Tickets vs. Conversations vs. Tickets vs. Conversations vs. Confusion
SOLVE
Hi,
I am new to the Service Hub and the ticketing feature confuses the **bleep** out of me. There appears to be so much overlap with the Conversations feature, and both seam to mingle with each other. A conversation opens a ticket that is also a conversation that lives in two places (conversations and tickets), I can respond to it from two places but both seem to have an entirely different experience and workflow.
This UX breaks my head, and that almost never happens.
It is confusing, I agree. There are some great discussions on this already here and here.
Overall, how tickets and conversations are to be used is very ambiguous. None of what I'm about to describe is 100% set in stone. How you use the tools comes down to personal preference.
Communication for the ticket can both happen through the inbox or the record itself.
Personally, I use the conversations inbox for chat and tickets for incoming emails and form submissions. I am a big fan of task automation and task queues coming from ticket record and like to work from the record more than from the inbox. Other people, see the threads linked above, almost exclusively work through the inbox.
So yes, it's ambiguous and confusing. Still I hope my answer could help you.
Best regards!
Karsten Köhler HubSpot Freelancer | RevOps & CRM Consultant | Community Hall of Famer
Tickets vs. Conversations vs. Tickets vs. Conversations vs. Confusion
SOLVE
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.
Tickets vs. Conversations vs. Tickets vs. Conversations vs. Confusion
SOLVE
The help desk interface (which lists tickets and lets you select them) has a pane showing ticket history, but only shows the history of a single conversation. This makes it extremely confusing and hard to use. Sure, there is a drop-down on the right to select which conversation it's showing, but:
that conversation selector is completely out of place. no other element of the interface relates only the view of activity. if you have such a selector/filter, it should be located inside/adjacent to the pane itself.
it's extremely annoying to have to select each and every conversation and try to piece things together in your head. the activity pane should show all activity across all conversations. if you really want to have a selector to filter, the default should be showing an integrated history of "all conversations"
The other thing I think that makes this really confusing -- or frankly is just broken -- is that new conversations seem to automatically get generated and tied to a ticket, without you even knowing about it. In particular, responding to a ticket via email always creates an entirely new "conversation" in HubSpot. Your true conversation gets split up incorrectly into multiple "hubspot conversations", making it very hard to piece together the history. For us at least, this is the biggest problem, and the activity UX just exacerbates it.
Tickets vs. Conversations vs. Tickets vs. Conversations vs. Confusion
SOLVE
@miked_jacktrip we are very heavy users of Helpdesk and find it equally confusing in many instances 🙂 I do think that many of these things will be resolved reasonably soon based on conversations that we've had with Hubspot PM's.
In the interim, our teams typically use the system like this:
For tickets that have a single conversation, helpdesk is pretty quick and simple, so we mostly live there.
For tickets with two conversations, but separate parties, we also usually use Helpdesk. This is not great b/c the conversations are labeled horribly in the dropdown so you just randomly click around until you find the right one. We use this mostly for 3-way service issues. IE. customer emails us and we email a vendor then get back to customer.
When there is a lot of noise on a ticket (calles, multiple conversations, etc.) We advise our agents to go into the ticket itself so that you can see all the back and forth sequentially. A downside here is that this does not pull in comments from HelpDesk but rather "notes" from the ticket only.
Conversations shouldn't auto tie to a ticket unless you're merging tickets. Our configuration is such that a new email to our support inbox creates a new ticket. A 2nd conversation can get created to tie to that ticket by going into the ticket and creating a new email within it.
Tickets vs. Conversations vs. Tickets vs. Conversations vs. Confusion
SOLVE
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.
Tickets vs. Conversations vs. Tickets vs. Conversations vs. Confusion
SOLVE
Hi Sophie,
We have been playing with help desk and while it does seem to have combined conversations and tickets, it seems to have removed some important inbox functionality.
Oftentimes we have 3 way support tickets... ie customer emails our support inbox and then we have to then email the vendors. So we have TWO conversations linked to one ticket.
When using Help Desk, it's really awesome that both conversations are appended to the right sidebar so we can toggle between the two. However, a critical feature that's missing is the ability to mark the conversations "complete" or "closed." This used to be an option in Inbox, but no longer exists it seems.
Oftentimes when there are multiple conversations on a single ticket, they are essentially individual tasks that need to be completed prior to closing the ticket. When there is a single conversation on the ticket, then it is 1:1 of solving the conversation = solving the ticket.
How do we manage the more complex workflow of "If there is more than 1 conversation attached to the ticket, then we need to make sure that both conversations are closed before the ticket can be closed."
The workflow that WOULD work is "If a ticket has more than 1 conversation AND the ticket status is closed AND any conversation status is "not closed" then reopen the ticket.
But that only works if you can close the conversation without closing the ticket.
Tickets vs. Conversations vs. Tickets vs. Conversations vs. Confusion
SOLVE
While this sounds pretty exciting and exactly what I had envisioned, the fact that you make this available to Pro and Enterprise customers only is a let down. I am not going to upgrade our 5-user startup team to a Pro plan just to get a feature that I can get elsewhere for 5 US$ a month.
It is confusing, I agree. There are some great discussions on this already here and here.
Overall, how tickets and conversations are to be used is very ambiguous. None of what I'm about to describe is 100% set in stone. How you use the tools comes down to personal preference.
Communication for the ticket can both happen through the inbox or the record itself.
Personally, I use the conversations inbox for chat and tickets for incoming emails and form submissions. I am a big fan of task automation and task queues coming from ticket record and like to work from the record more than from the inbox. Other people, see the threads linked above, almost exclusively work through the inbox.
So yes, it's ambiguous and confusing. Still I hope my answer could help you.
Best regards!
Karsten Köhler HubSpot Freelancer | RevOps & CRM Consultant | Community Hall of Famer
Tickets vs. Conversations vs. Tickets vs. Conversations vs. Confusion
SOLVE
Thank you Karsten, great insights! I am clear on the difference between conversations and tickets. What bugs me is the fact that a ticket lives inside the conversation inbox AND its own ticket inbox. So you have multiple "surfaces" to interact with a ticket, and both are different.