topic Re: Merging Ticket Conversations for Help Desk through the Conversations API in Conversations API Beta

Merging Ticket Conversations for Help Desk through the Conversations API

Stian-Ing — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 17:44:27 GMT

We have an ongoing issue where many replies to our Help Desk tickets are creating new tickets rather than being routed into to the correct existing ones. This often happens when contacting emails linked to external support systems (which seem to strip the in-reply-to header before responding). This causes a lot of extra work for our agents, and is affecting our ticket handling times.

Are there any plans to enable conversation merging through the API? I’ve created a script that merges an incoming ticket if the associated contact already has an open ticket and the subject of the new ticket contains the full subject of the older existing ticket. While this helps to some extent, each merged reply becomes a new conversation, leading to multiple split conversations threads attached to a single ticket, which is far from ideal.

Do you have any suggestions for better workarounds than the one I’ve created? Having an API feature for merging conversations would be a great way to mitigate this threading issue.

Considering the recent introduction of the splitting feature in Help Desk, I’m hopeful that something like this could be in the works already?

Additionally, I created a button that allows agents to remove (archive) conversations in Help Desk when a ticket has multiple conversations, which helps "tidy up" the ticket a bit. When a conversation is archived, does the associated email get deleted after 30 days, or is it only the thread/conversation that gets deleted?

Re: Merging Ticket Conversations for Help Desk through the Conversations API

kennedyp — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 23:51:29 GMT

Hi @Stian-Ing! Welcome to the Community-- happy to have you here 😊

Your question has two parts:

When a conversation is archived, does the email activity also get deleted from the contact record?
- When you delete a ticket from Help Desk, the associated conversation will also be deleted from the Inbox. That said, you will still see the email conversation on the associated contacts.
Is there a workaround to merge duplicate Conversation threads created for the same contact?
- I found a similar post for the ability to merge Conversation threads on the Ideas Forum. Upvoted! Add your use case there so the Product Team managing it can hear you.

I want to invite some subject matter experts to see if they have any suggestions.

Hey @karstenkoehler, @ChristinaKay, @HubSpot_Corey do you have any workarounds for merging duplicate conversations or avoiding separate threads from being created because they're linked to external support systems?

Best,
Kennedy

Re: Merging Ticket Conversations for Help Desk through the Conversations API

EricHirsh — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 22:00:26 GMT

API product manager here! Thanks for the feedback. The reason we are unlikely to add a 'merge conversations via API' feature is because we'd rather solve the underlying problem.

Sounds like this, right? https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Conversations-Inbox-Emails-To-Use-quot-Reply-to-Email-Address/idc-p/810626

Or are you experiencing this across other channels besides email?

In the user interface when I go to the trash to permanently delete a conversation, the associated CRM activity is also removed. That leads be to believe (but not confirm) that it is the same with API thread archiving.

Re: Merging Ticket Conversations for Help Desk through the Conversations API

Stian-Ing — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 09:25:59 GMT

Hi. Thanks for the feedback, great to see that the from/reply-to issue is being addressed!

Though that won't solve the issue for us completely. An example is for a partner (banking support system) that we regularly contact.
1. An agent sends a mail to the bank
2. The auto-reply arrives as a separate ticket
3. The reply from the bank's support team arrives as another separate ticket.
4. Each new reply after we respond to then arrives as more separate tickets.

Step 4 will hopefully be solved by using the in-reply to mail in our replies instead of the from mail, and I've set up some automations through Zapier to test this now.

The other split replies are not related to which mail we reply to, and won't be solved by changing that. We're seeing this issue happen with several different support emails we contact, and not just one specific bank. For these cases, it would be beneficial to merge the conversation and not just the tickets. Not sure if there are other ways to handle it?