We have a dilemma of having multiple billing programs, multiple businesses all by run by one office. Because of the nature of what we are doing we have no choice to use 1 product for all of them. Separate companies and geographic locations etc. Multiple Powercode instances for different countries, non wireless services require separate system. The issue is one tech support for all of them. So when the public contacts us we need to ID what sort of customer it is, where, and log into the appropriate back end, put tickets and issues into that specific system.
Then we need to monitor multiple channels, Email, Voice, Text, Slack, Social Media, Chat etc. Input the issues / tickets into each billing system. Then we need to tie these tickets somehow to other tools and reference material such as Wiki's, KB's, IPAM's, Charts, Diagrams, attachments, decision trees. Then we need software to manage all of these issues that are attached to ongoing projects. Project management software or kanban boards like Trello. Then we all need to collaborate in the same system internally and globally. Some employees are mobile obviously some are fixed. Some people use slack, we use Zimbra chat and slack. Then maybe you could even have your Sales team use this to enter in new leads, customers to push that information into the right billing software package. So yes there are a few solutions that do lump SOME of these things together. Zendesk is one example can unify your channels into one pretty flat and basic ticketing system. You can integrate it with Trello cards (minimally) and other software like Jira etc. It is by far the biggest cloud based software but it simply just helps you plug into other products they support. I've been looking at some of these cloud based programs that help unify comms and other functions. The rest you'll need to build out yourself, and or use / attach to existing programs. So what you get is needing to pay 5 different products a monthly fee that we could host ourselves internally. Then it still doesn't have all the functions you want in 1 nice collaboration / ticketing suite. I'd like to ask you folks.. what you use if anything to unify some of your platforms? As you grow much larger you encounter these growing pains. I'm looking for something we can really grow into no matter which billing software we use. It must be 2 way however, preferably on prem. This allows us to pull customer info into the system without risk of hack or interception. SO the goal is: 1 ticketing software -- multiple businesses 1 collaboration / email platform / chat 1 project management software 1 sales process -- multiple billing platforms 1 repository of information pulled from multiple sources All of them linked together. -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
