group communcation failures --

We are still struggling with how CommitCRM handles group communications. For example (this happens all the time), today we had a client (John) create a service request which he sent to a number of internal folks plus two external vendors (Frank at company.com being one) and included our CommitCRM help desk email to open a ticket. The external vendors (Frank) are not in our CommitCRM database. The ticket was created in CommitCRM and all was fine.

Frank then responded to Jon’s original email by hitting “reply all” (which is what most folks would do). Unfortunately, he is responding to an email that does not have the “[TKT-0500-1234]” reference information so his email comes back as invalid (because he is not in our system) and bounces through the CommitCRM system as "un-process-able".

The problem continues to magnify itself as all the people in the group communication “reply all” to messages that do not have the ticket reference in the subject so guess what, we get many (sometimes dozens!) of tickets and failed emails in CommitCRM. This is a real problem!

I’m not sure what the fix is and I'm sure it's not easy to implement but what’s currently happening is not working well.

Thanks --

//ray

Thank you for posting this. The Ticket number on the Email Subject line is required for the system to refer the email to an existing ticket. Having Frank replying directly to your customer email, that does not have any identifier from RangerMSP, means that indeed the system does not relate it to an existing Ticket. We do see the real-life scenario here though it seems like a really challenging scenario. Thanks.

The problem is you cannot control what external people do.

We had this very issue and turned off the auto ticket creation for a while. We started having all support emails go to a person for review first.

We have a client with 10 contacts and someone copied almost everyone at the company and we ended up with 9 tickets for 1 problem. WTH.

It doesn't happen often but when it does it leaves a big block of unused ticket numbers. Like Ray I cannot see a way to fix it without turning off the auto ticket creator, either, but it is a problem when it happens.

Yes, this is a tough scenario and there isn't a magic bullet here. As you mentioned it is not happen often and in the cases that it does you should use the Ticket Merge feature.

Thanks.