Collaboration is an essential aspect of customer support. If your support organization has multiple departments then being able to share tickets with them to get your work done is vital for the success of your support operations.
For example, a customer is sending a ticket for a failed order, yet seeing a pending charge on their credit card. The solution to this customer could rely on information from one of those departments that manage the account receivables. If you could share this ticket with the other departmentsand their agents provide information for resolving the issue, it would be much easier to close the ticket with a quick turnaround time.
Sharing Tickets
You can share tickets with other departments for their agents to collaborate towards resolving it depending on their pre-defined access levels. You can set the terms of access in the parent department, which determines the actions of agent in the receiving department (child) on the shared ticket.
Notes:
- Ticket sharing is available only on Professional and Enterprise edition.
- A ticket can be shared with more than one department, each with its own level of access.
- Agents in the child department cannot modify the status or the assignee of the shared tickets regardless of their level of access.
- A shared ticket does not create a new ticket in the child department.
- The receiving department (child) cannot further share the ticket with another department.
- All the shared ticket information will remain synced between the tickets in each department.
- By default, support admins can share a ticket with other affiliated departments. Agents with respective Share Tickets multi-department profile permissions can share a ticket with the desired departments within the Desk portal.
Ticket Sharing Permissions
Share permissions are the permissions you set for a ticket when you share it with other departments. They determine the type of access agents have to the shared ticket in the child department. There are three types of permissions,
- Full Access: Agents can have full access to tickets except for changing their status and assignee. Use this access level if you want agents in the child department to reply to tickets.
- Restricted Access: Agents can leave private comments and forward ticket conversations. Please note that agents cannot forward tickets to the requestor's email address.
- Read-only Access: Agents can view the shared tickets and leave private comments.
To share a ticket
- In Zoho Desk, navigate to the Tickets module.
- Open the desired ticket to share.
- Click the More Actions icon in the upper right corner of the page.
- Click Share on the More Actions menu.
The Share Ticket window will slide open in the left panel.
- Select the desired departments from the drop-down menu to share the ticket.
- Specify the sharing permission level for each department.
Note: Each department has an associated drop-down menu with three sharing options: “Full Access, Restricted Access & Read-only Access. By default, “Full Access” is selected on all departments. - Click Share.
Note: Click the Share icon (
) on the left panel to view the ticket sharing list (department wise). You can also share the ticket with more departments, modify sharing permissions or unshare tickets from departments.
Viewing Shared Tickets
Agents can view the tickets shared with their department under the Shared Tickets view.
For ease of identification, each ticket will have the Shared badge in the left panel in its detail view.The shared badge indicates the department from which it was shared from.You can find detailed sharing information by clicking on the Shared link.
Note:
- You can't access the shared tickets from any other view except the Shared Tickets view.
- You can't unshare or modify permissions of a shared ticket from inside the child department.
Unsharing Tickets
You can unshare a ticket that you have shared with the child departments. Unsharing a ticket removes it from the Shared Tickets view of the child department.
To unshare a ticket
- Open the desired ticket to unshare.
- Click the Shared badge in the left panel.
The Share Ticket window will slide open.
Click on the corresponding Delete icon of the department to unshare. - Click Unshare to confirm the selection.
- The ticket will be unshared from the corresponding department.
Referring to Shared Tickets in Custom Views
You can filter tickets that have been shared with other departments while creating a custom ticket view. The condition statement ‘Shared with Others’ is true will return tickets that were shared from the current department. You can add additional conditions with it, for example, 'Status' is OPEN to view the shared tickets that are in the Open state. You can also define the visibility for your custom view.
Notifying Agents of Shared Tickets
Zoho Desk can send email notifications to all agents of a child department on receiving a shared ticket. This is important to ensure that agents can send out a timely response for such tickets.
To enable this notification
- Go to Setup > Customization > Notifications.
- In the Notification Rules page, select the desired department from the drop-down.
Toggle the Receiving a shared ticket notification to ON under Department Notifications.
The agents will receive the notification every time a ticket is shared with their department.
Note:
- If you can't access this setting, you might need to ask your administrator to enable it for your department.
- The email or the SMS template for this notification can be customized by clicking the Edit icon next to the toggle.