[rt-users] Escalating ticket by customer

[Sebastian Flothow]

Am 7. Jun 2004 um 00:50 Uhr schrieb Alex S. Burba:
> A simple customer sends the request, support/NOC creates a ticket and 
> openes it, and so that customer gets a message saying "Your problem 
> has got ticket number XXX ...". Ok, for some time the customer is 
> satisfied.
> A few hours have passed - no furhter messages have followed. The 
> customer is worried that there is no new information (progress) about 
> his trouble, he understands that sending another request with the same 
> problem is a bad idea, so he needs some kind of way to escalate his 
> own ticket to attract more attention to it of the support/NOC 
> personal.

I'm not convinced this is a good idea - every customer will consider 
his own tickets the most important ones, so you'll end up with all (or 
most) tickets escalated to highest priority, and your situation isn't 
better than before (except for being annoyed by the escalations, 
maybe).

I'd rather clue customers in that there is a finite number of humans 
dealing with the tickets, so things may take a while occasionally. 
(This seems obvious, but some people tend to mistake ticketing systems 
for automagic problem solving machines.)

Also, escalating a ticket will satisfy the customers only for a short 
time, as they get just another automatic response. What they actually 
want is a reply from a human, at least a confirmation that the problem 
is being worked on. Thus, you could make it a policy that if a ticket 
is (say) 4 hours old, the owner should reply with a short summary of 
his troubleshooting attempts.


Sebastian

-- 
Sebastian Flothow
sebastian at flothow.de

Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
 > Why is top posting frowned upon?