engine and Social Engagement
One of the many benefits of SmarterTrack is it’s SEO-friendly nature. Between knowledge base articles and news items, not to mention the new Community, SmarterTrack can further assist businesses with their search engine strategy and social interaction. SmarterTrack 10.x improves in many of these areas. For example, sitemaps are now automatically generated via the site’s Robots.txt file. In addition, social sharing options have been updated to include sites like Google+ and LinkedIn, and the entire social sharing piece was re-written to be much easier to manage. Finally, extensible schema tags were added to portal content, allowing for better search engine indexing and SEO. While this last change may not be entirely noticeable, it is a big change that has significant positive impact for SmarterTrack users.
Better Transparency and Measurement of Survey Result
Knowing what your customers and end users think about you, your product or service, or the level of support they’re receiving is key to offering the best service possible. With SmarterTrack’s flexible survey system, you were already able to create virtually any type of survey, with a number of different question types, and attach those surveys to your tickets and live chats. With SmarterTrack 10.x, your ability to actually see the results of those surveys is greatly improved. For example, each ticket and live chat now has a Survey tab that will display the survey and the score the agent received. Double clicking on the survey brings it up in a new window, so you can easily view the survey, the answers and the ticket or live chat. In addition, survey ratings are now displayed in the ticket and live chat header so agents can see how they rated when a survey is completed and admins can use custom text for survey links and add those links to Group and/or Department signatures. Transparency is key to keeping tabs on the level of service and support being provided, and SmarterTrack 10.x delivers.
Large Number of Additional Optimization and Improvements
With each successive major version of SmarterTrack that is released, we do our best to include a large number of back-end improvements to help keep mail servers performing at their best. Many of these changes are in the back-end code, so they’re not easily seen by end users, much less by system administrators, except when they notice how much better SmarterTrack runs. Some of the changes in SmarterTrack 10.x include improved processing of HTML messages, leading to both incoming and outgoing messages being processed much faster. There’s an improved code structure to speed up startup and reduce overall resource usage, and we’ve also improved Who’s On so that there is less load on CPU and memory.
Is that All ?
Of course not! SmarterTrack 10.x has many more features and improvements.
- A “Download All” button has been added to the attachments tab allowing the agent to download all attachments at once as a zip file.
- If a ticket fails to send, the spool will automatically try to send it again. After repeated failed attempts, over a 24 hour span, the ticket will be re-opened with a comment added explaining that the last message failed to send so agents can look into the issue.
- When a KB article is deleted, it’s now possible to redirect people searching for that article to a new, or updated, article. This saves SEO and search time for users.
- Several optimizations to code structure, allowing for faster startup and reduced resource usage.
Reinstate Upgrade Protection – Get 10% Discount with FREE SSL & Uptime Monitoring
If you are looking to upgrade to SmarterTrack 10.x for your existing install, be sure your upgrade protection status for SmarterTrack license is active as this is necessary for your upgrade to be success. Otherwise, you could renew your SmarterTrack upgrade protection at an additional 10% discount at our store and you will be sure you will be able to upgrade to SmarterTrack 10.x when it’s officially announced as stable release. By renewing your upgrade protection with us, we will be getting you a FREE SSL certificate which you can enable HTTPS for your SmarterTrack and also FREE Uptime Monitoring service to monitor your support portal availability at 24×7.
