[rt-users] How to deal with people reopening old tickets
We have 2 problems that I would classify as lying somewhere between being technology problems and user education. I have a few ideas but I'm curious to hear how others have dealt with these issues. 1. How do you deal with thank you messages? We resolve a ticket, and get a reply that says 'thanks' which then re-opens the ticket. 2. How do you deal with users who use an old email as their 'entry point' into your ticketing system? This happens where a user keeps an old email around, and keeps replying to it. So you might have a ticket from 6 months ago that refers to a printer installation, and the person just replies to it and says 'oh my internet is slow now' The problem is that since these replies don't go through the proper work flow, staff may not see them and the issue won't be handled appropriately. So we have discussed a few options. One option is definitely user education. Another might be to not allow resolved tickets to be reopened through replies. We could outright reject new text appended to them and send a message that the user should create a new ticket as one example. I'm curious to see what others are doing as we try to explore our options. -John ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] How to deal with people reopening old tickets
Number one is always a headache. Number 2 could be resolved w/ a procmail recipe or such. If you don't use the rt cli tools, you should. I say this because you could config procmail to check the date on a case before it hits the mailgate. If date is too old (3 months?), then it mails the person back telling them how to open a new ticket. We had 'proxy' accounts set up on my old rt2 box at the last job specifically for this sort of thing. You could set up as many of these 'proxy' accounts as needed. Another thing that might help is that Joe Average might not want another password to another ticketing system (that was the case at my old job), so we dumbed the whole process down by making webform frontends for all of our queues. Webform dumps to mail and voila. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John Arends Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2008 5:02 PM To: rt-users@lists.bestpractical.com Subject: [rt-users] How to deal with people reopening old tickets We have 2 problems that I would classify as lying somewhere between being technology problems and user education. I have a few ideas but I'm curious to hear how others have dealt with these issues. 1. How do you deal with thank you messages? We resolve a ticket, and get a reply that says 'thanks' which then re-opens the ticket. 2. How do you deal with users who use an old email as their 'entry point' into your ticketing system? This happens where a user keeps an old email around, and keeps replying to it. So you might have a ticket from 6 months ago that refers to a printer installation, and the person just replies to it and says 'oh my internet is slow now' The problem is that since these replies don't go through the proper work flow, staff may not see them and the issue won't be handled appropriately. So we have discussed a few options. One option is definitely user education. Another might be to not allow resolved tickets to be reopened through replies. We could outright reject new text appended to them and send a message that the user should create a new ticket as one example. I'm curious to see what others are doing as we try to explore our options. -John ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com ***CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE*** The information in this email may be confidential and/or privileged. This email is intended to be reviewed by only the individual or organization named above. If you are not the intended recipient or an authorized representative of the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any review, dissemination or copying of this email and its attachments, if any, or the information contained herein is prohibited. If you have received this email in error, please immediately notify the sender by return email and delete this message from your system. ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] How to deal with people reopening old tickets
John, We put a message at the VERY TOP of the Resolve template that reads DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE!!!. It works most of the time. For those that do NOT pay attention, we remove the CreateTicket right, so they have to go thru the WebUI in the future and if that doesn't work, we would remove them as a privileged member. That way they could GET emails, but not reply to them thru RT. All in all, there no easy way. You just have to try a couple things and hope it works. I like to think that user education is the easiest and most productive, but sometime the punitive method (remove rights, etc.) has to be employed. Lots of luck. Kenn LBNL On 3/13/2008 2:02 PM, John Arends wrote: We have 2 problems that I would classify as lying somewhere between being technology problems and user education. I have a few ideas but I'm curious to hear how others have dealt with these issues. 1. How do you deal with thank you messages? We resolve a ticket, and get a reply that says 'thanks' which then re-opens the ticket. 2. How do you deal with users who use an old email as their 'entry point' into your ticketing system? This happens where a user keeps an old email around, and keeps replying to it. So you might have a ticket from 6 months ago that refers to a printer installation, and the person just replies to it and says 'oh my internet is slow now' The problem is that since these replies don't go through the proper work flow, staff may not see them and the issue won't be handled appropriately. So we have discussed a few options. One option is definitely user education. Another might be to not allow resolved tickets to be reopened through replies. We could outright reject new text appended to them and send a message that the user should create a new ticket as one example. I'm curious to see what others are doing as we try to explore our options. -John ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
