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 Agent tools > Side conversations.
2. Tick Turn on child tickets.
3. Set Comment type. It offers Public, Internal and Match ticket privacy, and it arrives on Public. Decide this deliberately rather than inheriting it.
4. Under Ticket fields, choose per field whether it is copied to the child. Each one can be Include by default, Show selector so the agent decides, or neither. Nothing else carries over: a child ticket inherits the side conversation replies and the fields you name here, not the parent's status, tags or CCs.
5. Leave Status updates on unless you have a reason not to. It closes and reopens the side conversation as the child ticket's status moves, which is what makes the parent readable.
6. Save.

Two smaller settings sit alongside: Private notes, to carry internal notes into the child conversation, and Include recipient address, which adds the original ticket's recipient address to the child.

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.

One group cannot use them at all: a light agent can neither create nor send a child ticket, and cannot be assigned one.

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. Nothing flows the other way either: changing the parent's status, tags or CCs leaves the child untouched.

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