Agent reply to customer - initiated by mail?

RT Users
1

Hello all,

I searched the list archives (and the RT help/wiki), but was not successful
so far.
Maybe it is just to obvious?

I want to replace an older ticketing solution - not very nice tool, but with
an often needed feature:
When an agent replys to a notification for a ticket, this reply is sent to
the ticket requestor and added to the ticket as “agent answer” from the
trouble ticket system.

This feature is needed as our companys blackberry devices are not well
capable of handling login tracking for SSL web pages (don’t know why) and
installing the Opera mini browser seems to be impossible (telco
restriction).
So the only helpful way is to do these things by mail…

Does this work with RT? Which effort would I need to calculate to make it
working?

Thanks for any help / hint / …

regards,

Kai Schmitte

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2

Hello all,

I searched the list archives (and the RT help/wiki), but was not successful
so far.
Maybe it is just to obvious?

I want to replace an older ticketing solution - not very nice tool, but with
an often needed feature:
When an agent replys to a notification for a ticket, this reply is sent to
the ticket requestor and added to the ticket as “agent answer” from the
trouble ticket system.

This feature is needed as our companys blackberry devices are not well
capable of handling login tracking for SSL web pages (don’t know why) and
installing the Opera mini browser seems to be impossible (telco
restriction).
So the only helpful way is to do these things by mail…

Does this work with RT? Which effort would I need to calculate to make it
working?
Yes, it works. People can use email to reply to a ticket, but only
when they get some notification from RT or know ticket id.
Notifications are configurable and you can implement various
solutions:

  1. When ticket is created you notify a group of people (your team)
    with a template, in the template you can insert content of the
    original request. In this case all people who receive such a message
    can hit reply and write a message, however as they are all notified
    you can end up with situations when multiple people reply to the same
    request. Also, in RT all tickets have an owner, usually this is person
    who is working on the ticket. Without using this field you have to
    grant all staffs with right to reply to tickets and you loose track of
    who is working on this or that ticket. To avoid such problems you can
    use another solution described below.

  2. When ticket is created, you set up an owner using a scrip with some
    algorithm. On the wiki you can find examples of some scrips that set
    owner of a ticket automatically. Then you set another scrip “On Owner
    set notify owner with template X”. In this situation you can grant
    ‘ReplyToTicket’ right to owners only, so other people should take
    ownership over unowned tickets or steal from other people to reply to
    a ticket. Also, only one person from your team (who was set owner by a
    scrip or manually) get a notification and mail boxes are not bloated
    with emails they shouldn’t deal with. This solution is harder to
    setup, but it has more advantages over the first one. For example,
    with scrip “On Correspond Notify Owner with template Y” (RT has this
    out of the box) owners will receive notifications by email when other
    persons reply to a ticket they own and sure they can use this emails
    to continue conversation with people associated with the ticket
    (requestors, ccs and adminccs - these are three groups of people that
    can be connected to a ticket except owner).

Thanks for any help / hint / …

regards,

Kai Schmitte

Best regards, Ruslan.

3

Hello Ruslan,

Thanks for the help!

I’ll try it - and I have even seen that setting some things can be done with
a RT “AddOn”.

Now I “just” need to set up mail usage for my RT to see it working :wink:

Thanks again!

Kai
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4

Hello Ruslan,

thanks - after setting up incoming & outgoing mail to the 2 needed mailboxes
(support & support-comment) I’m able to
→ Answer customers
→ Comment tickets
by mail.
Great!

As we are currently only 1 full time and 2 part time agents working,
collisions will in the fírst step be avoided by sending a comment telling
all other “my ticket” and then sending an answer.
The next will be to learn Perl and get deeper into scrips - then your
recommendations on processing will be very useable!

Thanks for you your help!

Kai
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5

Hello All,

while looking for another issue, I found a post to this list showing how to
resolve Ruslans first point

Ruslan Zakirov-2 wrote:

Yes, it works. People can use email to reply to a ticket, but only
when they get some notification from RT or know ticket id.
Notifications are configurable and you can implement various
solutions:

  1. When ticket is created you notify a group of people (your team)
    with a template, in the template you can insert content of the
    original request. In this case all people who receive such a message
    can hit reply and write a message, however as they are all notified
    you can end up with situations when multiple people reply to the same
    request. Also, in RT all tickets have an owner, usually this is person
    who is working on the ticket. Without using this field you have to
    grant all staffs with right to reply to tickets and you loose track of
    who is working on this or that ticket. To avoid such problems you can
    use another solution described below.

It can be resolved by changing the ticket owner from nobody to the first
agent answering the ticket - like described in “automatic take” (see
http://www.nabble.com/automatic-take-td19312788.html
http://www.nabble.com/automatic-take-td19312788.html )

Grüsse,

Kai

View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Agent-reply-to-customer---initiated-by-mail--tp19069049p19627575.html