[SOLVED] Help: can agents be customers at the same time?

[Rippie]

Hi everyone,

I have an situation here where I have been asked to try set this up as a test for a small department with 1 external sales person and 6 internal sales people. The idea is that the external sales person will log in to the admin interface and log a ticket and put in a queue for the 6 internal sales people, or she will log a ticket directly against any of them. Now i have noticed that if I only have myself as an agent, if i create a phone ticket and start typing in the field "From Customer" then nothing shows. But if i add myself in to the customer database, then i will see the "From Customer" field start to auto populate.

So my question really is if an agent can also have a customer account or am i completely wrong and it is not needed?

Regards
Rippie

[crythias]

an agent can also have a customer account

Yes. Why not?

[Rippie]

I was not sure if that was a good idea or not. but since you, who seem to be running this place dont see a reason not to, then i think it might not be an bad idea to do

Would you yourself ever do that setup?

Thank you.

[crythias]

Would you yourself ever do that setup?

For test, and perhaps I may require assistance from my peers.

Among other things, queues that don't relate to that which I provide support (Plumbing?).

[Rippie]

Please excuse me, but what does that mean? "Queues that don't relate to that which i provide support (plumbing)?

[crythias]

"Queues that don't relate to that which i provide support (plumbing)?

It means that the implementation of OTRS may involve queues for departments of which I am not an agent that provides support.

In my utopian view, Queues are things that agents handle. But agents don't have to handle all the queues. The queues match what the agents are able to handle.

As I tend to post, you may have queues like: "Supplies/Requisition", "Hardware", "Software", "Plumbing", "Maintenance", because the ticketing system is well suited to handle multiple departmental ticketing requirements. A customer of a campus, for instance, (an employee of a large company?), would like best to go to a "one stop shop" for all the needs she may require. One website to help them all. So, she'll go to the help website, choose a queue, submit a request, and the agents who are assigned that queue will get a notification that a new ticket has been created in the queue they watch. But, of course, only the members (agents) of that queue will get a ticket notification - if they have notifications enabled and the queue selected in "My Queues" in their preferences.

In that set of agents, the first one to lock the ticket or respond to the request through OTRS "owns" the ticket and is the agent with whom the customer will have correspondence. This is a good thing, as it helps (generally) the customer realize that the owner of the ticket is going to be a single point of contact during the ticket phase. (I, personally, dislike having 5 different people ask me "what's this request all about?", which is what "locking the ticket" is supposed to prevent.)

Now, how does this relate to your question about my statement?

I as an agent may be an agent assigned to a queue that provides support for "Hardware" or "Software", but I may not be an agent of the queue that provides support for "Plumbing", and the toilet at my call center is clogged. I am now a customer, submitting a ticket to a queue --Plumbing -- that doesn't relate to that which I provide support -- Hardware.

[Rippie]

see that makes perfect sense. thank you very much for your input.