Merge ticket as side conversation

 Hi Morten, we don't have immediate plans for this, but it's definitely something we've thought about for a future update. So, to make sure I'm understanding correctly, you'd want to have some sort of option in the merge ticket dialog that lets you add it as a child ticket side conversation under the other ticket rather than a full merge? Or are you thinking of a different approach?

I´m not exactly sure what a child ticket is, but probably yes. 

It´s not merged into the exiting communication in the ticket, but separated as a side conversations of some sort. 

HI Toby,

Yes, something like that. I´ve only breifly looked into child tickets, but it sounds like it.

This would be such a major improvement, being able to merge a ticket as a side conversation to a ticket.

We see multiple Zendesk instances where there is need for this, in mostly two situations:

• The vendor emails customer support, where customer support needs to start up a ticket with the customer as requester. You would like to add the initial vendor email as a side conversation to that ticket.
• Where vendors email customer support which was started as a side conversation (and the vendor changes subject or other improper email handling, I do understand the cause partial lays outside Zendesk, but would be awesome if it can be solved this way)

@lucas11 so i understand, are you referring to taking an existing vendor email e.g. in your Outlook, and then turning that email into a side conversation? Or is it an existing ticket that would then be added as a child ticket side conversation to the ticket that you'd create for the customer?

As for the second point, do you mean when they email improperly and a new ticket is created, merging that into an existing ticket as a child ticket side conversation?

@toby12 I mean a vendor that created a normal ticket via channel that could be email, but also ticket form, chat (doesn't matter, the case is the same) and add that ticket as an email side conversation to another ticket. The reason why this should be an email side conversation is that the vendor is not part of your Zendesk agents (so creating a child ticket has no function, as this is normally being used for a partial responsibility or task fulfillment for another ZD department/agent not an external party).

Not every ticket is being grouped properly into the same conversation, so mostly due to improper handling of email outside Zendesk by customers/vendors. But the main reason is the first one.

Ok, thanks for the added detail, @lucas11! That's an interesting scenario, as it means we'd essentially have to:

1. Provide a way to initiate converting a ticket into a side conversation
2. Let agent choose which type of side conversation if more than one channel is active
3. Take the ticket's original info and process it into a new email side conversation
4. Solve the original ticket out (I assume this is preferable to deletion in case something doesn't work right)

That seems doable, but kinda tricky to get right.

One other interesting aspect is since side conversations are usually initiated by an agent or the system, we'd use the person who initiates this conversion as the creator and participant of the side conversation?

Thanks again for the thoughts, curious to hear your thoughts on the above.

Hi Toby,

We have a customer that would be extremely interested in this functionality, exactly as you have detailed it in your response above. Do you think it likely and if so, what would be the possible time frame?

Regards

Jean Arnall

Illation

Our company are extremely intrested in this functionality as well.
 

The customer service team and our Purchasing team are going to be in the one instance.
The customer service team will put in requests to purchase stock to our purchasing team where they will need to send a new ticket off to the supplier. 
Idealy in this situation we would like to be able to merge the Customer Service ticket into the side conversation (child ticket) of the supplier comms ticket.

Like the original poster we tend to try and keep internal comms as side convos and external comms on main tickets. 

We are also highly interested in this functionality.

Similar to the above, our service team works with third party vendors to order products and like to keep conversations with these third parties as side conversations in the ticket. Updates to these conversations do not always get replied to in a ‘proper’ way such that zendesk can automatically know it's related to the side conversation.

It would be good to be able to merge into a side converstation, potentially first selecting the main ticket that you want to merge into, and then selecting whether you want to merge as a side converstation, and if yes, provide a choice of merging into existing side conversations on the ticket, or creating a new side conversation for it.

This would help massively in managing conversations on tickets that require collaboration with multiple parties - especially when those parties have their own ticketing systems that tend to create new tickets rather than automatically get added as a conversation.

Hello,

We also have a need for this functionality.
An example use-case:

- Customer sends an email, ticket automatically is created.
- We have to issue a request in the system of our vendor.
- Vender mails us with status updates regarding delivery, of which new tickets are automatically created.
- We mail updates to our customer, but we'd not like to include all of the info from our vendor.

So we'd like to relate the vendor mails to the main ticket, but not merge them as then they'd become part of the main thread and would also be included when mailing from the main ticket to the customer.

What we do now is close the vendor tickets and type an internal comment with the main ticket number as a cross reference.
But being able to merge them with the main ticket would be a cleaner solution as everything will become one “file”.

Kind regards,
Ron