Using RT in help desk mode

Hi,

I was thinking of using RT for our phone-in customer support. How would a
typical RT installation be for this kind of scenario?

francis a. vidal [bitstop network services] | http://www.bitstop.ph
streaming media + web hosting | http://www.keystone.ph
v(02)330-2871,(02)330-2872; f(02)330-2873 | http://www.kuro.ph

francisv@dagupan.com:

I was thinking of using RT for our phone-in customer support. How would a
typical RT installation be for this kind of scenario?

Great. We use it for this, and it’s working fine so far without too
much customization. But then, we can be reasonably strict about getting
a user’s University card number and entering that into the system, so
it’s easy enough for us to provide an email address for the users. There’s
no reason, of course, why RT shouldn’t work just fine with just the users’
names instead of email addresses, so long as i) you can uniquely identify the
user, and ii) you don’t try setting up scrips which will attempt to send them
email…

One thing we’re considering doing is adding a dummy “Unknown” user and a
checkbox on the “New ticket” page so that if someone rings up with a really
quick query which we still want to log, and we don’t get their name or
barcode, helpdesk staff can click “unknown” and it allocates it to the dummy
user.

Feel free to mail me (or the list, of course) if you have any more questions
about how we run RT or its suitability as a phone-in helpdesk utility.

So what if I have a fertile brain? Fertilizer happens.
– Larry Wall in 200002121919.LAA27974@kiev.wall.org

Hi,

I was thinking of using RT for our phone-in customer support. How would a
typical RT installation be for this kind of scenario?

We found that the sticking point was creating new users; RT is
sort of expecting that users already exist, and that you’ll just refer
to them as requestor when you create a new ticket.

I’ve modified our local copy to add a new button, “New voice call”, in
the tabs section. That takes a user to Configuration->Users, lets them
create/modify/find the requestor, and then a new button in that panel
takes them to the create-ticket screen with Requestor prefilled.

It’s a messy hack, but if you want it, lemme know.

-Rich

Rich Lafferty --------------±----------------------------------------------
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada | Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus!
http://www.lafferty.ca/ | Save The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
rich@lafferty.ca -----------±----------------------------------------------