Case management.
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Discussion

HBFS

Original Poster:

803 posts

220 months

Wednesday 15th February 2012
quotequote all
I've been in my current sales role for around 4 months now, but I'm struggling with what I'd call case management.

Does anyone know of any free web-based case managment tools? It's something I just want to use myself, not for others. Soemthing that can give me due dates and effective case tracking etc.

A little history for those interested in my reason for asking:

My compmany has no software as such, and at the moment (For many complex reasons, there is no scope for it in the next 6 months.)
At any one time I have 20+ outstanding tasks (Mostly due to lengthy internal processes, customers and collegues not getting back to me etc.) which vary from sales leeds, logging calls on behalf of customers, getting contracts amended etc.

I'm struggling to keep track of all my oustanding tasks, I'm pissing around with bcc'ing myself into e-mails, paper notes etc but it feels unintelligent and clunky.
In my old job as a computer technician we used to have Remedy software, where as soon as a case arised we'd type it up and soon as the case changed (usualy triggered by an e-mail, phone call, or someone dropping into the office.) we'd add a comment (Which would have a date and time shown against it.) with it being computer based, it meant you could copy and paste from e-mails too which is always usefull. I'm after something similar, but it doesn't need to be anywhere near as feature rich as something like Remedy.

davepoth

29,395 posts

228 months

Wednesday 15th February 2012
quotequote all
Generally I try to use outlook tasks for logging outstanding issues, and a variety of piles of folders on my desk to designate status. The trick is of course to know when something needs to be logged...

HBFS

Original Poster:

803 posts

220 months

Wednesday 15th February 2012
quotequote all
I've had a look at that, and whilst it has some good features such as status updates, being able to assign to someone else and attach documents. But it doesn't really look as if it's designed to take updates: I guess I can re-open the task and write the date and time in manualy.

Maybe it's something I'll have to test.


My issue now is that, I have so many outstanding tasks (All with a lot of history and detail.) That the time it would take to get these properly documented would see me get further behind in processing tasks!

Any other suggestions?

TurricanII

1,516 posts

227 months

Thursday 16th February 2012
quotequote all
You mention 'logging calls on behalf of customers' - does that mean there is some sort of logging system already?

Some versions of Microsoft Office have Business Contact Manager that tries to turn Outlook into a mini CRM system http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/outlook-... - yu may already have this on your PC..

There are free ticket management systems like RT Request Tracker or OTRS but this work best on a Linux box and so might need an IT gimp to set up for you