Hi everyone!
This got a bit long, but I am trying to explain all of our issues and how they are connected and hopefully can be solved all together.
We just implemented Freshservice to handle our internal IT operations; however, as we are a small department, we have a lot of vendors and outsourcing partners working with us. We are still the first line of support to our customers though. Usually what we do is receive a ticket from a customer by e-mail or portal, then we have communication with our customer, and if needed, we would forward the e-mail chain to our third-party vendor. They would normally create a ticket on their own systems that we would log into the same ticket and continue the communication with us by e-mail within the ticket.
Customer ↔ Us ↔ Vendor
With our previous system it was basically a chain of emails being handled in a “ticket” back and forth between the vendor, us and the customer. The vendor would reply to our initial request with their ticket number and then ours attached. Then all mails would be threaded both for them and us on our respective systems. Quite simple.
Now with Freshservice we are having an issue which has basically disrupted all communication with our third party vendors. We receive an incident from our customer (requester) then we forward it to our vendor (Subject being: [#INC-XXX] - Ticket Title) then the vendor would reply back with their automatic ticket (Subject being: [Vendor ticket ID] - FW: [#INC-XXX] - Ticket Title). The problem is that their reply gets added as a private note to the tickets and then we can’t see their subject, and when we reply 2 things happen: first, it replies to the requester and not the vendor (as it was a note), and second, the subject goes back to the original that we set. So even if we forward and change the address from requester to vendor, they get it as a new ticket as we don’t have their ID in our subject anymore, and so on.
Our second issue is with vendors that send the “we received your request and this is your ticket ID with us” email notification. This is created as a new email and our subject is removed and put into the body of the notification. So the mail is not threaded into our ticket. So every time we forward a ticket to them, when they reply automatically, a new ticket gets created by us which sends a notification to them that a ticket was created which then creates another automatic ticket by them and so on. Not only that, when we close the second ticket they think the problem was solved so they close theirs and it is all just a disaster as you can see.
Finally, when we forward emails to the vendors, the whole chain of communication is not sent on the email, so whatever the customer had said or we had worked with before escalating to the vendors is not shown.
To conclude, is there any way to just be able to send emails back and forth within a ticket to third parties? It can be done with requesters, why not with a third party? How are you guys solving this? We can’t possibly be the only ones having back and forth e-mail communication with third parties that have their own ITSM tools. Seems like a pretty basic functionality to have, we could do it with our previous system without problems and it was the worst system I had ever seen, so can’t imagine Freshservice not having something.
Thanks for your time and feedback!