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?"

Comments

FogBugz

[Screaming Lunatic]

At my last place of employment we had support emails sent directly to FogBugz. After that they were organized by priority and severity, dupe checked, and assigned to a developer to resolve. You should probably be able do that with any bug tracking software.

Amen, Brother!

[cjsnell]

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

Not enterprise ready

[hughk]

Sorry, despite marketing info to the contrary, Exchange Server isn't enterprise ready. The file storage uses a combination of propietary technologies, which make it difficult to recover parts (it always seems easier to recover the whole message store). It certainly doesn't provide an open client interface. Those people interfacing have had a lot of hard work getting at the protocols.

There are maintenance tools, but they aren't documented. Without source code or documentation, you can be very much in the dark.