#1105: Outgoing Tickets

In some support services, there are scenarios that require interaction with related departments. In this case, related departments may work both in Swarmica and be some external contractor.

In general, the process looks like this:

1. The support service in Swarmica receives the original ticket from the client.
2. The support agent contacts an external contractor or related department to formulate a response to the client.
3. After receiving a response from them, they respond to the client in the original ticket.

Creating an outgoing request

To create an outgoing request, you need to click on the icon

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

Next, you need to select the Recipient in the right-top column:

For an internal employee of a related department

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

For an external contractor

Enter the email of the external recipient and click Invite User. In the expanded window, you can additionally enable the Robot checkbox if you are sure that the receiving side has an automatic system with autoresponses. The Robot flag in this case will disable служебной notifications to avoid a 'robot battle.' If the email of the external contractor 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 contractor will be added to Swarmica. At the same time, they will also receive an invitation to register and change the password, and they will be able to log in to Swarmica with client rights and respond to their tickets in addition to email.

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

Tracking and Interaction

After creating an outgoing 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 outgoing tickets:

At the same time, the behavior will be similar to the behavior of related tasks of the task tracker. Namely:

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

In the feed of the original ticket, you can see all comments from related outgoing tickets in chronological order for correct perception of the correspondence.

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

The Outgoing Requests flag above the comments allows you to enable/disable the visibility of comments from outgoing tickets.