Professional Flight Management, Inc.
Delivers High-End Service at Jet-Like Speed

As a team that's constantly on-the-go, speed is critical. Before contacting OTRS Group, PFM was running the open source ((OTRS)) Community Edition on-premise. The customer relations team knew that the professionally supported OTRS 7 had been significantly enhanced over time, and were excited by the latest features, such as mobile accessibility and faster search functionality.

The difficulty was that their programmers and IT staff needed to concentrate on their customers and on delivering the best possible service in support of PFM’s own application. There simply wasn’t enough time to keep up-to-date with the latest versions of OTRS and import the more than 50 GB of on-premise data into a modern managed environment.

So, PFM turned to OTRS Group to see what could be done. It was of crucial importance that prior communication with customers not be lost during the transition. The OTRS team handled the upload behind-the-scenes and ensured correct configuration so that emailing directly to the system would not be interrupted during upgrade.

Moving from an on-premise installation to the secure managed environment was a relief for the internal PFM IT team. Said Alexandra John, Director of Customer Relations, "Having the software hosted by OTRS Group has given our programmers more time to focus on the needs of our own customers. And, it's really reduced the issues that we were having with the older version."

The customer solution team transitioned easily to the newest version of OTRS. Fortunately, they had the support of the OTRS customer solutions team to answer any questions throughout the process. Alexandra John commented that "Everyone at OTRS Group was so quick and helpful to us during the transition time." That resulted in no downtime for the team and a seamless transition for PFM’s customers as well.

"Our customers need to know that we're here for them," said Alexandra John, "They need the confidence that comes from getting an automated reply to tell them that their inquiry has been received. And, they need the reassurance that comes from knowing they have the support of an entire team behind them: If one of us is not available, OTRS makes it easy for another person to step in and help."

She continued to say that today's version of OTRS is much more streamlined. The team finds it easy to see who is working on which ticket and what notes have been made. Between the ability to save templates for reuse and the ticket locking feature, the team has been better able to balance their workload because the work of each person is clearly structured and documented for all to see.