HELP - getting my head around customers and queues

[Rippie]

Hi every body,

I am a system administrator for a big global distribution company managing our UK systems. We are still using Exchange secondary mailboxes for when customers contact us as we apply various rules to those emails as they come in. I believe we have 50-100 "non specific people" mailboxes and some of these are called something like "security quotes" and others something like "fakeCustomer1Orders". I am convinced that how we deal with customer emails is VERY poor and out dated, so i am looking around for other alternatives.

So just to make it clear, our "Security Quotes" mailbox have a team of about 15 dedicated people working with customers that email in to security.quotes@company.com and as mail come in, we will respond. Our "fakeCustomer1Orders" mail box have a dedicated team of maybe 5 that sit and watch that mailbox and as emails come in they have to respond.

So could someone please summon up ways i can go about OTRS and the set up of queues? I am not sure if i should have a queue for each "important" customer and for each more generic mailbox like the security quotes one. My head is thinking setting up the more generic queues like "Security Quotes Queue" or "Professional Services Queue" but then how do i make sure that my team of 5 that need to act fast on enquiries from fakeCustomer1??

Some help would really be great.

Ronnie

[crythias]

Don't use Customer Based Queues viewtopic.php?f=53&t=16064
Don't do it. No. Don't even think about it.

A Queue is something Agents can do. Aside from basic listings, customers should not have to have "their" queue. They should choose what they want to have fixed.

You don't want queues for important customers. You want important customers to be sent to agents who handle important customers.
For instance, you give your important customers an email address to send to you as "priorityOne@yourdomain.com" which routes to "ImportantCustomer" queue (a generic name, not a customer-specific name). In web based, you'd perhaps use customergroups to allow "Important customers" to choose "PriorityOne" or "ImportantCustomer" as a queue. Again, this is *generic*, like "VIP Room" ... There's no VIP Room that's for A but not for B. If the VIP room exists, it's for all VIPs.

Next, you'll want to read on Customers and Customer Groups... viewtopic.php?f=60&t=7531

And read my links below. No, really.

[Rippie]

Could you get around not creating any priorityone queue but have SLA's iinstead?

So customer create a ticket with Security Quotes, but because he is an important customer we want 1 Hour SLA and that to get highlighted to a specific group of agents?

btw, bed time now, will be back tomorrow morning for an update

Ronnie

[crythias]

Could you get around not creating any priorityone queue but have SLA's iinstead?

SLAs attach to services, and yes, you *could* do that. Services are attached directly to customers and SLAs are attached to services.
The SLAs "win" in the sense of you will see escalation in the panel, but by default, just out of the box, your 5 users doing triage will have to open the submitted ticket to check for an SLA/Service. Which, of course, they should already be doing unless they're only sorting by who sent the request and not what they sent it on.