Display ticket details in Help Desk conversation thread through API submission

[Ron-IS]

As a workaround to a known issue with HubSpot's email "reply-to" functionality, we are trying to configure a private app API to create a support ticket submission directly from our software's support page.

For the most part, it works as expected: it creates a Contact record and a Ticket and assigns relevant ticket properties and associations. 

However, it doesn't display the Ticket Details (the message from our customer) in the Help Desk conversation thread. The ticket is added to the Help Desk queue, but the original message is ignored, and our agents have no context. They have to leave the Help Desk and go to the Tickets page to see the message, then come back to Help Desk.

One possible solution is to add the Ticket Details property to the Help Desk Sidebar "default view". This at least allows our agents to see the original message at a glance without leaving the conversation. However, when they reply to the customer, the original message is not included in the thread, so the customer's email would begin with our reply instead of their message.

Fine, we could copy the message into our first reply, but this seems unnecessarily clunky and we also run the risk of having agents forget this step.

Surely, there has got to be a way to access the conversation thread through the API to create a new one when a submission is received. Our Dev team has scoured the API docs but can't find the necessary info. They reached out to HubSpot support, but no response has come back yet.

Is there a solution we're missing, or is it actually impossible to do what we need?

[kennedyp]

Hey @Ron-IS- thanks for your post! 

Just to clarify the setup here, is there a form being submitted to create this HelpDesk ticket? I may need some more context with the original setup. Maybe you can show some screenshots of an example for clarification-- be sure to exclude any private/personal information like email addresses! 

Best, 
Kennedy

[Ron-IS]

Hi @kennedyp ,

Thank you for your reply. We're not currently using a HubSpot form. That is another possible workaround that we explored, but we opted to use our existing private app API connection, which we already had in place to allow our software to sync customer info with HubSpot.

The way the process works today:

• The customer visits the Support page in our software, where we have our own custom-built form (not a HubSpot-embedded form)
• The customer enters their name and email address (we use their stored email as default, but they can change it).
• The customer selects an appropriate support category -- each option is linked to a corresponding ticket property, which may or may not trigger a workflow automation.
• The customer enters a message explaining the nature of their support request -- the message is linked to the Ticket Description ticket property.

As it's working now, in our test submissions:

• The API connection searches for a matching Contact record (based on email address)
• If it exists, no changes; if it doesn't, a new Contact is created in HubSpot
• The API connection creates a ticket, and HubSpot associates the contact and, if possible, the Company with the ticket
• The ticket Name is generated automatically -- we use a default setting
• The ticket is added to our General Support queue in the Help Desk
• The support category (based on the option selected by the customer in our custom form) is displayed in the ticket info on the right sidebar.
• In some cases, the category triggers a workflow that moves the ticket to a different pipeline.

Everything is working as expected except for one critical piece. Other than the support category, we don't know what the ticket is about. In Help Desk, the message (aka the Ticket Description) is not displayed in the Conversation thread. The Conversation box is empty until our agent replies. We can get the message elsewhere (as I indicated in my original post), but ideally, we would like the API to automatically create a Conversation thread, the same way an email, chat or HS form submission does.

Any help you can provide is appreciated.

[Ron-IS]

Hi @kennedyp ,

Another update to this situation: HubSpot support replied to our Developer and indicated the endpoint we're looking for, which includes the conversation thread ID. Unfortunately, we don't seem to have access to create/identify a thread ID for a new message. HS support said our best bet is to post in the Community forum...  

Hopefully, you or someone else reading this has some idea about how we can resolve this. The amount of energy and Developer resources we're putting into finding a solution for what seems like a no-brainer, which itself is already a workaround for a known issue (the reply-to-email address issue) that several HubSpot users have been asking to be fixed for years, is frustrating, to say the least.

As before, any help you can provide is greatly appreciated.

[HubSpot_Corey]

Hi @Ron-IS  and thanks for the tag @kennedyp 

From the sounds of it, you're just wanting to include some of the ticket properties in the base of your email automatically? The only solution that comes to mind is to setup an autoresponder by creating a conversations based workflow, triggered on conversation creation that then sends an email to the contact that you've received their ticket (plus the ticket data you want to include) and it will be answered by the next available agent. The issue is, the workflow doesn't support getting data from the associated ticket. To circumvent this, you will need to either use a custom coded workflow to extract the data from the ticket or to have another workflow that migrates the data from the ticket to the contact (which is accessible in the workflow) and ensure this workflow is triggered before the conversations ticket is triggered. 

[Ron-IS]

Hi @HubSpot_Corey ,

Thank you for your detailed reply. I think I understand what you're suggesting. though it seems a bit complicated for what we're trying to achieve, and I'm not sure it ultimately solves our problem.

All we want is for the contact's message (the ticket description) to start a conversation thread through the API connection. That's it.

If you were to write an email in Outlook or Mail, with a message like, "Hey, we have an issue. Here are the details. Can you help?" and send it directly to our support email address, it would essentially do 4 basic things:

1. Create a ticket in the CRM. The ticket name = the subject line
2. Add the "Hey, we have an issue" message to the Ticket Description property in the ticket object
3. Put the ticket into the Help Desk queue based on Pipeline rules
4. Initiate a Conversation thread in the Help Desk using the message ("Hey, we have an issue.") as the start of the message thread.

As it stands today, submitting through our custom form using the private API connection creates a few different ticket properties (correctly), but of those 4 basic things above, it only does the first 3. Even though it puts the ticket in the Help Desk queue (#3), it does not create a new thread with the "Hey, we have an issue" message. The Conversation box is blank. We just want the API connection to create the conversation thread using the contact's message as the start of the thread - exactly the same as an email does.

If this absolutely can't be done through the API, it seems like a glaring oversight. However, we'll live with that and go with one of our fallback plans, which is to either embed a HubSpot form on our support page (not ideal because the styling doesn't match) or use a button with a URL to redirect the customer to the Knowledge Base and have them submit a ticket there using a HubSpot form. With either of these options, we get, "Hey, we have an issue." as the start of a conversation rather than a blank box.

[kennedyp]

Thanks for all of this additional context @Ron-IS!

I'd like to invite some of our API experts in this case. Hey @HubSpot_Corey , @ChristinaKay , @albertsg do y'all have any potential solutions to create a conversation thread with conversion details via API?