My apologies Tom, I know I was sparse on the details in my original post, I
started my post just before closing time yesterday and didn't notice the time
until everybody had left the office, lol.
This project is a function of our tracking database for our Returns
department. The function we're trying to build has to do with customers who
return their products to us, but upon inspecting those items it is determined
that those items are outside of our returns policy parameters. Right now we
have no way to track when we have received an item that has failed this
inspection process; we only have a tracking system for items that have passed
this initial inspection. I have developed a tracking process for this inside
of our main database, which takes important information from these rejected
returns and stores it in a table. This information is then used to generate a
letter for the customer stating why we were unable to accept the return,
along with some other internal tracking information. At this point, our
customer service department contacts the customer to determine if there are
extenuating circumstances which may require us to accept this return, or if
the return is to be sent back to the customer.
This is where my previous post comes into play. What I'm trying to do is
build a way that our database can see which orders customer service has
processed and what status to move those orders to WITHOUT customer service
accessing our database. The easiest way that we could come up with was a
specialized email address that our customer service supervisors could send
emails to, using a specific format, that could be checked by the database and
parsed for order numbers and status information. This would then be filtered
by the user who originally checked in the order (this information is already
stored in the database table for this process), and upon logging in, that
user would see a status update message on those orders to alert them to
continue the process.
I know this is something of a roundabout way to do this, but we're trying to
make this as easy as possible for our customer service supervisors. We've had
a substantial round of layoffs of late, and most of our supervisors are now
handling twice as much work as they did before, so forcing them to learn a
totally new process is a bit difficult. They're already emailing our
department with this order information, so changing the email address they
send those emails to would be the easiest way to transition our reps to the
new system.
