Sorry opyrus, unfortunately we had too many sources of incoming info.. CRM (help tickets), RMA's, emails, voicemails, private messages and forums. It was impossbile to manage so we needed to cut it down to one source and email won out for the time being. ('Contact Us' on the bottom of ever page).
I also like the help ticket feature but there are some flaws in the help ticket system that make it unmanageable, mostly the ability to reply to a help ticket message via email and not via the website..
You'd have a good help ticket going and next thing you know it's a string of email messages, then flipped back to a help ticket, all depending on how the user decided to reply.. It made the help tickets responses disconnected from the original ticket and hard to follow.
Email is definitely not the management tool of choice but ends up being the default for now unless the CRM system can be contained so replies responses are not disconnected.
hoog