Question

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FogBugz should match References: header to existing case Message-ID: when no case number in Subject:

I want to re-introduce this issue because I do not think the FogBugz team really understands the severity of it. http://fogbugz.stackexchange.com/questions/2961/fogbugz-should-match-references-header-to-existing-case-message-id-when-no-case

I think the team is so focused on the use of FogBugz for software bug tracking only they don't understand how this one issue prevents FogBugz from effective general public support case tracking. In direct emails to their support team, they always ask questions back to me about why the people sending the email don't use BCC or something else to work around the problem.

They are really missing the point, which is that you cannot expect external customers to treat any particular support email address differently from any other email address. Let me explain my business and how our customers interact with our support team.

We make high-tech cutting-edge scientific instruments (low-volume). Most of our sales are to research departments within universities. The instrument is complex and often researchers are doing things with it that haven't ever been done before. We have several application scientists on staff that have expertise in several different fields to help out. The customer might have one or two of these staff people's direct email addresses. They will also have the email address of the person who installed the machine and of course the sales guy. And we tell them to always include our general support account email address on any support questions just in case the other people aren't available.

We cannot avoid giving out these other email addresses. Customers at this level expect to have them. But even if we could avoid giving our employee email addresses, another consequence of selling into the university marketplace is that often graduate students or post-docs are running our machine, and when they send in support email, they often CC their principal adviser or other members of their research team. For our industrial sales, bosses are CC'ed as well.

Right now, all of this email flows into a single support email box that all of our support staff (including the people who make hardware repairs and the application scientists and the engineers writing software) can access. We have some internal tricks to insure that all replies from our support staff end up there, too. But it is sometimes difficult to trace the thread of replies to a customer, and sometimes, questions that have similar subjects get delayed or dropped in getting answered. We are now at the point where this system is showing more of its inadequacies.

Anyway, I'd say about 3/4 or more of our support email has CC's on it. Of that, about a third of our replies came from people who were CC'ed on the conversation. Imagine if FogBugz was connected to our support mailbox. All those CC'ed conversations would generate new cases. It is not enough to ignore these new cases or connect them to the original case. The new case often contains very valuable information to solving the issue and we'd be much better served if it was appended to the original case.

We are currently using FogBugz just for internal software issue tracking and it is working great for that, of course. I did find another area related to support for it to control. We sell some accessories on our website, and the website generates emails based on those orders. We were having a problem because multiple people were responsible for looking at these emails, but sometimes one person thought the other person was handling it but they weren't. I thought this would be a great place for FogBugz to do issue tracking. So now the website-generated emails go through FogBugz and all further interactions with the customer are tracked. If an email doesn't get answered for a day or two, an alert email is sent by FogBugz. Just awesome, and the people involved in this project love it. But in this case, there are rarely CC's generating additional cases because the website is generating the initial emails. So I know that FogBugz could also play an important role in helping us tame our support mailbox if it weren't for this darn CC issue.

We also use FogBugz internally for IT department issue tracking (again, it works awesome for that), but our employees have been taught not to CC when they send questions to the IT department FogBugz address. This is not something we can expect our customers to be vigilant about.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. -todd-

EDIT Please vote for Todd's feature request, linked at the top of this page, if you want to see this change made.

Answer 1

Thanks for the feedback. It's a very valid point. But being the best support email solution is not what we're striving for.

We understand that by not having the best customer service email functionality, we're limiting our business. A Google search for "help desk software" will show you just how crowded that space is. In some respect, we do compete with those folks, but only peripherally. And for the record, FogBugz is a positive bargain compared to many of them. ZenDesk Plus is twice the price. Salesforce is five times the price.

I haven't used ZenDesk, but I don't see them touting their project management or issue tracking features on this page. I'm sure you could use it in some respect to track issues and report them to developers, but it's not the best tool for the job. You can use FogBugz to do customer service. We do. Is it the best tool for the job? Probably not. ZenDesk is a good company and a worthy competitor (inasmuch as they are a competitor).