morning all,

Ive been working on a support ticket application. Doing some market research ..

I'm after some thoughts on what really makes a good system, what do you guys as hosts, look for in a ticket and/or billing system?

Let me know,
many thanks
Sir P

Well to be honest, most free support ticket scripts will do the job, we use osTicket and love it!

Anything that can track, send emails, and provide customer's with automated ticket numbers is generally the most important, in my idea.

In terms of ticketing, Ryan has it pretty much spot on. The only points I'd like to add are:

• spam filtering (optional, but certainly beneficial to have as part of the application)
• easy/simple user interface - gmail is a great example of how emails can be managed via a simple interface which has a lot more power than it first appears... little things like redirecting to the "right" place after you perform some action make a big difference to overall usability
• reply with and without quoting previous reply is useful - quotes included by the customer's response should be cut/hidden since in a threaded "conversation" style interface (as ticket systems are) you have previous responses already and don't need to duplicate them... again gmail is a good model with its JS based show/hide quoted etc.
• obvious, but unfortunately forgotten by some of the commercial systems out there - must be reliable

There are many other points as well relating to integration with other systems etc., but if you're writing a new application from scratch then looking to include those kind of "bonus" features now will most likely end in disaster (IMO).

With regards to the billing side, that varies depending on exactly what purpose you need a billing system... in the hosting context (as per your question), the obvious issue is integration with:

• popular control panel software for automated provisioning, suspension etc.
• domain registrar's and/or registries (depending on your target market)
• ssl providers

If you're thinking of writing a combined billing/ticketing system, I think there's some merit in this idea, but I would point out that there's also probably some value in offering both as stand-alone products (potentially even making it easy to integrate with rival billing/ticket systems) since there are many already well established with a suitable billing or ticketing system that may consider replacing the weaker aspect.

In many cases (for example) migrating to a new billing system as an established company (e.g. host) is not something undertaken lightly, and is unlikely to be straightforward. In which case better for you to be able to sell them a ticket system than nothing..?

That's way more than I intended to write about this, but hope at least some of the above helps anyway...

I'm not a host...I'm a customer.

But I like the support ticket system provided by my host, Sectorlink: http://support.sectorlink.com .

I can see the status of recently tracked tickets, I can submit one easily, I can assign priority (which I like because some stuff is more important than other stuff), and I know it's written to database.

I find that Trellis Desk is a good one. Google it!

Originally Posted by Sir P

morning all,

Ive been working on a support ticket application. Doing some market research ..

I'm after some thoughts on what really makes a good system, what do you guys as hosts, look for in a ticket and/or billing system?

Let me know,
many thanks
Sir P

i guess will be free ticketing system.
and easy template management. i dont like to retype the same thing hundreds time a day

Originally Posted by charlesgan

i dont like to retype the same thing hundreds time a day

Yep. An interesting feature I've seen in FogBugz which enables you to set what I think it terms "snippets" so that you can basically define your own abbreviations that will be plucked out and replaced in the finished message.

There are loads of things I type daily (certain URLs etc.), and I would love that feature.

The other thing that came to mind was the ability to let users tell you what priority they feel the ticket should be - as Adam already mentioned actually, but I just want to second that it's a really useful feature from both sides of the fence (customer/provider).