Child tickets from a side conversation

A side conversation can create a real ticket for another team, so their work has its own owner, status and SLA.

A side conversation can create a real ticket for another team, so their work has its own owner, status and SLA.

Turn on child tickets

1. Open Admin Center, then Workspaces, then Side conversations.
2. Enable child tickets.
3. Set the defaults: which form, group and brand a child ticket gets.
4. Save.

What a child ticket is

An ordinary ticket, created from the parent, and linked back to it. It appears in views, is assigned to a group, counts in reporting, and can carry its own SLA.

That last point is the reason to use it. An email side conversation to another team is invisible to your reporting: you cannot see how long they took or how often it happens. A child ticket makes internal work measurable.

Child ticket or email side conversation

• Child ticket when the other party works in your Zendesk and their part is real work that deserves tracking.
• Email when they are outside, or when it is a quick question rather than a piece of work.

The parent does not wait automatically

Creating a child ticket does not change the parent's status. Set the parent to on-hold yourself, or build a trigger to do it. Otherwise the parent sits on Open looking like nobody has touched it.

Internal SLAs

Child tickets are how teams put an SLA on internal handovers. The customer-facing promise sits on the parent; the internal promise sits on the child. Where handovers are the slow part of your process, that is the way to see it.

See also

• Triggers for side conversations
• OLAs with internal SLAs and child tickets
• Can I report on tickets with side conversations