Email response tracking (and an introduction)

[husker]

Hi all,
I've been a Technical Support Manager for just over a year now; before that, I was a supervisor (at the same company) for 5 years.

I am in charge of two teams of our front-end representatives/technicians; this is why I joined this site -- I am searching for resources that will help me improve our processes, use of technology, and morale. It's nice to meet you all.

Now to my question:

We offer email, fax, and phone as options for our customers to report new issues. The emails come to a group address which goes to everyone in the department. The problem we have is that there is no efficient method of tracking the emails which have/haven't received a response.

What I end up doing is leaving them all in my inbox and waiting for a response from one of our reps. Then I delete the original one, then move the response to a folder. This is the best way I have come up with to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks, but there has to be something better (more automated?)!!

Could any of you share your solutions to a similar situation in your organization? I am not ruling out a software purchase, but if there is some hidden or less frequently used feature that is built into Outlook (we are on Exchange Server), that would obviously be preferable.

I appreciate any light you can shed on this!

[netstar]

There are several inexpensive call ticketing systems out there, which I believe are VERY well worth the $$. (There are also open-source/free ones too, but I haven't found any that was worth the effort... In my opinion)

What the system does is it watches an email box in your exchange server. (i.e. support@yourcompany.com) When the system sees the email, it creates a ticket number for it, and also can be setup to send an email notifications that are assigned to that particular group.

With the ticketing system vs. relying on your outlook program, is that every issue is tracked, and every issue must have a resolution before closing. It's especially nice when having to create metrics to justify additional resources (i.e. employees) to management. Management wants figures. It would be extremely difficult to create a complete metric based on an outlook folder.

If you have any other questions, please don't hesitate to contact me.