My Client is having a serious problem with the Contact Form Widget

Question

My Client is having a serious problem with the Contact Form Widget that I can not figure out how to correct.
I created a website for a client and inserted a Contact Form widget on their 'Contact Us' page. Whenever anyone uses the form, the e-mail my client receive shows my e-mail address as the sender. So, when they 'reply' to the e-mail, the reply is sent to me and not the person who sent the original message. This creates a major problem in that I get barraged with e-mail replies while my client's potential customers go without a response.
When I look at  'Site Manager > System E-Mails > Workflow Information > E-mail From Address' on the site's Admin Console, it shows my e-mail information. Is this is what needs to be changed?  If it is, what needs to be placed in that field so that the e-mail my client receives shows the senders e-mail information in the 'From' field.  My client wants to be able to click reply and have the message sent to the right party. They would be very upset if they have to cut and past the senders e-mail address from the body text on every contact they receive.
Their feeling is that if I can't find a way to make the contact form work the way it should, then it's useless to them.
Can anyone help me figure this out? I really don't want to disappoint my first client.

Answer 1

Are you on a plan that has the CRM feature that stores your customers' data? If so, the idea of the contact form is that you'll receive a notification that there's been an inquiry filled out on your contact form and there should be a link in that email notification that leads to the "Case" that was created when that customer filled out a contact form.  You can click that link and visit the case for that customer in your BC site and reply to them from there so that all of the correspondence is logged in the CRM for safe-keeping and for your records.
If your client finds this is too much work to login to BC to reply every time, then you should check to see if you have the "Customer Service Ticketing" feature on your hosting plan.  This is a feature where you create a dedicated email account (like [email protected]) and the BC system will automatically login to that email account and pull any emails in that inbox and convert them to a customer case for the sender of the email and then it will send out a notification via email to any of the BC Admin users you delegate as "Customer Service Agents".  Since the CST integrates with the BC CRM it lets you reply directly within the email-- but when you reply it will be going to that same email address dedicated to the CST but once the CST service checks your email again and sees that you replied to this inquiry it will log your reply against the customer's case and sends your reply via email back to them so that all the correspondance gets logged on BC's CRM but you can still reply via email.
There's no way to use the default web forms to update the "From" or "Reply-To" address.. it must come from an approved email address to avoid spam issues.  On most web services you cannot change the "from" address anyway but usually you can at least specify the "Reply-To" address so that when someone hits "reply" in their email client it will reply to whoever you setup as the "Reply-To" address.
Here's some more information about CST: http://kb.worldsecuresystems.com/kb/customer-service-ticketing.html?bc-partner
I don't think the CST feature is in the webMarketing BC plan-- I think it's only in the webCommerce plan so if you have less than an webCommerce plan you have to tell your client to reply through BC by clicking the link in the notification they get.  You can justify it by saying its one or two more steps but it keeps the entire convo on record in their CRM for easy referral later.