[rt-users] Is the ball in our court?

[bill at daze.net]

> We have been using RT for several weeks now and its saving us time and
> confusion every day!  There is one small issue I would appreciate some
> advice on.
>
> We have found that it takes several exchanges with the customer to
> completely resolve their issue.  After we send them some correspondence, we
> don't have a good way to know if they have replied, since the TOLD column
> in the search is updated upon any correspondence, whether sent or received.
>
> We have tried resolving the ticket right after sending correspondence, and
> this works in that it gets opened again by RT when the customer responds.
> This is not a great solution.
>
> Is there an easy way to know that the customer has replied, without
> resolving the ticket?

You could stall the ticket...

In our organization, we established the following:

Stalled: we are waiting on an internal or external resource for
information before we can respond to the requestor.

Resolved: we have sent a response to the requestor.  It doesn't matter if
our response was a query for more information or if we think we have
closed the ticket.  You see, many times, the requestor never responds to
the query therefore we would have a bunch of stalled tickets sitting there
forever.

In both cases, the ticket will be opened if the requestor replies
referencing the ticket number.