When your front-office team needs to work with back-office teams to resolve an issue, create a linked Back-office ticket from a conversation for seamless collaboration.
We make this easy with:
Clear ownership - Clearly define responsibilities between front and back-office teams with a ticket that can be managed separately from the customer conversation.
Context for back-office team - All back-office tickets are linked to conversations so back-office teams never lose customer context.
Front-office teams kept in the loop - Internal notes and status changes in the back-office ticket are cross-posted to the customer conversation.
What are the main characteristics of Back-office tickets?
For Intercom customers who have been using tickets prior to May 2023, Back-office tickets are an improved version of Linked tickets.
Visibility to customer
You can optionally choose whether or not to share Back-office tickets with customers when setting up your Back-office ticket types.
This depends on the nature of the ticket type (e.g. you may decide never to allow sharing of a fraud investigation ticket type with a customer due to the sensitive nature of the issue).
When optional sharing is enabled for a Back-office ticket type
Teammates in the Inbox can choose whether it should be shared with the customer when the ticket is created and it has been linked to a customer conversation.
The ticket type will appear in the list of ticket types of the Send ticket form action in Workflows. This allows you to automatically send the Back-office ticket form to customers in a Workflow.
Additionally, teammates in the Inbox will see this ticket type when sending a ticket form to the customer.
Note:
You can only share one Back-office ticket with the customer per conversation.
You can’t share Back-office tickets that are linked to a Customer ticket.
Only "Shared with customer" tickets can be tagged.
When a Back-office ticket is shared with the customer, their experience is exactly the same as Customer tickets. The primary difference is the teammate experience in the Inbox where they see 2 linked objects:
Customer ticket/conversation - owned by the front-line teammate who handles the customer conversations
Back-office ticket - assigned to a separate team responsible for resolving the task
Communication
Back-office tickets only allow internal notes
Notes posted on a Back-office ticket are internal only and not shared with customers. Any customer facing replies happen in the linked Customer ticket or conversation.
Updates are cross-posted from the Back-office ticket to the linked Customer Ticket or conversation
When posting a note in the Back-office ticket, you can also choose to cross-post the note to the conversation or Customer Ticket that is linked to your Ticket. This allows you to update the teammate working on the linked ticket/conversation in real time.
Use the keyboard shortcut ⌘ / Ctrl Shift Enter to cross-post a note.
This guarantees the teammate assigned to the conversation is kept in the loop and has the full context they need.
Similarly, changing the Back-office ticket state cross-posts an event in the linked Customer ticket or conversation.
Note: When you cross-post a note and the ticket and conversation are assigned to the same teammate, conversation will not be un-snoozed. The conversation un-snoozes if the teammates assigned to the ticket and conversation are different.