[rt-users] Customer Centric RT?

[Bob Goldstein]

>
>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 ?


Would it be adequate to create a special RT "user" for each customer?
Then you attach that user to a ticket as a CC.  You still have individual
requestors, owners, and so on.  But you can easily get reports of all tickets
relating to given customer.  (And you can even have a single ticket
be related to multiple customers.)

Some variations:

  1. Create a Group for each Customer (instead of, or in addition to,
     the special Customer User.)  You can assign the group as a CC watcher on a ticket.
     This will enable you to put the representatives of a Customer in
     that Group.  With a little bit of scrip'ing, if repA from Customer2
     sends in a ticket, you would automatically CC Customer_Group2,
     which would notify repB and repC, who are in that group.

     It would even be possible to have a real user be a member of
     multiple Customer Groups.  This might be useful if you have
     a consultant assigned to specific Customers.

     (You might have to hack RT a little to allow non-privileged users
     to be in groups.  Or better, make everyone "privileged", 
     but reserve real privilege for consultants to other special consultant groups.)

  2. It was suggested to add a new "role". You might create a "Customer" role,
     to stand out a bit visually from CC or AdminCC, but for the most part,
     do the same thing.

  3. Note that you can make custom fields that apply to a user rather than a ticket.
     That should let you tag a Customer as "premium service" or whatnot.
     You can also add comments to a User.


        bobg