RT Essentials

Every so often, a customer has a question about how to use their rocket or whether their rocket is rated for a specific mission. Yoyodyne takes good customer service very seriously and does everything it can to make sure that every customer gets her questions answered quickly and correctly. An important part of that strategy is tracking every incoming support request with RT. Emailed support requests flow directly into RT through the email gateway. Customer Service staff open tickets for issues that come in by email.

By reviewing all the requests that come through the Customer Service team, Yoyodyne's engineers are better able to plan how to make their rockets more robust and easier to use. The sales team leads occasionally go through the past few months' tickets in the Customer Service queue to decide which customers might need some buttering up after they've had a test or a launch go awry.

7.4.1. Custom Fields

Yoyodyne's Customer Service team uses a pair of custom fields to keep track of which products users are reporting issues with. Both fields are used heavily during the reporting process and when evaluating possible hardware or software defects, but they aren't used much in the immediate triage process. The two fields are:

Model

This SelectSingle field lets staff track which sort of hardware the user is having trouble with.

Serial Number

Yoyodyne staff use this FreeformSingle field to track which specific bit of hardware or software a ticket is about.

7.4.2. Groups

The Customer Service queue is managed primarily by Customer Service staff. There are a couple of engineers who are responsible for handling escalated issues, and the Customer Service staff will sometimes assign issues to those engineers. Additionally, certain Engineering and Sales managers are allowed to peek into the queue.

To simplify queue administration, Yoyodyne set up RT groups for each of these roles:

Customer Service Reps

Every Customer Service Representative is a member of this group.

Customer Service Engineers

These engineers have regular duties outside the customer service team, but from time to time will be called upon to deal with complex user issues.

Customer Service Reviewers

This group consists of the engineering and sales managers who are allowed to look at support requests but not modify them.

7.4.3. ACLs

The Everyone group is granted certain rights to the Customer Service queue to allow end-users to report and correspond on issues:

CreateTicket ReplyToTicket

The Customer Service Reps group is granted full power to manage tickets in this queue, so this group needs to be assigned a full range of ACL rights:

CommentOnTicket CreateTicket DeleteTicket ModifyTicket OwnTicket ReplyToTicket SeeQueue ShowOutgoingEmail ShowTicket ShowTicketComments ShowTicketHistory StealTicket TakeTicket Watch WatchAsAdminCc

Customer Service Engineers have the exact same ACL rights as Customer Service Reps:

CommentOnTicket CreateTicket DeleteTicket ModifyTicket OwnTicket ReplyToTicket SeeQueue ShowOutgoingEmail ShowTicket ShowTicketComments ShowTicketHistory StealTicket TakeTicket Watch WatchAsAdminCc

Customer Service Reviewers are allowed to look at everything in the Customer Service queue, but aren't allowed to change anything, so the ACL rights assigned to them are a bit more limited:

SeeQueue ShowOutgoingEmail ShowTicket ShowTicketComments ShowTicketHistory Watch WatchAsAdminCc

7.4.4. Scrips

Customer Service reps work pretty much entirely within the RT user interface, so RT has been configured not to firehose the entire team with mail about every issue. Instead, only the owner of a ticket is notified. Additionally, whenever a ticket is given to someone to handle, he gets a notification. This makes sure that the Customer Service Engineers know about issues they need to handle. Table 7-4 shows the scrips that apply to the Customer Service queue.