It's 2009, there's absolutely no reason to make it hard for your customers to talk to you. The technology exists now, and has for a while, to import whatever mail you receive into whatever ticketing system you're using. Sure, internally use whatever system you're happy with, there's lots of inefficiencies in trying to handle any volume of support through traditional mail clients. Your clients on the other hand, aren't wizards at whatever system you're using, but they do know how to use their email client.
When you send a client an email, monitor the address and import replies.
Yes, there's challenges, watching vacation auto-responders ("Hi, I'm on vacation! I'll come back on the 20th") and ticketing systems (“Thank’s for emailing Widget-Co, Your email will be answered soonish!”) get into a reply fight isn't pretty. Handling character sets, HTML formatted mail, etc. all present challenges. But these are manageable problems.
The only reason not to import email into your ticketing system is if you don't actually want to talk to your customers.
When you send a client an email, monitor the address and import replies.
Yes, there's challenges, watching vacation auto-responders ("Hi, I'm on vacation! I'll come back on the 20th") and ticketing systems (“Thank’s for emailing Widget-Co, Your email will be answered soonish!”) get into a reply fight isn't pretty. Handling character sets, HTML formatted mail, etc. all present challenges. But these are manageable problems.
The only reason not to import email into your ticketing system is if you don't actually want to talk to your customers.
If you get an error when PHP launches along the lines of:
You're going to either need to upgrade to 5.3.0, or wait for 5.2.12 to be released. Some debugging code made it into the core, both branches now have the issue corrected. Please help with google bait as this was a bit annoying to track down before Scott gave me a hand
PHP Warning: PHP Startup: mm_create(0, /var/www/phpSessionStorage/session_mm_cli1000) failed, err mm:core: failed to open semaphore file (Permission denied) in Unknown on line 0
You're going to either need to upgrade to 5.3.0, or wait for 5.2.12 to be released. Some debugging code made it into the core, both branches now have the issue corrected. Please help with google bait as this was a bit annoying to track down before Scott gave me a hand
When I attend a PHP conference, I generally expect people to be nice to me. This isn’t pure ego, it’s mostly because I consider many of the attendees and organizers my friends. People I’ve seen sporadically for the past five or six years at various hotels around the world, often with a decent budget for drinks in my back pocket.
I arrived at ApacheCon US last night, without finding a familiar face. I did however find several friendly faces, from the closed check in desks, to pretty much everyone I interacted with while asking the standard conference questions (how’s the WiFi? pretty good. How is it in the rooms? sad face).
This brought me a notable measure of joy. People at conferences aren’t nice to me. Simply: People at conferences are nice.
That was a great realization to come to in the morning. That, and when attending conferences on the west-coast, I can sleep in and still be early.
I arrived at ApacheCon US last night, without finding a familiar face. I did however find several friendly faces, from the closed check in desks, to pretty much everyone I interacted with while asking the standard conference questions (how’s the WiFi? pretty good. How is it in the rooms? sad face).
This brought me a notable measure of joy. People at conferences aren’t nice to me. Simply: People at conferences are nice.
That was a great realization to come to in the morning. That, and when attending conferences on the west-coast, I can sleep in and still be early.
