Tickets overview
Overview of tickets, when to use them, and how they compare to conversations.
Written By Markus from Featurebase
Last updated 7 days ago
Overview
When it comes to customer questions, some are straightforward to answer and best resolved over chat. But others are more complex, requiring more time to resolve, or input from other teams. That's where tickets come in.
Tickets can be either customer-facing or internal, depending on their type and purpose. Featurebase's tickets are optimized for team collaboration and real-time customer updates, so your team can resolve any type of complex query more efficiently.
The Featurebase Inbox contains two types of objects:
Conversations - For simple queries that can be handled quickly and involve minimal collaboration (e.g. "How do I delete tags?")
Tickets - For complex async queries that take time to resolve, requiring investigation, multiple steps, or collaboration (e.g. "My bill is incorrect, please issue a refund.")
Ticket categories
Complex queries are not all the same. They can come in different shapes and sizes and require different processes and toolkits.
That's why Featurebase offers 3 different ticket categories, each uniquely optimized for the top use cases for complex queries:
Customer tickets
Private conversations between your team and a customer for async requests. Customer tickets are the only ticket type visible to customers – they can track progress in the Messenger and Ticket Portal, and receive automated status updates via email.
Best for bug reports, feature requests, refund requests, and any issue where the customer needs visibility into progress.
Back-office tickets
Internal tickets between your team for tasks that happen behind the scenes. Best for issues that require cross-team collaboration (e.g. finance, security, engineering) without involving the customer. For example, escalations to engineering or billing investigations.
Notes and status changes are cross-posted to the original conversation so front-office teammates stay in the loop.
Tracker tickets
Internal tickets to track shared issues affecting multiple customers, such as bugs and outages. When you update the status of a tracker ticket, it automatically updates all linked customer tickets at once, so your team doesn’t have to follow up with each customer individually.
Customer experience
Messenger widget
The Messenger includes a dedicated Tickets tab where customers can submit new tickets, view existing ones, and track status updates – all from one centralized place. This keeps tickets visually separated from regular conversations, making it easy for customers to find and follow up on their requests.
Public Ticket portal
In addition to the Messenger, Featurebase offers a standalone Ticket Portal – a dedicated page where customers can submit and track tickets outside of the Messenger.
The Ticket Portal lives alongside your Feedback board, Product updates, and Help Center, so everything is in one place for your customers.
Notification emails
Customers are automatically notified via email about ticket activity, so they stay informed even when they're not in the Messenger. Emails are sent when
A ticket shared with the customer is submitted
A teammate replies to the ticket
The ticket state changes
Customers can reply directly to notification emails without returning to the Messenger.
Ticket automations
You can automate common ticket actions using Workflows – Featurebase's visual, no-code automation builder. This helps your team save time, standardize processes, and ensure consistent ticket handling.
Some common automations include:
Auto-assign tickets by type – Route tickets to the right team the moment they're created, so nothing sits unassigned
Auto-close stale tickets – Automatically close tickets that have been waiting on a customer response for too long
Send ticket forms in the Messenger – Prompt customers to submit structured ticket requests during a conversation, so you collect the right details upfront and reduce back-and-forth
Convert conversations to tickets – Automatically turn conversations into tickets based on conditions, without requiring any customer input
These ticket automations can be combined with all existing Workflow capabilities like branching, assigning, snoozing, and more. The possibilities are endless.
Tickets tab in the User & Company profiles
Tickets appear as a dedicated tab in both User and Company profiles in the Users directory. This gives your team a complete view of all tickets associated with a specific customer or organization – alongside their support chats, feedback, and survey responses.
This is useful for quickly understanding a customer's full support history when you need additional context.
Multi-brand tickets
Tickets can be created with a brand, and you can update the brand after ticket creation. All 3 ticket types support brands.
The brand can be updated from the ticket details section in the right-hand sidebar.
Note: Multi-brand tickets are only available on the Enterprise plan with access to the multi-brand feature.
Get started
Before you can create tickets in the Inbox, you first need to create the ticket types you want to use. A ticket type defines the data fields to be captured in the ticket and its category.
Ticket types can be set up from Settings → Support → Ticketing.
Learn more: Getting started with tickets
