Tickets and the help desk

Chat is good at conversations that finish in one sitting. Tickets are for everything else — the refund that needs approval, the bug that needs a fix, the question that needs somebody who is on holiday until Tuesday.

Converting a chat to a ticket

From an open conversation, convert it to a ticket in one action. The transcript, the visitor’s details and any attachments come with it, so the ticket opens with full context rather than a summary somebody typed from memory.

Once it is a ticket it has:

• an owner — one named person, not a queue everybody assumes somebody else is watching
• a status — open, pending, resolved
• a priority
• a thread that continues by email if the visitor has left the site

Ticketing is available on all plans. The fuller help desk system — including the scheduler and additional channels — is on Business and Platinum. See pricing.

When to convert

The rule of thumb: convert as soon as you know the answer will not arrive in this session. Converting early is cheap; discovering three days later that a chat was never followed up is not.

Concretely, convert when:

• You need input from someone who is not online
• The customer needs to do something first (send a photo, check an order number)
• The resolution depends on a delivery, a refund clearing, or a fix shipping
• The conversation is a complaint that needs a written trail

Assignment

Assign to a person, not a team, wherever possible. Unowned tickets are the single most common way support desks lose things — everyone can see it, nobody has decided it is theirs.

If you do route by team, make sure somebody’s job is to triage that queue at a known time each day.

Priority

Keep the scale small and defined in terms customers would recognise: is the customer blocked, is money at stake, is it time-limited. Elaborate priority matrices tend to collapse into “everything is high” within a month.

More on this: how to prioritise support tickets and ticket routing.

Measuring the desk

The two numbers that matter most for a small team are first response time and resolution time, split out rather than averaged together — they have different causes and different fixes. See help desk metrics for what is worth tracking and what is vanity.

Next: connect your support email.