We’ve been using Zammad for almost 3 years now. This being our first experience with a ticket system, there was a learning curve and I’d say even today we could improve on how we use it.
Even though the possibility has been around from the start, we never opened up web login to Zammad to our customers. We’ve been using it as an internal tool only.
Now I’m thinking of changing this and giving customers direct access. The main idea here is that we could add a Zammad link to our invoices, answering proactively the question what this invoice is about.
Two questions I would like to ask the community, a technical and a strategic one.
I’ll start with the technical one. Is there a way to restrict access for customers to tickets that are older than a certain date? Assuming I’d start making Zammad from January, customers should be able to see all tickets that have been created since then, including all entries made in the ticket. Old tickets should remain out-of-bounds, however, not least because in most cases, our communication within the ticket was very informal and not something that was meant to be shared. Still, starting from scratch is not an option, the information in Zammad has become much too important for us.
The strategic question is what experiences you made with opening up Zammad to your customers. Is it a step you’d recommend or do you believe we may be making our lives unnecessarily difficult instead?
It will definitely become at least a bit more difficult because instead of using internal notes, we’ll have to use a lot more public notes or even call and email messages to document what happened. Since a higher quality for such entries will be required, this will increase the time we need to spend on a ticket. Only question is if it’s worth the trouble.
I hope some of you will take the time to answer, it would be very helpful.