Tickets, statuses, and SLAs
Every conversation is a ticket
By default, every customer conversation opens a ticket the moment it starts: chat widget, Help Center request, email, or API, plus any ticket you create by hand with New ticket. The ticket carries the subject, the conversation, the status, priority, assignee, team, tags, and the service-level clocks.
If you prefer tickets only when a conversation is handed to a person, open the ticket settings gear in the inbox, go to General, and under Ticket Creation choose Only handoffs open tickets.
Chats your own team has in the app never create tickets.
Statuses
Statuses sit on six fixed categories. The defaults are:
Status | Category | What the customer sees |
|---|---|---|
New | New | In progress |
Open | Open | In progress |
Waiting on customer | Pending | Awaiting your reply |
On hold | On Hold | In progress |
Solved | Solved | Resolved |
Closed | Closed | Resolved |
Customers never see your internal status names. They see the calm label on the right, in the Help Center portal and in status emails. To add a status or change what customers see for one, open ticket settings → Statuses. A new status needs a label and a category. Each status has an editable customer-facing label ("What customers see for this status"); leave it empty to use the category default. You can deactivate a status you added and no longer use; the six defaults stay. An organization can have up to 25 active statuses.
How statuses move
A public reply from your team on a new or open ticket hands the turn to the customer: the ticket moves to your pending status. You can turn this off under General → Turn Handling.
A customer reply on a pending, on-hold, or solved ticket reopens it. A bare "thanks" on a solved ticket does not.
A reply on a closed ticket opens a follow-up ticket linked to the original. The follow-up is filed under the same companies as the original.
Automations (ticket settings → Automations) send pending reminders (after 3 days, up to 2 reminders), auto-solve pending tickets after 7 days, and close solved tickets after 14 days. You can change the days or turn each rule off.
A conversation the AI answered, that nobody touched, quietly solves after 24 hours of silence. Before that, a check confirms the AI actually answered rather than asked a question; an unanswered question closes as abandoned, not resolved.
Status emails
Customers on chat widget and Help Center tickets get an email (when we have their address) when their ticket is waiting on them, is solved, or a follow-up opens. No email goes out while they are active in the conversation. Edit the wording under ticket settings → Notifications.
Customers can answer these emails by replying, once an admin turns it on. Open ticket settings → Notifications and, under Reply Inbox, pick one of your verified forwarding inboxes, then save. It is Off by default. Help Center tickets need nothing else. Chat widget tickets also need Email replies to offline visitors on (Settings → Help Desk → Channels). When it applies, the email uses that inbox as the reply address, the waiting and follow-up emails say "Reply to this email", and the customer's emailed reply lands on the same ticket. Otherwise those emails ask them to reply from the Help Center portal or in the conversation.
If the inbox you picked stops being verified or active, or is deleted, replying by email turns off. Reply Inbox marks it as unavailable until you pick another inbox or choose Off. Nothing switches to another inbox on its own.
If you write your own wording, use {{reply_hint}} where the "how to reply" sentence belongs. It becomes the line that matches the ticket.
Priorities
Low, Normal, High, Urgent. A person can change priority at any time. Changing it before the first response re-targets the first-response clock from when the ticket was created.
With AI triage on new tickets on (ticket settings → Automations → AI Triage), new tickets get a suggested priority and team, a clearer title when the subject was machine-made, and a flag when they look like a duplicate. Suggestions wait for you to Accept or Dismiss them.
A request sent from the Help Center Submit a request form can carry a Category. On a Help Center with the Severity field turned on, it can also carry a Severity. Both appear at the top of the ticket's opening note. Severity sets the ticket's priority to match: Normal, High, or Urgent. Without the Severity field, requests start at Normal priority. See Gated access and the customer portal.
Service levels
Go to Settings → Help Desk → Service Levels.
Under Default policy, set the First-response target (time to a person's first reply) and the Resolution target, in minutes.
Leave Count only during business hours on (the default) if due dates should skip closed hours. The calendar is your organization's business hours and time zone under Knowledge › Business (Company details).
Under Targets by priority & channel, click Add override to set a different first-response target for new tickets of a priority (Urgent, High, Normal, Low) or a channel (Email, Chat widget). When both match, the priority override wins.
Click Save. Existing tickets keep the due dates they were created with.
Each ticket shows an SLA light that counts down to the first-response or resolution due time and turns to SLA Breached when it passes. The Breaching view lists every breached ticket. SLA breach alerts can be turned off under Automations.
Snooze
Press z or use the snooze control to hide a ticket until later: Later today, Tomorrow 9am, Next week Mon 9am, or a date and time you pick. Snoozes are capped at 30 days. Snoozed tickets stay out of the list until the time passes or the customer replies; use the Snoozed filter to see them.
Merge and split
Merge into another ticket… folds a duplicate into another open ticket from the same requester. Search the requester's open tickets, pick the surviving ticket, and confirm. The duplicate closes and its conversation moves to the surviving ticket. Possible duplicates are flagged by AI on the ticket.
Split into new ticket… turns part of a conversation into a separate ticket. Describe the separate request, and a new ticket is created and linked back. The original keeps its full conversation.
You can also Forward thread… to an outside email address. See Saved replies and macros.
Tags and custom fields
Tags are free labels you add from the ticket or in bulk (Add tags) after selecting several tickets. Filter any view by tag.
Custom fields appear on the ticket under Additional information. To define them, open ticket settings → Fields, enter a label, pick a type (Text, Number, Select, Date, Yes / no), and for Select list the options separated by commas.