How to prevent tickets from getting split into a new thread?

  • 26 July 2016
  • 5 replies
  • 104 views

This is a big problem for us.  A customer's reply to an ongoing support thread will create a new ticket, instead of being added to the original thread.  It seems to happen in about 1 out of every 10 tickets.  We've been searching all these orphaned responses for some kind of pattern.  At first we thought maybe it was happening because the customers were responding from a different email address.  But no -- we verified that at least some of these orphaned responses definitely came from the same email address that was used to create the original ticket.  And the original threads were definitely "Open" or "Waiting for reply" when the response came in.


So at this point, we're kind of at a dead end.  How can we stop this from happening?  It's becoming a bigger problem as our company grows and we have to train new support people.


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5 replies

Make sure that, under Admin > Email Notifications, the subjects the notifications for Requester Notifications, CC Notifications, and Reply Templates include the string [#{{ticket.id}}]
in the subject line ( only a couple of administrative notifications
like 'User Activation Email' and 'Password Reset Email' should not
contain that string in their subject ). Doing that enables Freshdesk to
use subject based threading to match incoming emails to existing tickets
if the other methods of threading fail.

 



Thanks for your reply.  Do I need to include the brackets in the text?  In other words, should I include this


[#{{ticket.id}}]




or this


#{{ticket.id}}


You need to include the brackets.

Example subject for Requester Notification / New Ticket Created:
New ticket created - {{ticket.subject}} -  [#{{ticket.id}}]

 



Thank you for your help.  This seems to have helped, but I think it also caused a new problem.  We have noticed several long-running threads that now have messages that are missing from the threads.  For example, I just noticed a thread that has two messages: The first message is the customer describing the problem, and the second message is me saying, "Great, I'm happy to help!  Bye!"  There were 5 or 6 other messages between those two, and now they are gone.  They didn't get split into a separate thread -- they are just gone.  




It's also possible that this could be related to the recent changes to FD.  Either way, it's very troubling!


Dear Jeremy, to the best of my knowledge when an email is added to a ticket thread it becomes a permanent part of the thread.

Please click on [Show Activities] while in that ticket and look for replies/notes with the indication [Deleted] in the upper-right corner of the reply/note window. Clicking on such a reply/note will show you its contents ( deleted replies/notes are not deleted - the are just hidden ). This should rule out that someone deleted the missing replies/notes.

If this is not the case and you are absolutely sure that you are looking at the right ticket, start by using the Freshdesk Search tool to hunt for the missing replies/notes. If you locate them and they are threaded to an entirely irrelevant ticket or if you are positive they are nowhere to be found you should raise a ticket with Freshdesk.

BTW, you can see all the data for a ticket by adding the '.json' extension to the end of a ticket URL to view its data in JSON format. Example: https://myaccount.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/5343883.json If you are using Firefox you can install the JSONView Add-on ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jsonview/ ) to be able to see JSON data in a human-friendly way. There are other similar Add-ons for that and other browsers.