Question

We have tickets where we have emailed the client and are awaiting a response. The client doesn't have a ticket system, Natch!, so some tickets get lost in their Email in-tray.

Our project managers sit on hundreds of tickets waiting for response, and don't really have time to wade through them chasing the clients.

Can we in some way "Assign" them to the client, or set some sort of Status, such that the client can see a list of what is on their side of the fence?

For us the trigger for this would be sending an Email to the client (I'd be happy that the default for that was to Assign to client, but it would help if we could prevent that (at the email stage) where we needed to retain it.

For our Project managers it would help if we could filter such cases in/out of their lists so they can ignore them when looking for stuff actually needing their attention.

We've only ever used Fogbugz to control our internal development activity, so I apologise if this is something I should have been able to work out for myself.

Thanks.

Answer 1

What we generally do internally here at Fog Creek with customer service Inbox cases is resolve the case as "Resolved (Responded)" and close it. The workflow we have setup for the Inbox project assigns cases which are reopened to the closer, so the case goes back to the same person when the customer gets back to us.

If the issue is one where we don't want to put the burden on the customer to reopen the case (as you don't), we generally resolve the case "Resolved (Waiting for Info)" and leave it assigned to the person that's been interacting with the customer.

By using this resolved status, it makes it easy to filter out those cases that have already been responded to or are otherwise waiting on the other party involved before more work can be done.

For the Inbox project, we also make use of the due date field and have all support people look at the same filters to work in order of due date. Our Mailbox setting sets the due date of new and reopened Inbox cases to ensure a prompt response. When we are waiting for info, we just set that due date to the next time we want to "ping" the customer.

Answer 2

I would recommend creating a Virtual User in FogBugz so when you've e-mailed the client and are waiting for a response, assign the case to virtual user. Then you can easily search for all cases assigned to this user and pester the client or close as appropriate.

Answer 3

While a bit less elegant, the Tag system could also be used to flag cases that are awaiting a response.

Additionally, you could add a "waiting for response" resolution using the workflow plugin.