topic Re: Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service? in Tickets & Conversations

Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service?

JSzojka — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 18:45:10 GMT

Hey everyone! Right now I have some customer service reps who prefer the Service > Tickets page over the Conversations > Inbox page for handling customer service tickets.

However, I do find the Conversation > Inbox page does sometimes have some customers within it asking for help that Tickets didn't pick up because a Ticket wasn't created. This can happen if a "Sales" person forwards a customer service inquiry to our "Support" email.

On which of these pages do you spend the majority of your time when handling customer service?

Thanks!

Re: Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service?

TitiCuisset — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 09:07:07 GMT

Hi @JSzojka

Thank you for reaching out.

I want to tag some of our experts here - @Jnix284 @Olivia_Bagnall @Josh do you have any thought for @JSzojka on this?

Thank you!

Best

Tiphaine

Re: Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service?

Jnix284 — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 11:12:49 GMT

Hi @JSzojka this is such a good question!

At my previous company, we only had a form submission process and the tickets were streamlined and managed through the tickets. The team liked the view and simplicity, it was very focused and essentially only used to transfer to the warranty system they used (not used to communicate).

In February I joined a new team and jumped right into the Ticket view. It didn't take more than a day to realize this wasn't going to work. Conversations were being left open while the ticket was closed, "tickets" from other sources like our support email were not creating tickets automatically, and it wasn't long before I realized that working from the conversations inbox paired with simple automation was the way to go.

I spend about 12-15 hours a week answering tickets and doing tech support, the only time I go to ticket view is if I need to merge two tickets. 🙂

The most important suggestion I can give you is to create a process, show them the value of using the inbox and create your SLA around conversations and not just tickets. I created a dashboard that covers tickets, conversations, and chat - all equally important for customer success.

Re: Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service?

Josh — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 13:17:05 GMT

Hi @JSzojka,

Yes, great topic and love the insights from @Jnix284.

One other thing to note (from my experience) is that not all conversations necessarily need a ticket. Some customer initiated questions might come through that just require a simple response. Having the ability to do this quickly from a conversation is a more efficient way than creating a ticket that follows a specific resolution process. This is helps to avoid skewing service analytics as those types of things that come up can falsely inflate how many actual tickets (issues) are being handled and drastically reduce overall data on time to close a ticket.

Questions or comments that come through and require more attention and should follow a process to be resolved should have a ticket created once it is triaged. If you can gather some of this information on intake you could certainly automate ticket creation for some things but not others.

Obviously these recommendations are very dependent on your specific processes and situations, but it's been the common setup/process for many of our Conversations/Tickets implementation.

I hope this helps!

Josh

Re: Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service?

Jnix284 — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 16:06:25 GMT

@Josh very good point about not every convo should be a ticket! 🙂

Re: Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service?

JSzojka — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 16:09:42 GMT

Thank you very much!

Re: Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service?

JSzojka — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 16:09:50 GMT

Thank you very much!

Re: Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service?

drafeedie — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 20:34:28 GMT

We work out of the conversations inbox as well and find it really valuable versus the tickets view. We do create custom views so that we can see conversations that are "waiting on customer" or "waiting on us"... so that we have quick visibility into all conversations linked to those sorts of tickets.

However, the challenge we often face is when you have multiple conversations linked to one ticket. Sometimes when tickets are merged, then you end up with 2 conversations linked to different agents. If one closes their conversation (and ticket) it'll also close their colleagues ticket and an issue may get missed.

Any ideas about how to determine if there's another conversation to consider in these instances?

Re: Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service?

Jnix284 — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 20:36:39 GMT

HI @drafeedie I typically close one of the conversations before merging the tickets and then verify the status of the ticket after merging.

Re: Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service?

drafeedie — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 20:40:48 GMT

@Jnix284 I think the issue with that for us is when 2 or 3 conversations are attached to one ticket... if a customer replies to one of them and the ticket bumps back to a new stage of "waiting on us", it reopens all the tickets.

Many folks on our team are accustomed to working out of a zero inbox in Gmail, so that's often what they are trying to replicate. It's either an open conversation and in our inbox, or conversation is closed and waiting on customer (or ticket is closed.) Are we just going about this the wrong way?

Re: Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service?

Jnix284 — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 20:47:57 GMT

@drafeedie I completely understand and like a zero inbox, too. Maybe I misunderstood, it sounded like you had this situation:

Ticket 1 - conversation A

Ticket 2 - conversation B

Merged Ticket 1 and 2, closing conversation B and keeping conversation A open along with Ticket one. Even if conversation A and Ticket 1 get closed, when they reply, it should still only reopen Ticket 1 and conversation A, is something else happening?

I haven't had the experience where one conversation can open and close a different conversation, even on the same ticket. I don't have an example currently so I will have to run a test and see what happens so I can better understand what you mean.

Re: Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service?

drafeedie — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 20:57:43 GMT

Thanks so much for your responses @Jenn ! Sorry for being a bit unclear. The situation that you presented is a good example. But, the remaining ticket now houses both Conversation A and Conversation B. When the customer replies to Conversation A, it bumps the ticket back to us and both conversations reopen since they're tagged to that ticket.

Similarly, if you close that ticket it will automatically close Conversation A and B as well.

We have recently turned off the automatic ticket creation for all messages, so maybe that'll help clean up some of the mess w/ merging tickets and such and feel a bit easier to simulate the zero inbox.

Re: Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service?

Jnix284 — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 21:25:23 GMT

@drafeedie that's interesting, I have only merged tickets when two were created but after looking, only one ever had a conversation.

It sounds like you might have resolved the issue by turning off the automatic ticket creation, I wonder if maybe you're merging tickets too early. Could this be done when both tickets are fully resolved and closed instead of during active conversation? If two conversations are needed, are they really the same ticket? This makes me think of many scenarios and how the behavior is expected to be for conversations/tickets when merged. Very interesting what we've stumbled upon here 🙂

Re: Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service?

drafeedie — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 12:47:58 GMT

@Josh agree with you here. The problem is that Hubspot automations is atrocious with Conversation properties only, so they essentially force you into ticketing if you're looking to autoclose tickets / conversations, use Inbox Filters to create different views, etc. If they had basic automation / filtering functionality like you can get in Gmail Inboxes, it would make this a lot more realistic for us.

Re: Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service?

smerrow — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 22:16:53 GMT

Hi everyone! I'm Sophie from the Service Hub product team. I wanted to share an update here that I hope you'll be excited about (we certainly are!):

🎉 Help desk is currently in public beta. Help desk combines the best of tickets and converstions into a single workspace to drive efficiency and connectivity between your business, support team, and customers, resulting in faster resolution times and improved satisfaction. Learn more in this video overview and on the KB. (Plus: here's how you can migrate from inbox to help desk.)

Help desk is currently available for seated Service Hub Pro and Enterprise customers. We will be enabling the collaboration use-case (for non-Service Hub seated users) with the upcoming release to all. You can opt in here, or by navigating to Product Updates in the top right corner of your portal and searching for "help desk." If you have any questions, please reach out to your CSM or email us at helpdeskfeedback@hubspot.com.

Re: Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service?

laurabren — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 23:35:31 GMT

Hi @smerrow, thanks for posting an update!

I just watched the video overview and had a clarifying question. The KB article mentions that tickets can still be created via workflow. If we create tickets via workflow rather than connected channels, can they still be added to helpdesk?

For example, we use custom object forms to capture inbound support requests for two reasons: 1) to avoid overwriting customer data (we have a one-way sync with our member management system which is our source of truth for name, DOB, email, etc.), 2) to avoid cluttering up the contact/ticket objects with dozens of hyper-specific properties needed for conditional forms. We then use workflows to create unified tickets utilizing the data from the custom object.

For that reason, I'm not sure we'd be able to connect one of those forms directly to helpdesk, and instead need the interim workflow steps to compile the ticket.

If this is possible, it would be great to be able to utilize helpdesk to respond via conversations. Right now, our agents reply directly on the ticket via their personal connected emails. This opens up other issues - e.g. email not being logged if a user replies directly from Outlook, but also creates new contacts via the email integration if someone is CCed on the email.

Thanks!

Re: Tickets Vs Conversations? How do you handle your customer service?

Jnix284 — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 23:46:20 GMT

Thank you for the update @smerrow, one of the issues we ran into during the private beta for a client account was that chatflows created via the sales channel/inbox could no longer route to create a ticket.

So if someone is on a website and has options to reach sales or service, the same chatflow can't route them accordingly now that service conversations are in Help Desk.

Any plans around how this could be better managed?