Sharing tickets with multiple agents

Hi Brent,

We actually have a different reason for having stayed away from this: we've figured that a customer receiving replies from different people would be confusing, and would give them a sense that the individual writing the reply at that very moment might not fully grasp the back-story of the issue. Even if the individual does in fact completely understand everything, it could engender in the customer the fear/uncertainty of it, which is nearly as bad, in my mind.

By the same token, the Agent picking up the conversation where another Agent left off would have to spend time riddling out exactly what's happened so far, and not only what the previous Agents have said, but what the previous Agents have investigated or done behind the scenes without describing explicitly to the customer or in an Internal Note.

Anyways, throwin' all these words not to slice you into a bazillion pieces ;-) Just proposing that perspective, since you may have a business model where none of that would be any problem at all, or where lickety-split response time is vastly more important than it is for us.

Thanks for chiming in!

Yeah I agree. Actually I left that part out that you wrote about the uncertainty part. I had the same mentality though. It's too is a major reason we don't do it right now.

I didn't consider the fact about research time involved on picking up the ticket mid-conversation. It certainly is a factor, but probably none more than getting involved with a new ticket from a customer with a history. Either way, in aggregate it could considerably slow things down when doing it on nearly EVERY ticket touch.

There is the benefit though of everyone being in-the-know though. Which should help bubble up reporting on trends which might not have happened if the agents are tunnel-visioned into their own tickets. Although, perhaps this  benefit is minor since ticket categorization should probably be the main way of seeing trends.

Brent, I would consider the fact that when an agent is assigned to a ticket after they have made a first reply on a new ticket, the agent will have to take responsibility, as incomplete answers will reopen the ticket towards himself; in a shared environment I'd say the opposite is more likely, thats my experience.

Also fair agent performance reporting will likely be an issue. 

I have experience of teams running both setups , and I would never choose a shared team setup where tickets are not kept assigned to agents; but of course your setup may warrant that, only you know your operation. 

We had this same wish, to be able to assign multiple agents to a ticket, but we solved it by adding another agent's initials as a tag, and creating custom private views that showed any ticket assigned to you or tagged to you, so you can see them all at a glance. Almost as good as multiple-agent assignment, and lives within ZD's philosophy.

Thanks for sharing your solution on this, Chris!

Hi All,

Within our workflow there is one "ticket-owner" and there are multiple other "ticket-helpers" to be assigned to the ticket to. As I read above, this is not possible in the Zendesk functionality. 

Am i correct that there aren't any possibilities to do so? If not, can someone explain the approach Chris Ryland is mentioning?

Thanks in advance!

Hi Niek! Welcome to the Community!

In Chris's comment, he talks about using ticket tags to add the "ticket-helpers". So, let's say that Joe is a helper on your ticket. You would add a tag to the ticket that says "Joe" or "J".

Then your agents can create a custom view that shows tickets they're assigned to in the usual fashion, as well as tickets that have their "helper" tag applied to it.

Does that make more sense?

Hello everyone!

We also have in our support teams the need for multiple agents to act on a single ticket.

Thinking of a complex scenario where I have a service team that has ownership over the business rule but needs support from other teams for timely technical actions, it would be imperative that all agents involved, both in the support team and in-house staff, could track customer contacts, respond to a customer with a query or placement request, and above all share the same SLA deadline for service.

In the solution reported by Chris Ryland we don't think it's the best way, because although agents have shared views and can keep up with those demands, it doesn't mean they're acting and tracking those views directly. Considering the fact that the ticket would be assigned to both groups and agents, the SLA would be shared between the two areas resulting in a greater commitment.

Is there a possibility to implement such a solution on Zendesk?

Hi Ivo, 

There is another community thread (SLA for a multi-step process) that is starting up that has started discussing similar workflows around this.  It doesn't so much as dive into a Zendesk solution, but you might get some ideas hearing from others there. 

Aside from figuring out what works today - I'd recommend putting some feedback into the Product Feedback topic on what you would like to see and what your use cases are.  Zendesk product managers watch those topics to understand our challenges to help shape the future roadmap of the product. You may also find similar posts already there that you can add to (posts with more votes/comments generate more attention - so add to something if it's there before posting something new). 

Thanks Dan;

I will follow this thread (SLA for a multi-step process) and put some feedback with our uses cases.