A ticket is a digital record of the question or concern raised by a customer. In order to solve the issue or guide the customer, a support agent often needs to have a back-and-forth conversation with the customer for better clarity. The exchange of information happens mostly through ticket replies and comments via email. When an agent has all parts of the conversation listed in one place, they can consider the full context and the current state of the issue to come up with effective resolutions.

A ticket conversation includes replies, which are also referred to as threads, and private or public comments. Private comments are used by the employees for internal communication. Public comments can be seen by the customer in their help center.

From the ticket detail view, agents can perform various actions as the ticket transitions to different stages. 

An agent can reply to the contact or ticket sender who is listed in the To field to respond directly to the person who raised the ticket or the main contact without involving anyone else in the conversation.

An agent can send a response to everyone involved in the conversation, including secondary contacts mentioned in the CC field. When a user selects reply all, the system automatically adds the secondary contacts and shows their email addresses in the CC field. The agent can also manually add other contacts to the CC field. This ensures that both the customer and other stakeholders are kept in the loop about the updates or resolution of the ticket. 

The agent can also manually remove the contact from the CC field. But if they are removing a secondary contact, they will still be able to access the entire ticket along with replies from the help center, unless the recipient is removed from Secondary Contact field.

Additionally, if the agent prefers to send a response via email, they can select the Reply via Email option. If the customer's contact information includes an email address, the 'To' field is auto-populated with the email address. If the customer's contact information does not include an email address, the agent must manually enter the email address to respond via email.

Let’s say a customer raises a ticket to report a bug in the application and has included their senior management in the CC field. The support agent picks up the ticket and needs more information about the issue. Since the agent only needs to communicate with the person who raised the ticket for more information (and not with the management team at this stage), the agent would use the Reply option.

Once the issue is resolved, it’s important to keep everyone involved in the conversation informed about the same. Since both the customer and the management team were included in the thread, the agent would select Reply All to notify everyone about the resolution.

At any point, if the agent needs to involve someone not currently in the conversation, such as the developer or testing team, the agent could use the Forward option to send the ticket details to that person.

Field Prediction is an AI based feature where Zia trains on support tickets and predicts field values, such as ticket owner and ticket type. Using Add to Prediction, agents can manually add new tickets to the training list and select the fields that Zia should consider for training. Read more about Zia Field Prediction.

This allows agents to authenticate where the email originated and confirm its authenticity.

For example, a ticket was submitted via mail with the subject "Alert! My subscription has been cancelled. Need help immediately!" The tone and content of the message raised the assigned agent's suspicion. In this case, the agent can check the full email header and verify whether the email is from an authentic source.

If the email appears suspicious, the agent can also mark the contact as spam to prevent future risks.

 

Agents can print a ticket with its entire email conversation. Having a physical copy of the ticket can be useful for filing documentation and to take as a reference when agents go out for field work.

Note: In order to print the entire conversation, including internal comments, the user must install the Print Tickets extension for Zoho Desk.

 

In customer service, it is important to ensure that the process a customer has to go through to raise a ticket is as simple and linear as possible. This places responsibility on the agent's side to ensure that each ticket is routed to the right agent, team, or department for timely resolution.

 

For example, a customer has reached out to ask about the availability of a product in a store. After getting the required information, they wanted to know about the services and insurance plans provided for the item. While the general support team can provide product availability details, there is a separate insurance team. In this case, the agent can split the ticket and assign each component to the appropriate agent for a quicker response. This feature ensures all of the customers' needs are met without the trouble of creating multiple tickets.