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www.ASPonline.com |
ASP Forum
Better Mail Management?
"Most of our support requests come in by e-mail, and we've been
using a shared Outlook mailbox to distribute these messages to
staff members, who mostly work in remote locations. This isn't
very efficient, though, and we'd like to move to a better mail
management tool. Any suggestions?"
—Ivan from Islan
Ivan,
We also handle the vast majority of our support via email (150
or so cases per weekday) and our system has allowed us to scale
incredibly well — high volume, minimal support staff.
Do you have any kind of CRM system? We use salesforce.com and
have both our support email address (support@articulate.com) and
online submission form (http://www.articulate.com/cs) linked to
the salesforce.com Email to Case agent. It works great and allows
us to manage all incoming cases (new or replies to existing) in a
single “support tasks” view. Then we leverage salesforce.com case
assignment rules to assign cases to particular support engineers
based on topic and/or time of day.
We run Symantec Brightmail on our Exchange server, which has
INCREDIBLE server-side spam prevention (“Prevents false positives
with a 99.9999 percent accuracy rate (less than 1 false positive
in every million messages)”), so I’m also not afraid to publish
our support email address online.
Alternatively, if you’re looking for a more affordable case
management solution, you might consider something like Kayako
eSupport, which we used prior to moving to salesforce.com and
worked just fine.
—Gabe Anderson
Director of Customer Support
Articulate — Empowering Rapid E-Learning
ganderson@articulate.com
www.articulate.com
My first question for Ivan would be:— what is the budget?
There are so many solutions to choose from. I am currently looking
at eGain: Avaya: Bomgar: GoToAssist [Citrix] to name a few; though
these will require some customisation for our needs. There are
many other effective scaleable solutions: Liveperson and also
Salesforce:
I would suggest creating a requirements doc then aligning this to
his reporting requirments, internal infrastructure, website and
CRM touchpoints and look for the most appropriate fit.
It doesn't always have to be about budget and there are plenty of
cheaper/free options available too. For instance, there's an open
source mail management system you might want to look at called OTRS
(http://otrs.org/) that many people like.
—Mrs. Sally Harris
Operations Manager/Sage Live Hosted Solutions
Sage Software (UK)
+44 191 294 3298
sally.harris@sage.com
www.sage.co.uk
Ivan, first of all, get rid of the open e-mail address you've posted
on your site. I'm sure that's being picked up by spammers, who
are going to choke your system with garbage. Instead, create a
Web form that can collect basic information about the incident
and then transmit it over more secure channels. You could also
program the form to send mail to specific agents depending on
product ownership, type of case, etc. Keeping track of all your
incidents is probably better handled with a database than an
e-mail program.
[If you have any other advice on this question, please send an
email to membership director Jane Farber at jfarber@asponline.com, and
we'll post your feedback.]
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