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
Back-office tickets are internal only by default. Customer sharing works on two levels: 1. Ticket type level — when setting up a Back-office ticket type, you decide whether customer sharing is allowed at all for that type. Some ticket types (such as fraud investigations) should never be shared with customers, so you can leave sharing disabled entirely. 2. Per-ticket level — when sharing is enabled for a ticket type, teammates in the Inbox then choose on a case-by-case basis whether to share each individual ticket with the customer. Enabling sharing for a ticket type does not automatically share every ticket of that type — it simply gives teammates the option to share when they create the ticket.
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).
Per-ticket sharing: how teammates choose case-by-case
When optional sharing is enabled for a Back-office ticket type, teammates in the Inbox independently decide whether to share that specific ticket with the customer at the time of creation — as long as the ticket has been linked to a customer conversation. Sharing one ticket of a given type has no effect on other tickets of the same type.
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.
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