[rt-users] RT for CRM?

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 12:34:44PM -0400, Jonathan Kelly wrote:
> In one of the chapters of the fine RT Essentials book*, there's mention
> of RT in a CRM-type context. We're currently using RT for customer
> support and I hear rumblings of a CRM project in the next few months.
> This got me wondering: what would be missing in RT for it to act as a
> "Customer Tracker" as well as a request tracker?
> 
> A CRM-enabled RT would introduce the concept of "Account" management
> which would allow to link tickets to Accounts and link users to Accounts
> (which would be contacts). The account contains the usual company info
> (address, industry, etc).
> 
> I believe the rest of the CRM features (activities, leads,
> opportunities, etc.) could be managed through ticket queues and custom
> fields. A nice bonus, though, would be to have the classic "full
> customer view" screen where you can see the contact info and a summary
> of all his open tickets.
> 
> What do you guys think? Any success stories or caveats of using RT to do
> CRM?

I think I'd *love* to see RT go that direction, since, being in the
consulting business, that's the sort of thing I need, and I have to
sort of kludge it into RT3 with custom fields, and the like, as it
sits.

One potential, but fundamental, problem I see with that is that to do
CRM (my idea of) right, you need to be able to track *all* calls,
whether there is a customer yet for the person calling, and whether
they are attached to (or result in) a ticket being opened *or not*.

I don't see a good way to do that, given RT's current architecture.

And it would be a pretty low-level change to the way RT thinks.

I'll be interested to see what kind of responses you get to this.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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