[rt-users] Customer Centric RT?

[Rolf Schaufelberger]

On Montag 21 Mai 2007, Justin Brodley wrote:
> Has anyone done any work into making RT more customer centric?
>
>
>
> Some history to help explain what I'm looking for.
>
>
>
> Basically were an ASP hosting operation, we have hundreds of customers
> that pay us money to host their site. Our company has several
> departments that create tickets associated to each of the customers.
> Currently the way were managing Customer is by having them defined as a
> custom field and then we can write reports based off these custom
> fields.
>
>
>
> However, the queries we see related to custom fields have  brought up
> concerns about scalability of CF fields.  Because we have several
> hundred customers we have several hundred custom field values defined,
> in addition to some more simple selection criteria.
>
>
>
> Has anyone done any work in making a more Customer Centric version of
> RT? In addition to our performance concerns we need to start adding
> additional criteria for each customer ie, escalated customer, premier
> support, etc. All of these parameters get factored into our escalation
> scripts, our current thought is to do most of this work outside of RT
> and then make the customer name display as Name (P) and then parse for
> the () values to determine the correct ruleset. But I find this to be
> terribly Kludge and there should be an easier way.
>
>
> If anyone has any ideas or knows of any extensions to RT to help
> accommodate some of these needs, I'd greatly appreciate it.
>
>
>
> Justin Brodley

We are currently evaluating a dedicated CRM system versus RT, since we have 
already running RT for other things. The main aspect that seems common to 
your problem to me is, that a customer (= a company) is the main object and 
not the person who created a ticket neither the ticket itself. Yet every 
contact, phone call etc will be documented by a ticket so I need to be able 
to search for all tickets belonging to a customer. Each ticket  may have 
different requestors (people in my company and employees of the customer. 
So is somebody using RT as CRM system ?

Regards

Rolf Schaufelberger
rs at plusw.de