Effective customer service keeps customers happy and improves your ability to keep them as a customer. In today’s fast moving business environment it is important to provide customers with timely support when problems occur.
You may be solving customer problems with known or researched 
solutions. Some problems, though, cannot be resolved in this way. These problems involve the design of your product or software. Many companies today use defect track applications to help them track and manage these issues. These same systems can also help them manage feature and enhancement requests, and help plan and document product releases.
Frequently the customer service and the defect tracking applications are separate pieces of software. Usually they do not talk to one another. So when a support problem needs to be reported to engineering, first the support agent needs to document the problem, and then the engineer has to duplicate this data into the defect tracking system. And the engineer may not have access to all the information collected by customer service, and may have to retrace steps already taken by the support agent. Companies who get the best results from their customer service and defect tracking applications are those who use integrated systems. Maintaining two different applications has many costs and issues.
Here are seven reasons to integrate customer service and defect tracking:
- Customer defects are identified and resolved faster.
- The cost of collecting defect data is greatly reduced.
- Development and QA engineers spend more time working on issues and less time collecting information about bugs and defects.
- When the defect is resolved, customers are notified more rapidly.
- Customer support agents’ time is better used leading to better productivity.
- Customer support and development use a common language and terminology, which makes their communication more effective.
- Comprehensive reporting and analysis of customer-related defects is now possible.