Slashdot Mirror
Handling the General e-Mail in an Organization?
cheezycrust asks: "I'm part of a small organisation (four staff members, seven board members), and we get a lot of mail on our info@... email-address. Some of the questions are complex, and require input from several staff and/or board members. I'm looking for a way to track and handle these messages. It seems to be a combination of a bug tracking and a groupware system. It should be very simple to use, be platform-friendly (Windows, Mac, Pocket PC), and work on- and off-line (if I want to handle 50 messages on a train ride, this should be possible). I have a preference for free software, but the administration of the software itself should not take too much time. What solutions have you used in your organisation?"
http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/
I need to second the AC parent post.
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.
RT has been a godsend for our company. Before I installed it, sales-at-ourcompany.com was getting deluged with e-mail from customers and spammers. Customers' questions were getting ignored and they were getting pissed. Our customer service reps were frustrated and the lack of coordination resulted in multiple replies to customers' questions.
Enter RT. It took me about 45 minutes to get it up and running and to master the basics. An hour later, I had all my reps trained on it and answering questions. Later that afternoon, I wrote a simple web interface for customers to contact us with. I created seperate queues for Customer Service, Billing, and Technical Support and the web interface routed questions to these queues appropriately.
But it gets better...I quickly discovered that RT is useful for much more than customer service. Our software development team uses it to keep track of bugs. The eBay team uses it to track auction questions and payment problems. Even the guys on our brick-and-mortar sales floor use it to keep track of special orders.
It's also super-customizable. It's written using Mason, which happens to be what I used to build all of our websites. When a customer creates a support ticket, the rep viewing his ticket sees a pane containing the customer's entire order history, including the status and FedEx tracking numbers for each order.
Best of luck,
Chris
http://otrs.org/
2 of the three I recommend have already been mentioned. RT and Fogbugz.
The last one is Cerberus Help Desk which is what we picked in the end. It's not free but it is low cost. Basically it's designed for help desk work instead of the more generic request tracking.
What does that mean? Well you can:
*Say how long it took to handel an email
*Assign billable time
*Create Service level Agreements
*Look at about 15 different built in reports
*use the knowledge base build in.
*Teach it's fuzzy logic engine that looks up knowledge base articales based on the content of the email.
*Setup Mutliple groups which can't see each others tickets based.
*Add custom feilds
So far I've been very impressed with it.