An Automated Support E-Mail System?

qm_37 asks: "I work for a small software company with a growing customer base. Our current support desk system has worked well for us in the past, but is going to become very unwieldy if it has to grow any more than it already has. We're looking for a more automated system that will do things like filter and direct incoming support e-mails to the support worker assigned to that task, assign and track support issue numbers, and give us a nice searchable database of previous customer issues. We've looked at various solutions ranging from commercial software packages to PHP/CGI-based server scripts, and nothing has really grabbed our attention. We have also considered writing our own system, but the trade-off is that we need to find the time to do it. Does anyone have any experience with a situation like this? Which route do you think we should take for our support system?"

Comments

First National uses E-Gain for customer email.

[Michael Spencer Jr.]

We use E-Gain. http://www.egain.com (We're also a bank, so we're well funded.)

New emails get a ticket ID, and you log into a web interface to download new tickets. It keeps messages for the same ticket associated together.

It also supports autoreplies, template/scripted replies, and some non-email-related things like a knowledge base, quick-message-forwarding address book, etc.

The whole point for going with a system like this, of course, is for performance monitoring, tracking, and reporting.

--Michael Spencer

Kayako?

[mind21_98]

Have you considered using Kayako? It's not free, but it contains a knowledge base, and has a clean layout too. We currently use this where I work and we've never had problems.

Ticketsmith

[rikitikitavy]

I've used Ticketsmith for a few years now. Threaded replies, assign tickets to staff members, web based, auto-replies to the client.
Does everything you need, and nothing you don't.

Call center software Linux resource page

[joelparker]

Try this listing of Call Center, Bug Tracking and Project Management Tools for Linux

Good luck! Cheers, Joel

Eventum - it's good enough for MySQL

[belorion]

I have been using MySQL's eventum http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/other/eventum/featu res.html/ for the past few months and have found it very good. It's PHP MySQL based. It supports multiple projects, email integration, supports public/private fields, custom categories, custom fields, project management (time tracking), issue listing, sorting, searching, reporting and graphical stats. It also supports SOAP (remote posting) and RSS for viewing

RT: Request Tracker from Best Practical

[zamboni1138]

I have been using Request Tracker for a while now and I love it, and so does my support staff and customers. It is very robust and flexible. I use Apache with mod_perl, SSL and a MySQL database, and sendmail for the mail interface. You might hit a few bumps during setup, but you should be able to work through them. There are a lot of good docs out there which walk you through the entire setup. If you haven't looked at it you should. Everything is free except the hardware and time. They also have RTFM (RT FAQ Manager) which is an addon to RT and can help you manage company wide knowledge.

If you need a serious customer support email + web based issue/ticket tracking and management system then you need to check out Request Tracker.

Request Tracker + RTFM

[dagnabit]

Ticket app: http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/

FAQ Manager: http://www.bestpractical.com/rtfm/