Used this for many years in the early 2000's for our company with 5 or so customer support agents. Worked great. It was Perl-based then and used a MySQL db to store everything. Never had any maintenance or scaling issues with it.
The only thing I ever did to it was to add a couple of lines of code to set a Cache header so that hitting the Back button was instantaneous rather than needing to regenerate the page from the db. It had lots of features we never used or needed, but the didn't get in the way either.
We assigned everyone "customer support" ID's, like cs1@xyz.com cs2@xyz.com etc and I would recommend doing that. We started out using our real email addresses, but with any business, there are always disgruntled customers, and the crappy ones can get very personal on the Internet when they get mad. Using generic CS IDs worked way better for us.
RT has both a web front end for customers or you can use an email-based approach to tickets. We ended up displaying our own web form to submit tickets so it looked like the rest of our site, then sent the form data to RT via email. From then on, the back-and-forth between customer and us was via email.
RT has nice features that we used a lot, for example:
- a general ticket queue where support agents can "take" tickets and assign themselves to it
- support staff can move a ticket to someone else or add someone to the ticket
- RT keeps a complete history of all tickets
- customers are auto-registered when a new email address is seen, ie, there is no big sign-up procedure
