Web Requests in CustomerGate 365

What arrives here

Every quote request the website sends lands in the app's own table with the status New, not in a sales quote. The website can create requests but cannot read or change them afterwards: turning a request into a quote is always done by a person in Business Central. A request from a customer who is signed in to the portal with the Buyer role is linked to that customer straight away; other requests arrive without a customer.

A staff order is a list a staff member enters for a customer who is present, for example someone who collects the goods at the warehouse (its Source is staffOrder). It becomes a sales order instead of a quote, no confirmation or notification e-mail is sent for it, and Staff Member names the colleague who entered it. Staff orders only exist while Staff Orders Enabled is on in CustomerGate Setup; after installation it is off.

Statuses and views

A request is New, In Progress, Converted, Rejected or Spam. The list has six views:

New

Requests nobody has picked up yet.

In Progress

Requests someone is working on.

No Customer Yet

New and in-progress requests without a linked customer.

Converted

Requests that became a sales quote or a sales order.

Unassigned

Open requests nobody has taken. The same filter as the Unassigned cue on the Role Center, so the tile and the list behind it show the same number.

Needs a Look

Open requests the screening marked as Suspect, Duplicate or Spam. Here too the filter is the one the cue of the same name counts with.

The columns Assigned To and, since 1.0.44, Project are on the list. My Requests is a button and not a view: a view carries a fixed filter, and whoever is looking right now is not one. The button sets the filter to your own name; Clear Filter brings the whole worklist back.

Assignment

Assign to Me and Assign To… record who picked a request up, so that two colleagues do not call the same customer. Both are on the list and on the card, and on the list they work on the whole selection.

• An assignment is not a lock. Anyone may still act on it, and reassigning is one click.
• Assigned To and Assigned At are on the request, in the Processing group.
• The cues My Requests and Unassigned on the Role Center count with the same fields.

Working on a selection

Reject, Mark as Spam, Assign to Me and Assign To… work on the rows you select in the list. One confirmation names the number, so a forgotten filter shows up before a hundred requests are closed.

• Each row runs in its own transaction. A request that fails does not roll back the ones that succeeded; the summary afterwards names the failures by request number.
• What succeeded is done and need not be redone.
• A bulk rejection asks for the reason once and applies it to the whole selection. No message is ever sent to the requesters; Reject on the card is for that.
• Converting to a sales document is deliberately not a bulk action. It asks per request about the ship-to address, the prices and the document type, and twelve times that same sequence is a trap rather than a convenience.

Actions

Start Processing

Sets the request to In Progress, so colleagues can see that you are working on it.

Link Customer

Links the request to an existing customer. Without a customer, no quote can be created.

Assign to Me, Assign To…

Record who picked the request up. On the list they work on the whole selection; see Assignment above.

My Requests

Filters the list to the open requests assigned to you.

Confirm Delivery Address

On the card. Confirms that the ship-to code on the request really is this customer's intended delivery address. The conversion refuses a code nobody has confirmed: the same short code exists for many customers and points somewhere else for each of them.

Process Request

Creates a sales quote, or a sales order for a staff order, and opens it. The document is not released: check the prices and release it yourself.

Reject

Closes the request without a quote, with a reason from the Rejection Reasons list. If that reason says so, the card then asks whether the requester should be sent a message about it.

Mark as Spam

Kept apart from Reject, so it stays visible how much unwanted traffic comes in and the mail job leaves those addresses alone.

Create Customer

On the card. Creates a customer from the request through a customer template and links it.

Reply

On the card. Opens the Business Central e-mail editor with a reply to the requester.

Screen Again

Looks at the request again for a duplicate and for unwanted traffic. Nothing is refused or deleted; only the score, the signals and the result are updated.

Not a Duplicate

On the card. Clears a wrong Duplicate Of marking.

Show Sales Document

Opens the quote or order that was created from the request.

Resend Confirmation

On the card. Sends the confirmation to the requester again, for example after you corrected the e-mail address or when the automatic attempts have run out.

Show Sent E-mails

On the card. Shows which e-mails belong to the request and whether they were delivered, including the replies you sent from the card yourself.

Export Personal Data, Erase Personal Data

Answer a request for access or erasure for the requester's e-mail address. See Privacy tools.

The card

Web Request shows everything the requester sent, in the groups of the screen:

General

The number, the status, when the request was received, the language it was written in, the Source (the page it came from), the number of Attachments and, for a staff order, the Staff Member. Staff Member is only shown while Staff Orders Enabled is on.

Requester

Company name, VAT Registration No. (not verified), contact person, e-mail, phone, billing address and Your Reference: the requester's own reference, such as a job site number. It becomes External Document No. on the quote. Since 1.0.44 also Project: the job site or project the requester named, which becomes the first line of the quote.

Delivery

Pickup or Delivery, Requested Delivery Date and, with Different Delivery Address, the delivery address. When a Ship-to Code is shown, Business Central takes the address from that ship-to address at conversion, with the VAT area and shipping agent attached to it, and the text fields are for information only. A different delivery country can change the VAT treatment of the quote.

Lines

The requested lines; see Request Lines below.

Attachments

The files on the request, from the requester and from inside sales; see Attachments on a request below.

Requester's Comment

The free text the requester wrote with the request.

Processing

The linked customer, Assigned To and Assigned At, after a rejection the Rejection Reason and the Rejection Remark, and after conversion the Document No. and Document Type of the quote or order that was created.

Screening

The four fields of the duplicate and spam screening; see below.

Privacy

Whether the privacy statement was accepted and which version, the IP Hash (made by the website with a secret key; the IP address itself is never stored) and Anonymized On, once the cleanup job has erased the personal data.

E-mail

When the confirmation and the notification to inside sales were sent, the failed attempts and the last error of each, and when the mail job last picked up the request.

Request Lines

Each line shows what the visitor chose on the website: the Item No. (empty for a free-text line), the Variant Code (the size), the description as the website showed it, the Requested Quantity and its Unit of Measure, and the requester's comment on that line. Where Steel 365 is installed, Profile Code and Grade Code are added, with the requested length, width and thickness in millimeters; without Steel 365 those columns are not there. Since 1.0.44 two columns follow, with and without Steel 365: Inspection Certificate (test report 2.2, or inspection certificate 3.1 or 3.2 according to EN 10204; empty when none was asked for) and Processing (for example Cut to length, Drilling, Hot-dip galvanizing).

Whether an item number exists is not checked when the request arrives; that is checked when you process the request. Whether an item may be put in a request is checked straight away: a line for an item that is not in the web catalog, or that is set to Not Orderable Online, is refused by the service the website offers the request to. That refusal does not apply to a staff order: with the customer present, everything the company sells may be sold. See Web catalog.

Project, certificate and processing on the quote

Since 1.0.44 the website can send the project, and per line the inspection certificate and the processing, as data instead of in the comment. Process Request puts them on the sales quote, or on the sales order for a staff order, as text lines, so they reach the customer and whoever cuts the steel:

• Project: the first line of the document reads Project: followed by the name, in every language. A long name continues on the next line.
• Inspection Certificate: a text line directly under the item line it belongs to, for example Inspection certificate 3.1 (EN 10204).
• Processing: a text line under that, for example Processing: Cut to length, Drilling, Hot-dip galvanizing.
• The certificate and processing lines are written in the language of the quote, which comes from the customer card, not in the language of the salesperson. The requester's comment on the line follows after them.
• The project is also in the confirmation to the requester and in the notification to inside sales; the certificate and the processing are not. The screening counts links in the project together with those in the requester's comment.
• The project is personal data, because a private building site names a person and a house. The cleanup after the retention period and Erase Personal Data erase it from the request and take the Project line off the quote, and Export Personal Data includes it. The certificate and the processing are not personal data and stay on the quote.

Attachments on a request

Somebody who wants steel cut to size has a drawing, a DXF, a photo of the old part or a cutting list. Those files are in the Attachments group on the card and in a FactBox beside the list. Uploaded By says whether a file came from the portal user or from inside sales; with Add File you add one yourself.

• Every file goes through the same checks. The strictest is a deny list in the code (exe, dll, js, vbs, ps1, bat, cmd, scr, msi, jar, sh, html, htm and svg) that no setting can override. It applies to every dot-separated part of the name, so drawing.exe.pdf is refused too.
• Next to that: the list of allowed types, a check of the first bytes against the file extension, a size limit and a maximum number of files per request. Those are in the Attachments group on CustomerGate Setup. The type sent along with an upload is never believed: the app derives the type from the extension itself.
• There is no virus scan. Business Central offers none and this app cannot invent one. Scan at the website, before the file ever reaches Business Central.
• With Copy Attachments to Sales Document on, the files travel to the quote or order as document attachments at conversion. They stay on the request as well. A copy that fails does not cost the sales document: it is counted and reported.
• Deletion is deletion. The cleanup after the retention period, an erasure request and deleting the request itself all remove the file with its content. There is nothing to anonymize in a drawing: the drawing is the data.

Duplicate and spam screening

Every request is screened when it arrives, and Screen Again does it once more at any moment. The Screening group on the card shows four fields:

Screening Result

Not Screened, Clean, Suspect, Duplicate or Spam. Not Screened means that nothing looked at it, not that the request is clean. It is also what a request created by hand carries.

Screening Score

How much the request looks like unwanted traffic, from 0 to 100. From 30 the result is Suspect, from 60 Spam.

Screening Reasons

The signals that were found, as fixed English keys: LINKS (three or more links, since 1.0.44 in the comment and the project together), NONUMBERS (two hundred characters or more without a single digit), THROWAWAY (a disposable e-mail domain), IPRATE (more requests from the same sender than Max. Requests per Sender), VATFAIL (a Belgian or Dutch VAT number that fails its check digit) and DUPLICATE.

Duplicate Of

The earlier request from the same address with the same lines, within Duplicate Window (Hours). Click it to open that request.

Three rules, and they are the point of the whole thing:

1. Nothing is refused, hidden or deleted. A flagged request sits in the worklist like any other, and additionally in the Needs a Look view and cue. Inside sales decides.
2. Nothing is mailed. The screening runs inside the call that stores the request.
3. Nothing breaks. What cannot be judged produces no signal, and if the screening itself fails, the request stays at Not Screened.

Not a Duplicate clears a wrong marking: two job sites for the same contractor on one day look identical to the screening. There is no block list, and there will not be one. Mark as Spam sets the status and records the reason, but it puts no address and no IP hash on any list; otherwise the website would quietly drop requests that nobody ever sees again, which is the opposite of the first rule above.

Rejecting with a reason

Rejection Reasons is a short list you maintain yourself, reachable from CustomerGate Setup. Installation seeds four of them, and only while the list is still empty.

• A reason has a Code, a Description, Notify Requester and a Mail Body.
• With Notify Requester on, Reject on the card asks whether the requester gets that message, in the language of the request. It takes a second confirmation and never happens by itself.
• A bulk rejection does not send that message.
• A reason that is no longer used is set to Blocked rather than deleted, so requests already rejected with it stay readable.
• Rejection Reason Mandatory on CustomerGate Setup decides whether a reason always has to be chosen. After installation it is off.

The Rejection Reason and the Rejection Remark are then in the Processing group on the card. The cleanup after the retention period erases the remark and keeps the reason, so the count of why requests are rejected is kept.

Replying to the requester

Reply on the card opens the ordinary Business Central e-mail editor, with the requester's address, the request number in the subject and their own text below it. The message is related to the request, so it appears under Show Sent E-mails.

Nothing is ever sent by itself. Only when the editor reports that the message was sent do Last Reply Sent On and Replies Sent move; if you close the editor, nothing has happened. The mail job never sends this kind of message.

Creating a customer from a request

Create Customer on the card turns the request into a customer through the ordinary customer templates of Business Central. The template decides the posting groups, the payment terms and the VAT business posting group; Default Customer Template on CustomerGate Setup pre-selects one.

• Name, address, country, VAT number, e-mail and phone come from the request. The customer card then opens so you can check it.
• If the VAT number already belongs to a customer, the question names that customer. Choose No and the request is linked to that existing customer instead of a second one being created.
• The VAT number goes into the field the customer's country actually uses: VAT Registration No. in the Netherlands, and Enterprise No. for a domestic customer in a Belgian installation. Business Central does not allow the two to be mixed, and the duplicate check searches both.
• If the check digit of the number is wrong, the customer is still created and the number is left off. The message says so, with the number in it; enter it on the customer card afterwards.
• If Default Customer Template points at a template that has since been deleted, Create Customer says so instead of quietly showing the full picker.

Turning a request into a quote

1. Open Web Requests with the view New and open the request.
2. Choose Start Processing, so colleagues see that you have it.
3. If Customer No. is empty, choose Link Customer and pick the customer, or make a new one with Create Customer.
4. If a Ship-to Code is shown, check it and choose Confirm Delivery Address.
5. Choose Process Request. The sales quote opens, or the sales order for a staff order.
6. Check the prices and release the document. A customer can accept a quote in the portal only once it is released.

When a requester got no confirmation

Look at the E-mail group on the card. A Last Confirmation Error means sending failed: correct the cause, often the address or the e-mail account, and choose Resend Confirmation. If nothing was attempted at all, check on CustomerGate Setup that the mail job is not on hold, that Send Confirmation E-mail is on and that the request came in after Send E-mails Starting From. While Demo Mode is on, every message goes to the demo recipient. A staff order never gets a confirmation.