OTRS for Field Technicians

[waruna]

Dear Helpful OTRS Community,
This is my first post.

We sell and service weighing scales and we have a team of technicians.

We have a call center and when customers call, Call Center Agents would enter tickets in OTRS Free Version. Depending on the area where the customer is located, call center agent would assign the ticket to a Service Manager (of that particular area). Then, Service Manager would assign the ticket to a Field Technician.

Note: Most of our customers do not have email addresses (we sell our scales to very small shops as well), but most likely they would have a phone (land or mobile). Also our technicians are not carrying smart phones due to lack of data coverage. Only way of communication in Text/Call.


Questions:
1) How can we set up OTRS, so that email address for a customer is not mandatory ? If mobile number of the customer is available, it would be good to send text messages to the customer about updates (about the ticket).
2) Would like to notify technician via text, when a ticket is assigned.
When technician accepts the job, can the technician reply via text to update OTRS?
When technician start the job, can the technician reply via text to update OTRS?
When technician end the job, can the technician reply via text to update OTRS. Is this possible?
3) Is it possible to capture when the technician would be visiting the customer in a OTRS ticket (date/time)?
4) Is it possible to see technician (that are reporting to him) availability: based on tickets assigned to him and on date/time he has to visit customers (probably in a Calendar view) for a Service Manager?

Is it possible to get my requirements covered with OTRS?
Appreciate your comments/guidance in advance.

[RStraub]

Hello and welcome to the forum

Phew, that's quite a bunch of requirements. I'll start with the stuff that's possible just via configuration:
* Notify a technician via text (mail?) when a ticket is assigned -> very easy, out of the box (notifications)
* Capture times when a technician would be visiting the customer -> very easy, out of the box (dynamic fields)
* See whether a technician is available -> depends how to represent it, out of the box this is possible with the events calendar

Requires some development (afaik):
* Accept, start, end (and probably auto-fill the date-fields) a job via text update -> requries you to parse incoming mails based on keywords (possible without development) and update the ticket accordingly (this will probably be a custom module)

Your first requirement however ... no idea if that's possible. OTRS heavily relies on email addresses as it's THE way to communicate. As for the text messages, there seem to be some modules to do that:
http://wiki.otterhub.org/index.php?titl ... ity_Module

Best regards,
Rolf

[EXG133]

If you have an email to SMS gateway you can enter the 'customer email' in the format that the gateway requires. As an example, our gateway uses the "0123456789@sms.domain.com" format to send a text message to the 0123456789 phone number. Be very careful with your notifications and mails if you enable this, a standard OTRS ticket create notification can easily be four text messages.

For the updates via text you could use http://opar.perl-services.de/package/R/ ... sterFilter which allows you to capture multiple capturegroups in one mail filter and use them as "X-OTRS-FollowUp*..." values. In that case text templates for your technicians would be advised to avoid typos.

That said, I'm not a huge fan of using OTRS as a field technician tool. There are specialised packages, with pre-made apps or devices that work with data or SMS to update which are a lot easier to use for your technicians.