SmarterTools announces 3 public beta release of their products on the same date of 1/Feb/2016 – SmarterTrack is one of them. SmarterTrack is an online helpdesk customer support tool that allow you to better utilize employees while lowering the total cost of customer support. Let’s take a look on what are the new features release of SmarterTrack 12.x Beta..

New Live Chat Widget For Your Website

Live Chat is an integral part of a complete help desk. It’s not only an efficient way to offer customer service, it’s also an important part of your brand presentation and image. To that end, a new Live Chat widget was created that focuses on the user experience, combining a more modern look and feel with additional customization options so you can better integrate live chat into your existing website.

In previous versions of SmarterTrack, it was possible to use either a button or a text link to initiate a live chat. Of course, if you were a CSS Guru, you could add additional customizations, but that could be tedious. With SmarterTrack 12.x, SmarterTools completely redone the live chat to act as an embedded widget directly on your website. There are several default styles and chat types that you can preview before it’s added to your site: use bubbles for chats or use the standard line, set your own background color for the chat window, choose one of over 20 different live chat images or upload your own. Once you’ve refined your layout and style, you simply add the code to your site.

In addition, live chats now follow a user as they travel around your website. You can chat with someone as they move from page to page, without fear of losing contact with them. Through it all, live chat stays consistent, branded and extremely user friendly.

Improve Conversion By Initiating Chat With Your Website Visitors

Visitors to your website can be expensive. Whether you’re driving traffic using Google Adwords or other online ad networks, using banner ads or more traditional advertising methods, it’s important to make the most of a user’s visit. While Who’s On gives you the ability to watch visitors move through your website in real-time, when it’s used in conjunction with live chat, a chat invitation can be sent when a visitor lands on a specific page, like a pricing or licensing page. The Event system can also be used to automatically invite a visitor to chat, and that chat goes right into an active Agent’s chat queue! This means you can help a valuable visitor find what they’re looking for, quicker and more easily, and make them make the most of their visit.

Furthermore, the ability to use variables and per-department customized text in your invitation messages will let you connect on a more personal level, calling customers by name, noting the city they’re contacting you from and more. Live chat PLUS Who’s On means companies can easily connect with their customers — personally — with the click of a button.

Better Community – User Profiles & Community Conversations

SmarterTrack is the only help desk to include a fully encompassed and integrated user Community across all installation options — from free to paid, on-premise or hosted. SmarterTools continue to build upon the features of the Community while you build upon your relationships with your customers. In this latest version, SmarterTools have added a few features that improve the Community’s role as a great forum for interaction: User Profiles and Community Conversations.

User Profiles are a way to better connect users: Know who you’re talking to with profile bios; Check another user’s expertise by viewing their Community Activity, which lays out the topics and posts they participate in the most; See the number of posts and replies a user makes and how many “thumbs up” they get so you can figure out who your most helpful Community member is; Agents can see a user’s contact info, which includes quick links to contact the user through a ticket or find other ways to communicate with them.

Along with getting more detail about users, the Community now has private messaging! Customers are able to communicate with each other through private Conversations, allowing them to help each other without the fear of posting sensitive information to the public. Message notifications display in a user’s Alerts area, plus email notifications are sent whenever a new message arrives in someone’s inbox. All of this builds upon the usefulness and sense of Community between users, as well as between users and agents.

Performance Improvement

As with every minor or major release of SmarterTrack, SmarterTools make significant fine tune to the overall performance of the product as new features continue to be released.

In Smartertrack 12.x, an entirely new way of managing files is introduced by streamlining all aspects of your help desk to keep unused, and unwanted, files from bogging down your system. Several items are now regularly compressed to reduce disk space, reduce the number of files on the server and increase the speed of backups: raw content for tickets, user avatars, ticket attachments and call recordings. In addition, when upgrading to 12.x from an earlier version, a one-time cleanup process will run to remove any orphaned files within SmarterTrack. By taking preemptive steps to clean up as you go, SmarterTrack will run smoothly for years to come.

Other Cool Features..

There are a variety of other changes throughout this version, including the ability to change the subject of a ticket through the management interface, print items while using a tablet and more! However, SmarterTools restricted many of the planned features that include, or coincide with, any interface changes, as they concurrently developing SmarterTrack 13.x, which will have a completely new interface and an entire architecture that is API-driven.

Upgrading to SmarterTrack 12.x

SmarterTrack 12.x will be available as FREE upgrade for any existing customers which hold an active upgrade protection of SmarterTrack license key. Not sure if you are eligible for the upgrade? Send us your license key by filling up the following form and we will have it check for you.

Update : 30/03/2016

SmarterTools officially announced the public stable release of SmarterTrack v12. Full release notes as below :

• Added: A warning is now given on the login page and login modals if the browser has cookies disabled.
• Added: Ability for users to delete their own conversation threads.
• Added: Ability to ban/unban users in the Community.
• Added: Ability to print is now available for tablets.
• Added: Ability to search banned users in the Community.
• Added: Administrators can upload images for “online” and “offline” statuses for the embedded live chat widget.
• Added: Administrators now have the ability to customize text, on a per department basis, that can be used for Live Chat Invitations.
• Added: Agents can now change the subject of the ticket through the management interface.
• Added: Agents now have the ability to use custom variables when composing a live chat invitation request.
• Added: An API-driven type of live chat link that can be embedded directly into the Portal or a website and persist across pages while allowing for the chat to be popped out into its own window.
• Added: Banned tab in the Community that allows administrators and moderators to manage banned users.
• Added: Email notifications indicating that a private conversation update has been received in the Community.
• Added: Moderators can now delete Community conversation messages that have been reported for abuse.
• Added: Portal alert indicating that a private conversation update has been received in the Community.
• Added: Preview area to review live chat customizations prior to implementation.
• Added: Private conversations between users and agents in the Community can be enabled/disabled by both users and agents.
• Added: Private Conversations can now be reported for abuse within the Community.
• Added: Shortcut within a user’s Community profile for agents to quickly start a ticket, view tickets for the user or view all user details.
• Added: The first line of a new live chat now indicates to the agent where the live chat originated.
• Added: Top Contributors and Recent Contributors now show in the Community.
• Added: User profiles and private conversations that have been reported for abuse will appear on the Moderate tab in the Community, allowing for administrators and moderators to handle reports of abuse.
• Added: User Profiles in the Community that display Community Activity, Contact Info, and Statistics.
• Added: Users can now be reported for abuse within the Community.
• Added: Who’s On live chat invitations now use the embedded live chat widget when enabled.
• Changed: Description of “Blacklist User” to “Ban IP Address”.
• Changed: Instructions to add Tags to Community Threads in the Portal has been clarified for users.
• Changed: Knowledge Base article breadcrumbs in the Portal are now clickable.
• Changed: Knowledge Base folders are now clickable in the Portal, allowing only the contents of that folder to be displayed.
• Changed: Live Chat invitations now clearly identify the recipient as the user who is logged into SmarterTrack, when available.
• Changed: Live chat transcripts sent by email are now easier to read.
• Changed: Live chats that were assigned to the queue now show when viewing all active and inactive chats within the management interface.
• Changed: User Agent definitions updated to include all of the latest browsers when viewing visitor details in Who’s On.
• Changed: When handling a live chat, “Agent is typing…” has been changed to include the agent’s name.
• Changed: When using Advanced Search in the management interface, ‘All Agents’ now includes anything assigned to the queue.
• Changed: When viewing an individual knowledge base article in the Portal, an icon now indicates its status — whether it be Private or Draft.
• Changed: When viewing an individual news item in the Portal, an icon now indicates its status — whether it be Private or Draft.
• Changed: Who’s On Live Chat invitations have been restyled to match the Portal look and feel.
• Changed: You are no longer able to invite someone to a live chat that is currently in a live chat.
• Efficiency: A clean-up process has been added to remove orphaned files within SmarterTrack in order to reduce the overall number of files on the server.
• Efficiency: Avatars are compressed after 30 days of inactivity to reduce disk space and reduce the number of files on the server.
• Efficiency: Call recordings associated to call logs are compressed after 7 days of inactivity to reduce disk space and reduce the number of files on the server.
• Efficiency: Idle system events now only look for custom fields that are used, not all custom fields available.
• Efficiency: Raw contents for tickets are compressed after 1 day of inactivity to reduce disk space and reduce the number of files on the server.
• Efficiency: Ticket attachments are compressed after 7 days of inactivity to reduce disk space and reduce numbers of files on server.
• Fixed: An issue where custom reports sorting was not properly saving.
• Fixed: An issue where if only an image was the only thing included in a Knowledge Base article, the preview would incorrectly say that there was ‘no content to display’.
• Fixed: An issue where in-line images were not properly displayed when a virtual directory was used.
• Fixed: An issue where survey questions were being cached as you moved between surveys, causing questions to be added incorrectly to surveys.
• Fixed: Cases where embedded content from Youtube, Vimeo, etc. would be stripped from Community posts.
• Fixed: Deleted tickets that have not been purged are now marked in the database as “closed and locked”.
• Fixed: Moderators can no longer ban each other within the Portal.
• Fixed: Print preview for Who’s On now works as expected.
• Fixed: Raw HTML is no longer shown within the chat transcript.
• Fixed: The setup wizard now properly assigns the SMTP settings for the brand.
• Fixed: URL’s now properly word wrap within the Community.
• Fixed: Users can re-report a conversation if needed.
• Fixed: When a “Copy To Address” is set for an agent, the correct link to the ticket is now provided.
• Fixed: When deleting a brand, you now have the option to reassign the RSS feeds to another brand.
• Fixed: Who’s On Invitation History now shows the correct information for a user.
• Fixed: Who’s On live chat invitations now only show departments for which live chat is enabled.
• Removed: Surveys can no longer be sent through a Who’s On system event.
• Removed: Who’s On live chats are now invite based only. The ability to force a user to chat has been removed.