Call Center -- Call Tracking Software

Call Center -- Call Tracking.

Frist a little history. I came to the company about a year ago. The senior Call Center tech took calls made on paper or in an email and entered calls from customers (both internal and external) and entered them in an access database. He would at times make up additional calls to seem busier. This was not adequate because new users could not reference old problems and only the one user could access it. I convinced upper mgmt to do a little upgrade and we setup zentrack, an open source ticket tracking system for projects, which I modified to better, fit our needs. This meets our needs much better than before as users can create/edit/follow up on their ticket on their own. Because of the tedious task of needing to assign a user or group to a new ticket some people think we will do better if we pay for a new application to do the job.

We are a growing ASP in medical imaging and support Hospitals and Imaging centers. We monitor and maintain all systems through this Call Center/NOC/Data Center. We have about 18 clients with an average of 3 servers and 9 workstations at each site and close to 500 active users. The HQ office has 25 users and a data center with 30 servers as well as SANs and NOC.

There is an upgrade to zentrack that will resolve some of our problems but not all. Short of a custom designed application I am not sure we will get much better.

So I was wondering what kind of application everyone is using for Call Center ticket tracking. Or what are you thoughts.

We use Remedy. Our "Call Center" is for outside customers. We're a bank. I am not sure what they use but our support center (for internal IT issues) and alot of our IT department use Remedy for ticket tracking. Frankly this is the first large company I've worked for so I have no frame of reference other than Remedy. Seems to do the job. Formal name is Action Request System. Not sure what the website is but a google search should yield the required results.

We use a CRM from a company called Onyx. If you have a small enough group and some patience Microsoft looks like they're working towards the 2.0 release of their CRM system which seems tailored for smaller organizations.

Remedy and Siebel always seem to come up in enterprise discussions. I would also investigate an ASP/Hosted solution although I can't suggest one of the top.

I found / implemented cerberus helpdesk, you can find it at: http://www.cerberusweb.com. We use it for tracking email tickets and it works great, cisco, linksys, thinkgeek.com all use this software and it has scaled well. In an attempt to test it we sent it 100,000 emails one day to various email addresses that I have going to the program, it parsed and presented them without a hich. The nice thing is that the software also has a web based user submission tool so users can open/track tickets via the web.

It's also quite customizable if you know php and it's fairly cheap. In fact they currently offer it for free if you only check from one email address so that you can try it out.

We have some different software that we use for our call in customers since it is 2 separate businesses, cerberus would work for this task as well though.

When I worked for the Iowa State Unversity's Administrative Data Processing center, we used a tool called HEAT. I can't say much about it, other than it worked perfectly for us. Had pretty much everything you'd need in a help center app. I'm sure it isn't cheap though.

We use remedy aswell. I havn't used it much, but it seems to be pretty good, and we don't get many complaints about it.

Another remedy user here. Can't think of anything that pisses me off too much about it.

niccoli said:

I found / implemented cerberus helpdesk, you can find it at: http://www.cerberusweb.com. We use it for tracking email tickets and it works great, cisco, linksys, thinkgeek.com all use this software and it has scaled well. In an attempt to test it we sent it 100,000 emails one day to various email addresses that I have going to the program, it parsed and presented them without a hich. The nice thing is that the software also has a web based user submission tool so users can open/track tickets via the web.

It's also quite customizable if you know php and it's fairly cheap. In fact they currently offer it for free if you only check from one email address so that you can try it out.

We have some different software that we use for our call in customers since it is 2 separate businesses, cerberus would work for this task as well though.

Click to expand...

Looks nice. I was thinking about moving my company to that or Kayako.

Thanks everyone. Looks like I have a few good places to start looking.