Leveraging the Ticket System

In a sole practice attorney's office, the CLOSED state might be considered reached as soon as the receptionist has taken the message and mailed it to the attorney. In 99 cases out of 100, this may be good enough. In the exceptional case, the email may go astray, be set aside for a "later" which never arrives, not be completed because client cannot be found, etc.

Your experience may vary but the point here is that communication failures do happen and they will cost you money.

Suppose, instead, that the attorney in this example marked the message as RECEIVED when received and CLOSED when completed. Perhaps some calls are marked as intentionally IGNORED in lieu of CLOSED. This requires some discipline on the part of the attorney but pays dividends that pay for the effort:

• All calls are accounted for and every thing that happens is by intent, not chance.
• It allows the receptionist to tell a repeat caller that a message has been received.
• It allows annotating the original call with follow ups so that everything concerning an original request is in one place.

The Telephone Message Pad ticket system allows you to assign a status of OPEN, RECEIVED, IGNORED, or CLOSED to a message at any time. The OPEN and CLOSED status are built in and any other status is defined by you.

The ticket system really comes into its own when there are multiple people who can work on an aspect of the message and/or there are external dependencies. Consider a dentist's office. They might have ticket categories of OPEN, HYGIENIST, DOCTOR, APPOINTMENT, INSURANCE, BILLING, and CLOSED. Different people may have responsibilities for these areas and the ticket tracking serves as a to-do list for each individual.