When it comes to customer questions, some are straightforward to answer and best resolved over chat. But others can be more complex, requiring more time to resolve, or input from other teams. That’s where tickets comes in.

Intercom’s tickets are optimized for team collaboration and real-time customer updates, so your team can resolve any type of complex query more efficiently.

How it works

Intercom Help Desk contains two types of objects:

Conversations	For simple queries that can be handled quickly and involve minimal collaboration e.g. “How do I delete tags?”
Tickets	For complex async queries that take time to resolve, requiring investigation, multiple steps, or collaboration e.g. “My bill is incorrect, please issue a refund.”

Complex queries are not all the same. They can come in different shapes and size, and require a different process and toolkit. That’s why we offer three distinct ticket categories, each uniquely optimized for the top use cases for complex queries:

	Customer tickets	Back-office tickets	Tracker tickets
When to use it?	To capture and track long-running queries while keeping your customer up to date.	Create a linked ticket from a conversation to collaborate with back-office teams.	Streamline problems impacting many customers with a single ticket.
Example	Change my address Modify payment schedule Sign up for beta Insurance claim	Refund task for finance team Question for tech support team Escalation to R&D team Fraudulent transaction to trust team	Bug Feature request Outage Faulty delivery batch
How to create it	Customers submit a ticket in a bot flow or your product. Convert a conversation to ticket via the Help Desk. Create tickets on behalf of customers via the Help Desk.	Create a Back-office ticket from within a conversation. Create standalone tickets to get help that is not related to a conversation.	Create a Tracker ticket for a new issue. Link to existing Tracker ticket from within a conversation.
Benefits	Collect customer info upfront to reduce back and forth. Allow customers to track progress with real-time customer updates. Customers can create tickets without starting a conversation. Accurately report on long-running queries using more expressive states.	Assign a separate ticket to back-office teams and eliminate tool switching. Conversations, notes, and customer data are always accessible from the ticket so front- and back-office teams never lose context.	Manage all conversations related to an issue from a single source of truth. Save time and keep customers up to date by broadcasting updates to all impacted customers.
Useful help articles	When to use Customer tickets How to create a Customer ticket How to view and manage Customer tickets from the Help Desk	When to use Back-office tickets How to create a Back-office ticket How to view and manage Back-office tickets from the Help Desk	When to use Tracker tickets How to create a Tracker ticket How to view and manage Tracker tickets from the Help Desk

Customer tickets

When your team needs more time to work on issues, use Customer tickets to capture, track and automatically share progress with the customer.

We make this easy with:

Convert conversations to tickets - Convert a conversation to a ticket with just one click.

Ticket forms - Collect comprehensive information upfront by automatically sending ticket forms to customers through a conversation, Workflow, or directly in your product.
Customer status updates - Keep customers up to date with automated status updates through the Messenger and via email.

📖 Learn more about Customer tickets.

Back-office tickets

When a Support rep 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.

📖 Learn more about Back-office tickets.

Tracker tickets

Streamline problems impacting many customers, such as bugs, service interruptions, and feature requests.

We make this easy with:

Single source-of-truth - Link all related conversations or Customer tickets to a Tracker ticket to create one single source-of-truth for your team to manage.

Collaboration - Easily work with other internal teams to ensure that updates are shared in one place.

Broadcast customer updates - Send mass updates to all impacted customers to save time and keep customers up to date in the Messenger and via email.

📖 Learn more about Tracker tickets.

Get started

Before you can create tickets via the Help Desk, you first need to create the ticket types you want to use. A ticket type defines the data fields to be captured in the ticket and its category.

Ticket types can be set up from Settings > Workspace data > Ticket types.