Tickets in Deskwoot: the customer keeps chatting, your team works the ticket
When a chat needs a developer, the warehouse or billing, the customer no longer has to start over somewhere else. Deskwoot tickets hand the work to your team while the customer keeps writing in the chat they started.
Deskwoot Team
11 min read
Contents
- What the usual handoffs cost
- When a chat should become a ticket
- From chat to ticket in 2 steps
- The customer never sees the ticket
- Resolve now asks how the chat ends
- Statuses that say who acts next
- The History tab: who held it, and for how long
- A Copilot summary on every resolve
- Tickets in the iPhone and Android app
- One problem, many customers: trackers
- Who gets tickets
- Where to start
A customer writes in your live chat that the invoice upload crashes every time. The fix belongs to a developer who never opens the chat inbox. Somebody pastes the screenshot into Slack, and the chat sits open for days.
Below you get a quick test for when a chat needs a ticket and a 4 line handover note. Then you see how Deskwoot tickets let the customer keep chatting.
What the usual handoffs cost
Small teams usually handle this moment in one of two ways. The Slack thread is the first, and it leaves nobody sure who owns the chat. The second sends the customer to email or a form, where they receive a ticket number and explain everything again.
In Salesforce's survey for the State of the Connected Customer report (6th edition), 56% of customers said they often have to repeat or re-explain information, and 55% said it feels like talking to separate departments.
Zendesk's benchmark data points the same way: 70% of customers expect anyone they deal with to know the full context. Both companies sell support software, so read these as vendor data. Anyone who has explained a problem twice to the same company knows the feeling anyway.
How Deskwoot splits the chat from the work
Deskwoot now has tickets, and they keep 2 things apart. The chat belongs to the customer. The ticket belongs to your team.
The customer keeps writing in the chat they started. The ticket takes the messages they already wrote, so whoever does the work reads them there instead of asking again.
When a chat should become a ticket
Most chats should never become tickets. A question about opening hours, a tracking link, a password reset: answer, resolve, done.
A ticket earns its place when at least one of these is true:
- Someone outside the chat has to do the work: billing, the warehouse, a developer, a technician.
- The work takes longer than the conversation, because you wait on a supplier, a carrier or a code fix.
- You will need a record later, for a warranty claim, a complaint or a B2B client who asks next quarter what happened.
If none of these applies, a ticket is just paperwork. A team that opens a ticket for every chat ends up with a second inbox nobody reads.
From chat to ticket in 2 steps
In Deskwoot you create a ticket from inside the chat. Click Create ticket in the conversation header, or the ticket icon next to a single message. Then:
- Tick the messages the ticket is about. Private notes can go in too, and one ticket takes up to 500 messages. Nothing is sent to the customer.
- Give the ticket a title of up to 200 characters, a summary only your team sees, a category and a priority. Then choose the team, the teammate or both who work on it.
Pick Anyone in a team, and the ticket waits in that team's folder until someone takes it.
Let Copilot write the first draft
Draft with Copilot fills in the title and the summary from the messages you picked, and only from those. You can change both before you create the ticket.
Each chat counts once a month as one of your AI conversations, and Enterprise includes 300 a month.
One chat, several tickets
A chat can have several tickets, each with its own messages. A customer who reports a broken upload and a wrong invoice in the same chat can become 2 tickets for 2 teams.
What a good ticket summary says
The person who picks up the ticket was not in the chat. Give them 4 lines:
- The problem in one sentence, in the customer's words.
- What you already checked or tried.
- What you promised the customer, and by when.
- What is still open.
Line 3 is the one people forget. It is also the one that produces the angry message 3 days later, when nobody kept the promise because nobody knew about it.
The customer never sees the ticket
Creating a ticket sends nothing to the customer. There is no ticket number in their inbox and no new email thread. They keep writing in the chat they started.
What your team sees in the chat
Inside that chat, your team sees a private card with the ticket's number, title, status, team and assignee.
The card updates whenever the ticket changes. Whoever has the chat open can see where the work stands without asking around.
Replying from the ticket
On the ticket itself, the team works with internal comments and @mentions. When there is news for the customer, Reply to customer sends it through the chat the ticket came from, on that chat's channel.
An email reply lands in the same email thread, a WhatsApp reply arrives in WhatsApp, and the customer sees an ordinary reply. Replying from a ticket does not reassign the chat or reopen it.
Send and wait
Send and wait sets the ticket to Pending. When the customer answers in the chat, the ticket goes back to Open and becomes unread again for whoever holds it.
Only the person who holds a ticket replies. A colleague who wants to answer takes it over first, so the customer never gets 2 answers to the same question.
The WhatsApp 24 hour window
The channel's own rules still apply. On WhatsApp, a free text reply only goes out within 24 hours of the customer's last message (Meta calls this the customer service window).
After that you need an approved template (see sending WhatsApp templates after the 24 hour window).
Resolve now asks how the chat ends
With tickets switched on, the Resolve button offers 3 choices:
| Choice | What happens | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Without a ticket | The chat is resolved, nothing else. | The question is answered. |
| Keep as a resolved ticket | The chat is resolved and this round of it is filed as a resolved ticket for your records and Reports. | You want a record, but nobody has to act. |
| Create an open ticket for a team | The chat is resolved for the customer, and an open ticket goes to a team in the same step. | The customer has their answer, but a team still has work to do. |
Reply and file at once
Next to Send there is also Send and keep as a resolved ticket. Your reply goes out, then the chat is resolved and filed.
A record of every conversation
Some teams need a record of every conversation: B2B service, logistics, anything that gets audited. For them, the inbox setting File every resolved interaction as a ticket files each resolve on its own, whether a person, a rule or inactivity resolved the chat.
Nothing is filed when the customer wrote nothing new since the last resolve, so resolving a quiet chat again does not create an empty record.
The CSAT survey waits for the last open ticket
One detail matters for your satisfaction scores. When a chat is resolved while a ticket from it is still open, the CSAT survey waits.
The customer gets one survey when the last open ticket is resolved, which is when their problem is solved. Tickets never send a survey of their own.
Statuses that say who acts next
Open, Pending and Resolved are too coarse for real work. Open can mean a developer is fixing the bug right now, or that you are waiting two weeks for a spare part.
Deskwoot lets you add up to 50 ticket statuses of your own, with names of up to 40 characters. Each one sits under Open, Pending or Resolved, so filters, SLA clocks and Reports still know what it means.
The tickets page uses examples like Waiting on supplier and Ready to ship.
The On hold status
When tickets are switched on, Deskwoot creates one status for you: On hold, under Open, with the SLA clock paused. Rename or change it like any other.
You can set a status by hand, in bulk from the list, with automation rules or with macros.
Keep the list short
A status earns its place when it tells a teammate who has to act next. If 2 statuses lead to the same next step, merge them.
The History tab: who held it, and for how long
A customer says they were promised a callback on Tuesday. You want to know who held the conversation on Tuesday.
The new History tab in the right panel shows exactly that, in 2 lists:
- Activity lists every event of the conversation or ticket: assignments, transfers, takeovers, and changes of status, priority, category and team.
- Assignments has one entry for every stretch a teammate held it, with how long it lasted and how it began and ended (taken, transferred, assigned automatically, handed over by the bot and so on).
The customer never sees it. Every conversation has the tab, tickets included, and it lives in the web dashboard.
A Copilot summary on every resolve
Under Settings > Conversation Workflows there is a switch called Summarize resolved conversations. With it on, Copilot writes down what the customer needed and what was done each time a conversation is resolved.
The summary goes into the ticket filed for that round, or into a private note in the chat when no ticket was filed. It works with or without tickets.
For a long WhatsApp or Telegram group with a B2B client, that gives you a short note for each round instead of a scroll through the whole group.
When it counts and when it skips
The switch is off until you turn it on. Each conversation counts once a month toward your AI conversations.
Deskwoot skips the summary when the customer wrote nothing new, and when you resolve many chats at once from the list.
Tickets in the iPhone and Android app
The Deskwoot app for iPhone and Android has the ticket folders too: Tickets, Created by me and Trackers. In the app you can:
- create a ticket from a chat, with the same 500 message limit
- write internal comments with @mentions and photos
- use Reply to customer and Send and wait
- change a ticket's status and category
Trackers are read only in the app. You create them and send their updates on the web. The full list is in the help article on tickets in the app.
One problem, many customers: trackers
A ticket handles one customer's problem. When an outage brings 40 customers to you within an hour, a tracker is the better tool.
You link the affected chats and tickets to it and write the update once. Each customer gets it in their own chat, on their own channel.
One update reaches up to 500 customers, and the table of affected customers shows who got it. The trackers page and the trackers help article cover the details.
Who gets tickets
Tickets, trackers, ticket statuses, SLA policies for tickets and the Jira Cloud integration come with the Enterprise plan (see pricing):
- $12 per agent a month when you pay monthly
- $9.60 per agent a month when you pay yearly
Your chats stay chats
A chat only becomes a ticket in these cases:
- when your team makes one
- in an inbox set to file every resolve
- in an email inbox where you switch on Open new emails as tickets, which is off until you turn it on
An admin can switch tickets off under Settings > Tickets at any time. Round robin never assigns tickets. An automation rule can, if you want that.
If you leave Enterprise
The tickets you have stay. Your team can still read them, comment, reply to the customer and resolve them. Only new tickets stop.
Where to start
Pick one kind of chat that today ends up in a Slack thread or a forwarded email, such as billing corrections or bug reports. Create a category and a team for it.
Use tickets only for that kind of chat for a week. By then you will know whether the summaries are good enough for the people who pick them up, and which status you are missing.
The setup steps are in the help center:
- Switch on tickets and set up categories
- Create a ticket from a chat
- Resolve with or without a ticket
- Reply to the customer from a ticket
- Ticket statuses
- The History tab
The tickets page shows the whole flow with animated examples.
Run that week on the trial
A week fits inside the 7 day trial. Every new Deskwoot workspace starts with 7 days of Enterprise without a credit card, for up to 30 seats including yours, and tickets are switched on there by default.
Sign up at deskwoot.com/signup and turn one real chat into a ticket. It takes 2 steps, and Copilot can draft the summary. When the 7 days end, you pick a plan or keep working on the free Hacker plan.
