Contact Form: nowonline

The SBE contact form is now online here. It's a bit more elaborate than the usual forms. This is why I used FormSite for its realization. Its pretty cool and allows for more flexibility than Wufoo. But its not so user handy than the latter and not so easy to style as one might want to. But for the rest it is great!
A year ago I was asked to put everywhere on the website email+phone for prospective students to ask questions. With the result that the admission department had to deal with a massive load of emails that contained questions which where not related to admissions in particular put covered basically everything. This caused some upset and in combination with the budgetary situation of the moment my task was to implement this solution.

The form distributes its content depending on the categories to different email recipients. In this way it hopes to reduce the influx of non-relevant emails to the admission office. Thus freeing them up to focus more on their job. It is basically a distribution solution that does not lower the workload, only distributes it up-front. It makes it easier for prospective students to ask questions by lowering the threshold to do so. Once send off, the question is processed in the same way then before. They arrive as emails in the inbox of a person who answers them by sending an email to the sender.

The problem with this solution is: 1. It does not allow to track a user request f.e. any ticketing system does. If a user send a request using this form, nobody can check if his request ever gets answered. 2. It does not lower the workload because the answers are send individually per email as before.
A solution used other service industries is a customer support system. Virtually every company has such a system implemented on their website. It includes a simple forum that allows users and the team of the sales support workers to communicate on a many to many platform. Questions posted in the Forum are answered and moderated so as to allow others with similar or same questions to look them up as conveniently as a google search. A webform that allows the company to track the requests and responses so as to monitor customer relationships. This is already implemented at ACO or ICTS where a simple email ticketing system provides such functionality. And of course customer relationship management is not solely a matter of email and webforms. Why not responding to requests via twitter, or facebook?....
 
And I did many other things as well today. But this was the highlight! ... Well, and I posted on facebook after my long abstinence.