What's a ticket in eDesk?

Understanding tickets and how they work in eDesk is key to delivering a fantastic, personal experience for your customers. Let's find out more!

This help file will describe what tickets are, and tell you how to manage them effectively and efficiently.

Before you start

You'll need an eDesk account. To find out how to create one, click here.

Let's talk about tickets, which, in eDesk, are where you manage the conversations you have with your customers.

01 Introduction to tickets

In eDesk, tickets are used to manage and organize the messages that your company receives and sends to your customers. When a customer sends your company a message or when somebody in your company sends a message to your customer, the message is displayed in a ticket. Tickets are listed in your eDesk Mailbox.
Note: Tickets are for messages only, not orders. Orders are listed separately in the Orders tab in your eDesk Account, although you can link an order to a message very easily. To learn all about the Orders tab, click here.

02 How are new tickets created?

Most new tickets are created automatically when a customer sends your company a first message on a new subject.
For example:

"When will my order be delivered?"
"Thank you for your excellent service."
"I'm not happy with my order."
"I'd like some information about a product you sell."

There are various ways for a customer to send a message. For example, they can send an email directly to the company email address, fill in a Contact Us form in a marketplace, or complete a Live Chat form.

You and your teammates can also manually create new tickets in eDesk. For example, if you learn that there will be a delay in delivering an item that a customer has ordered, you could create a new ticket with the customer's contact details, which would send a message to the customer informing them of the delay. For instructions, click here.

Pro Tip: Sometimes your marketplaces want to send you messages that appear in your eDesk account as tickets, for example, System Messages. In the screenshot above, there are a couple of System Messages that are notifications for orders or claims.

If you prefer to block certain types of system message or re-route them out of the New Messages section, you can configure this in your account in the marketplace, or set up a rule in eDesk. If you want to learn how to keep your Mailbox focused on your customers, click here.

03 Message threads in tickets

Once a ticket has been created in eDesk, then all subsequent responses between people in your company and the same customer email address are listed in a thread in the same ticket. By default, the oldest message is at the bottom of the list.
A message thread in a ticket

We identify the customer by their email address. If a customer uses different email addresses to contact you about the same issue, then a new ticket will be created for each email address. Similarly, if a customer sends a completely new message, rather than responding to a message from your company or to their original message, then this is represented in a new ticket.

Pro Tip: Not a problem though! If there is more than one ticket that relates to the same query, you can keep all the relevant messages together by merging the tickets. For instructions, click here.

In your Mailbox, tickets are listed one per row. The most recent message in the thread is displayed in the Latest Update column.

Only people within your company that have eDesk accounts can view eDesk tickets. Your customers can't view eDesk tickets but they can, of course, view the messages that they send and receive. Depending on the marketplace they used to contact you, they can either open their marketplace account to view the messages or view them in their own email account.

04 Example of a ticket in action

Here's an end-to-end example that illustrates how tickets work in eDesk.

1. Your company 'Joe's Bikes' sells bicycles via Amazon, eBay and Shopify. A customer places an order for a blue bike through Amazon. The order is received by your eDesk account and is listed under the Orders tab.

2. Your company fulfils the order and it's received by the customer, who realizes they ordered the wrong color. They log into their Amazon account and send the company a message via the Contact Seller form, to ask if they can swap it for a red bike. This customer message is displayed in a ticket in the New tickets part of the Mailbox for all the people in your company that have an eDesk account with the appropriate permissions.

3. You pick up the ticket and reply to the customer's message, providing instructions on how to return their bike and sending them details of the bike in red, with a promise to send it to the customer when you receive the blue bike. In the message, you ask the customer to confirm if they are happy with this and whether you should reserve the red bike for them. You give the ticket a Waiting status as you are expecting the customer to respond. To read more about setting a ticket to Waiting, click here. The ticket is listed in the Waiting part of your Mailbox, and you can open it to view both the original message and your response.

4. The customer responds to your message to let you know they will return the blue bike and would like to receive the red bike. When this message is received by your eDesk account, the ticket is moved to the To Do part of your Mailbox, and you can open it to see the customer's latest message plus all the previous messages in the thread that are from you, from other Support Agents in your company, and from the customer.

5. You reply and confirm that you'll let them know when you receive the blue bike and will then send them the red bike. You add an Internal Note to the ticket to remind you to notify the customer and set the ticket status to Snooze for 24 hours, which is the earliest possible time in which the blue bike might be returned.

6. Finally, you open the ticket again to let the customer know that the red bike is on its way to them, and set the ticket status to Resolved as the customer's inquiry has been handled. You can open the ticket from the Resolved part of your Mailbox if you need to view the messages or send another message to the customer. If the customer responds again after the ticket is closed, the ticket is moved to the To Do part of your Mailbox again so you can see that it needs another response.

To learn all about the different ticket statuses in eDesk, click here.

05 What's in a ticket?

A ticket contains any of the following:

Ticket number.
The unique ID for the ticket.
Ticket type, if provided.
If a customer has filled in a contact form, often they are asked to select the reason for their message, from a menu. This is then passed to eDesk and included in the ticket.
Ticket status. To learn about ticket status, click here.
Payment status (if applicable).
Only included if the ticket is in relation to an order.
All messages from you, your teammates, and the customer that relates to the original message. This is always in a ticket.
Customer information, if provided.
E.g. their name, contact details, the marketplace they used to send the message.
Note: Some marketplaces such as Amazon do not disclose customer information.
Order information (if applicable).
For order-related messages, you can manually attach an invoice to your response. Some messages are not order-related.
Internal notes (if applicable).
These are created by and visible to you and your colleagues only.
Any changes to the ticket.
E.g. status change, new owner etc, and the name of the person that made the change.
External messages
These are created by you or your teammates and sent to other people outside your company, e.g., a supplier.
Owner
The person in your company that is responsible for handling this ticket.
Time left.
This is the SLA timer to indicate how long the ticket has left before it exceeds the Service Level Agreement Response Target for that marketplace. For more information on SLA timers, click here.
AI summaries
These are summaries for AI-powered responses that you can select and send to your customers for super-fast response times. For more information on AI-powered responses, click here.
Rules matched by this ticket.
To learn about Rules in eDesk, click here.
Feedback status (if applicable).
To learn about Feedback, click here.

06 Managing tickets

eDesk's Mailbox allows you to manage your tickets quickly and efficiently.

Responding to the customer
You can type your responses manually into the Reply field, select a pre-written template, use Quick Reply to respond with one click, or instruct eDesk to use an Auto-responder to reply. To learn about all the ways you can respond to your customers, click here.
Assigning a ticket owner
You can assign an owner to a ticket by opening the ticket and selecting a colleague as owner. To find out how, click here.
eDesk can also be configured to assign owners automatically in a round-robin. To find out more about eDesk's round-robin, click here.
Adding an internal note
You can add a note to a ticket that is hidden from the customer but is visible to you and your teammates. You can even include a @mention of a teammate in the internal note, which will put the ticket in the Mentions part of their Mailbox so that they will spot that their input is needed. To learn more, click here.
Changing Ticket status
For a guide to changing a ticket's status and what each status means, click here.
Merging related tickets
You can merge two tickets together if they both relate to the same issue for the same customer. To find out how, click here.
Sending external messages
Another way to keep all the relevant messages together, even those you send to third parties, e.g., a message to a supplier asking if they have the item in yellow. To find out more, click here.
Adding tags
Organize your tickets with Tags. To learn about how Tags can work for you, click here.
Favoriting tickets
To find out how to bookmark the tickets that you want to keep a close eye on, click here.

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