Make Customers Smile in 7 Easy Steps with OTRS

"In today's fast-paced environment, this approach wouldn't work at all. Today's customers don't just use the phone to make complaints; they also send emails and faxes, visit support Web sites, send Facebook messages and write messages in forums. They're also an impatient lot who don't like repeating themselves, they expect service representative to have their entire complaint history at their fingertips, and they want problems to be resolved "yesterday".

"Enter the trouble ticket system, a useful little invention that lets service and support staff efficiently record, track and resolve customer complaints, regardless of where they come from or how many of them there are. As the name suggests, this system works like an automated assistant, helping service center staff to log, centralize and correlate communications on particular issues, search and lookup similar issues for more efficient resolution and, ultimately, handle customer communication in a professional and efficient manner.

"In this article, I'll introduce you to one such system: OTRS, or the Open Ticket Request System. OTRS is a popular, open-source ticket system that offers all of the features listed above (and a few more besides). Over the next few pages, I'll show you how to install and configure it, and then walk you through the process of adding, processing and resolving tickets for an example business scenario. So come on in, and let's get started!"

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