Tickets overview

Overview of tickets, when to use them, and how they compare to conversations.

Written By Markus from Featurebase

Last updated 1 day 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 a different process and toolkit.

That's why Featurebase offers 3 different ticket categories, each uniquely optimized for the top use cases for complex queries:

	Customer tickets	Back-office tickets	Tracker tickets
When to use it	To capture & track long-running queries while keeping your customer up to date	Create a linked ticket from a conversation to collaborate with back-office teams	Streamline problems impacting many customers with a single ticket
Examples	Change my address Modify payment schedule Sign up for beta Data export request	Refund task for finance team Question for tech support team Escalation to R&D team Fraudulent transaction to trust team	Bug Feature request Outage Faulty delivery batch
How to create it	Customers submit a ticket in a Workflow or your product. Convert a conversation to a ticket in the Inbox. Create tickets on behalf of customers in the Inbox.	Create a Back-office ticket from within a conversation. Create standalone tickets to get help that is not related to a conversation.	Create a Tracker ticket for a new issue. Link to an existing Tracker ticket from within a conversation.
Benefits	Collect customer info up front to reduce back-and-forth. Allow customers to track progress with real-time updates. Customers can create tickets without starting a conversation. Accurately report on long-running queries using more expressive states.	Assign a separate ticket to back-office teams and eliminate tool switching. Conversations, notes, and customer data are always accessible, so front- and back-office teams never lose context.	Manage all conversations & feedback posts related to an issue from a single source of truth. Save time and keep customers up to date by broadcasting updates to all impacted customers.

✨ Dive deeper into the differences and use cases between the 3 ticket types →

Customer tickets

When your team needs more time to work on issues, use Customer tickets to capture, track, and automatically share progress with the customer.

Convert conversations to tickets – Convert a conversation to a ticket with just one click
Ticket forms – Collect comprehensive information upfront by automatically sending ticket forms to customers through a conversation, Workflow, or directly in your product
Customer status updates – Keep customers up to date with automated status updates through the Messenger and via email

Back-office tickets

When a support teammate needs to work with back-office teams to resolve an issue, create a linked Back-office ticket from a conversation for seamless collaboration.

Clear ownership – Clearly define responsibilities between front and back-office teams with a ticket that can be managed separately from the customer conversation
Context for back-office team – All Back-office tickets are linked to conversations so back-office teams never lose customer context
Front-office teams kept in the loop – Internal notes and status changes in the Back-office ticket are cross-posted to the customer conversation

Tracker tickets

Streamline problems impacting many customers, such as bugs, service interruptions, and feature requests.

Single source of truth – Link all related conversations, feedback posts, or Customer tickets to a Tracker ticket to create one single source of truth for your team to manage
Collaboration – Easily work with other internal teams to ensure that updates are shared in one place
Broadcast customer updates – Send mass updates to all impacted customers to save time and keep customers up to date in the Messenger and via email

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

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.