#1105: External Tickets

In some support services, there are scenarios that require interaction with adjacent departments. At the same time, adjacent departments can work both in Swarmica and be some kind of external counterparty.

In general, the process looks like this:

1. The original ticket from the client comes to the support service in Swarmica.
2. The support agent contacts an external counterparty or an adjacent department to form a response to the client.
3. After receiving a response from them, he responds to the client in the original ticket.

Creating an external ticket

In order to create an external ticket, you need to click on the mail icon.

After that, a window for creating an external ticket will open, in which all fields from the original ticket will be automatically prefilled, which you can change if you wish.

Next, you need to select the recipient in the column on the top right:

For an internal employee of an adjacent unit

Just start typing their name or email and select from the menu.

For an external counterparty

Enter the email of the external recipient and click Invite user. In the window that opens, you can additionally enable the checkbox Robot if you are sure that the receiving side has an automatic system with auto-responses. The Robot flag in this case will disable service alerts to avoid a "robot battle".

If the email of an external counterparty belongs to a person or group of people, then there is no need to enable the Robot flag.

Next, click Send invitation and the external counterparty will be added to Swarmica. At the same time, they will also receive an invitation to register and reset the password, and they will be able to log into Swarmica with client rights in addition to email and respond to their tickets.

After that, edit the text that you want to write to the adjacent party/counterparty and click Create.

Tracking and interaction

After creating an external ticket, a link to the parent original ticket appears next to its subject.

In the original parent ticket, a widget will appear in the right column, which will list all related external tickets.

The behavior will be similar to the behavior of related tasks of the task tracker. Namely:

1. An external ticket is written to the counterparty and set to the status «Awaiting response».
2. The parent ticket can be set to the status «Pending» for some expected response time in the external ticket.
3. Then, the parent ticket will go to the status «Open» either when this time expires, or when the counterparty responds to the external ticket and it also changes its status.

At the same time, in the feed of the original ticket, you can see all comments from related external tickets in chronological order for correct perception of correspondence.

Comments from external tickets have a different framing, a link to the external ticket, and the absence of controls for standard comments to minimize the likelihood of an agent error when working with them.

The External tickets flag above the comments allows you to turn on/off the visibility of comments from external tickets.