Customer Support via Email
- A default Roundup installation has most of the desired features for a customer support system. At my work, every year there are tens of thousands of incoming support requests - all via email. For a while, we managed all this email via a shared IMAP account, where ten or so people would all be accessing the same account, filing and responding to email as they could. This was hard going, a lot of data duplication for no reason, confusion about responses, confusion about out-of-sync IMAP clients. This setup meant we were fairly slow and inaccurate in responding to support requests via email. So Roundup seemed like a good option for upgrading our email support process. We needed a couple of additional properties on an issue beyond the default roundup schema:
- - Product - Function - Support Level
Incoming mail filtering
- The mail comes into a couple of IMAP folders (corresponding to support@, feedback@, etc email addresses) and someone is responsible for sorting those messages into various other folders based on the likely topic of the message (we run numerous conferences and also publish journals) or whether the message is spam. We then have a customised mailgw script which looks at those other folders and creates appropriate issues from the messages in those folders.