[rt-users] RT -- IRC integration?

[Erek Dyskant]

Heya Matthew,

I think that you'll find that as IRC is a more free-flowing medium than
email, you'll have a hard time integrating it into RT.  It's not clear
to the system which conversation items are connected to which tickets.
In email, you have subjects that can be connected to a ticket #, but
there's no equivalent structure in IRC to separate issues.

Also, you may want to look at IM/web-based chat as an alternative to
IRC.  When handling support issues, a one on one chat session can be
preferable to a channel-based system.  People generally want to talk to
a company representative rather than other customers looking for help.
In addition, if you go with a web-based solution, it can be SSL and you
can integrate it with your authentication system so that the user's
identity is verified before they're connected to a tech.

We provide AIM and MSN support to our customers, and the way that we
handle it is that in the event that their request requires either
billing or followup action, we paste the conversation into a ticket and
then let it go through our normal support handling/billing workflow.  If
it's just a simple question that doesn't require followup, we won't add
it into the system.

I hope that you find this helpful.  Best of luck optimizing your
customer contact.

Cheers,
Erek Dyskant
System Administrator
Blumenthals.com

On Fri, 2006-12-22 at 09:19 +0000, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> Dear List,
> 
> We're thinking about proving an IRC service for our customers to
> communicate with us, and as part of that we'd like to be able to
> integrate it with RT for ticketing and ultimately billing purposes.
> RT already does WWW and SMTP -- why not IRC too?
> 
> Searching with google finds a lot of references to chat rooms about
> RT, but not what I'm looking for.  Searching the RT Wiki and CPAN has
> turned up nothing appropriate, although the RT bot at
> http://www.dmo.ca/projects/hacks/RT/RT.bm is more like it.  Alas, it
> doesn't have the sort of functionality I'm after.
> 
> I guess the sort of thing I'm looking for hasn't been done yet, but I
> thought I'd ask if anyone knew of some all-singing all-dancing RT-capable
> chat-bots out there?  I'd be interested to hear of anyone's experiences
> in doing something similar.
> 
> At the moment I'm only gathering the information we'll need before we
> decide whether to go ahead with this IRC project or not; part of that 
> will be to evaluate what we can afford to spend on programmer and admin
> time in setting it up.
> 
> 	Cheers,
> 
> 	Matthew 
> 
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