In a typical ticketing system, the client or end user submits their request, and then a ticket agent handles the request. I do a lot of web maintenance, and when I come across issues on websites, I need to ask the client what they want to do about it. Let's say they have a license that expired and I need to make a request to them to buy a new license and send me the key.
A normal ticketing system doesn't work for me in this case because it's not the client putting in a ticket for an agent, but rather the agent (me) putting in a "ticket" for the client. I need to request stuff from the client as if they are now the agent and I'm making the request of them. The reverse of a normal ticket.
When I make a request to the client, it should act like a normal ticket, it is "pending" until they respond. The ticketing system will send reminders to them if they haven't responded in a couple days. When they do respond, then I should get a notification that the client has answered my request, etc.
In order to do this with a normal ticketing system, I would have to create a ticket on their behalf to myself as the agent. So I would open my ticket software, start a new ticket, pretend it is from Joe Shmo, written to myself, to request the thing I'm trying to request from them. In other words, I create a fake ticket on behalf of Joe, asking to do something about their license. The problem here is that if Joe is the one who created the ticket, then it's like he's creating a ticket for himself to answer. It's just a weird way of going about it.
I don't want to make my client requests simply by sending emails or texts or whatever, because they can't be auto-reminded to answer, and I won't have the full context in a ticket history in one primary app.
Essentially, I need a ticketing app where clients can make requests to me, and I can also make requests to clients. If they need me, then I get reminded if I haven't responded. If I need them, then they get reminded if they don't respond. And this way I have a full history of things I request from them and things they request from me.
For some reason, all the most common ticketing software tools don't handle this two-way situation very well, or at all. They always assume "client sends ticket, agent answers", or "clients needs things, agent provides". But not the reverse.
Of course, I could be thinking about this all wrong to begin with.
What I'm doing now is simply sending my clients their monthly report. And in the report I list their pending issues. If the client wants to handle an issue, I tell them how to go start a ticket and ask me to fix it. So I am giving the client their issue, but I'm waiting for them to create the ticket to have me do something about it. This methodology simply doesn't work. Clients ignore reports, or don't care, or I have to beg them to think about it etc. I have open issues over a year old with some websites. What I'm trying to do is put more fire under the client. I want their issue to become an open ticket and I want that ticket to be constantly bugging them to deal with it. Once I create this issue, I don't want to have to think about it because the ticket software should be bugging them, not me. Every month I have to review all their issues over again to see if they perhaps fixed things on their own and didn't tell me about it. It takes time and is annoying. If they have a ticket, it would continue to bug them until they are forced to respond that they fixed it themselves or want me to do something, or just tell me to ignore it altogether. At least I wouldn't have to keep reviewing the issue every month!
Then I wouldn't even need to put issues in a report, because they would have some kind of ticket portal I can link to where they can see all their open issues/tickets any time they want, not just monthly when I send a new report. Both requests from me and their requests to me would be in this portal ideally.
Is there any ticketing software that can work this way?
