[LINK] Dealing with Your IAP

[Martin Barry]

$quoted_author = "Roger Clarke" ;
> 
> If a business can't take advantage of the (admittedly small minority 
> of) consumers' incident reports that identify systemic problems and 
> point to the solution, then the revenue will evaporate and the costs 
> (most of which are committed) won't.

This is the crux of the problem. The information systems that support teams
use can make the difference between superb customer support and the kind of
experience you've related to us.

>From my experience the best systems:
- give a unique identifier to each customer incident so emails and phone
  calls are all noted in the same place
- have the ability to link the incident to a service, location, device
  and/or product
- in turn allow staff to see other incidents linked to same for correlation
- allow creation of a master ticket which is then visible within the same
  view as the individual customer tickets
- the creation of a master ticket should ideally trigger an entry on the
  public status page of the provider

cheers
Marty