I am looking for a simple and elegant way to manage customer support email inquiries and technical problems. Has anyone ever used base camp as a tool to do this? If so I’d like to hear how.

Thanks
Mike

We do, and I wrote an add-on for Basecamp called BCTix to help streamline the process, but it turned out to be too narrowly focused/limited in fucntionality for even my needs so I am re-writing it from the ground up. Some people have found it useful though.

What we’re doing now is each client under support gets their own project, and each time a support request comes in that we need to track in Basecamp we setup a new todo like, like “070908 Requests from John” and then add To Do Items to the list for what needs to be done to complete the request. Then set a Milestone for when work on the request is due, and perhaps when it is scheduled to start. Time on the request is tracked to the Project on the Time tab, not through the To Do list but that is mostly because of some of the reporting tools we’ve built around it thru the API for our internal use. Messaging in Basecamp is generally not used in this scenario.

The new version of BCTix will tie the Messaging/Comments, To Do List, Start/Due Milestones, and Time Log for a single support request together in one screen for easy request management.

Another alternative to using Basecamp for issue tracking is our new issue tracker, Tiki. It’s full-featured bug and task tracker that integrates with Basecamp Todos, adding on all the additional fields and functionality we’ve been missing.

Tiki integrates with your Basecamp People, Projects, Companies, and To-Do
lists, provides a full issue-tracking lifecycle, including traditional ticket routing and approval, a detailed history, notification lists, time tracking, due dates, and search. Have a look!

http://www.tikiden.com

We’ve used Basecamp right out of the box for a couple of years now for this. Each client agency gets their own project. We use Messages and responses primarily to initiate and track all issues, bugs and requests. We had to use a sort of “carrot and stick” approach at first to get people out of the email/phone habit and use Basecamp as the entry point for anything, but once we got em trained, we’ve never looked back.

Simple and very effective. Of course, we’re a small shop with a very finite number of clients (maybe 20 or so at a time) and a pretty stable product, so we’re not exactly drowning in requests… but it really works great for us and the users all seem to like it as well.

I might look into the Tiki thing noted above, though… looks interesting. However, so far we get along great with Messaging.

We use basecamp as both an issue tracking “log” and a project management tool. As an issue tracking tool we mostly use it as a quality database (complaints coming inbound from customers, alerts from within, fixes, implementation dates of fixes, affected batches, etc). Though it’s not perfect, it beats having someone custom design a site and program for us. We do have one customer and one supplier interacting with us. The customer loves it, the supplier thinks it’s stupid (go figure). As a project management tool we mostly use basecamp as an idea sharing spot. If you have an idea, post it….. Again it’s not the dream system but it works. I don’t quite think Fried thought manufacturing companies would use basecamp for quality and product/project management, but we do.