Raising a ticket from a chat
Raising it
Open the conversation in Chat, then the ⋮ menu at the top right of the thread, beside Ignore and the customer button. Choose Create Ticket.
The chat belongs to whoever is holding it, and so does this. If the conversation is assigned to a colleague the option is greyed out and tells you who is handling it: take the chat over first, or ask a supervisor. Supervisors and organisation admins keep the option on any conversation, so a chat left behind by somebody who has gone home can still be dealt with.
Filling it in
Subject is one line saying what is wrong. It is what everybody sees in the ticket lists, so write the problem rather than the greeting: "Tracking missing on order 57316", not "Customer question".
Details is what the customer reported, in their words. Markdown works, so bold, lists and links all come out as you would expect. Paste a screenshot straight into the box or drop files on it - up to five images or documents.
Priority stays Normal unless the customer is blocked or money is at stake. Kind is Bug, Documentation or Data integrity; leave it unset if you are not sure, an engineer can set it later. Nothing on this form is final - it can all be changed on the ticket afterwards.
The line at the bottom tells you the ticket will be raised as a Customer support ticket, which means it carries a CUS reference and stays with customer service.
Mark as blocked
Ticked, this conversation cannot be closed until the ticket is resolved or cancelled. Ending the chat is refused, and the refusal names the ticket that is holding it.
It holds only us. The customer can still close the conversation from their side, and a chat that goes quiet is still closed automatically - the point is to stop us filing away a conversation whose work is still outstanding.
Choosing the Bug kind ticks the box for you, because a bug is usually the case where the customer is left waiting on us. It is a suggestion, not a rule: untick it if this bug report is a note for later rather than something that customer is waiting on.
When to tick it. Tick it when the customer is owed an answer that depends on the ticket. Leave it unticked when the ticket is our own housekeeping - a documentation note, a tidy-up - and the customer has already been served. A chat held open for housekeeping is a chat nobody ever closes.
Letting the developer close it
Ticking Mark as blocked offers a second choice: Let the developer close this chat when the ticket is settled.
Left unticked, the chat waits for you: the ticket is settled, the hold lifts, and you tell the customer yourself and close the conversation.
Ticked, whoever settles the ticket does it for you. They write a closing note when they mark it Done or Cancel it, that note is sent to this customer in this conversation, and the conversation closes. It goes out on whichever channel they wrote from - the website bubble, email, or WhatsApp - signed off as a developer rather than in a name the customer has never spoken to. Both closing dialogs warn the person writing that the customer will read it.
WhatsApp has a limit we do not set. Meta only carries a written reply within a day of the customer's last message. A ticket settled later cannot be answered there, so the conversation is closed without a message and the ticket records that the customer could not be told. Whatever happened - told and closed, closed in silence, or neither - is written on the ticket, because "the customer was told" and "we tried" are different things.
What it is for. A bug the customer is waiting on: they are owed the news the day it is fixed, not whenever an agent next reads the ticket. What it is not for: anything where the answer needs your words rather than an engineer's.
Following it afterwards
The thread's header counts what is still open on the conversation. Click that count and the side panel opens on Tickets, listing every ticket raised from this chat with its reference, status, kind and date. Click a row to read the ticket without leaving the conversation.
When one of them is blocking, the header button turns amber and carries a padlock, and so does that ticket's row in the list. Hovering the padlock says why. The button disappears once everything raised from the conversation is settled.
To clear a block, finish the work and set the ticket to Done, or Cancel it if it turned out to be nothing. The hold lifts immediately; there is nothing else to undo. If several tickets are blocking, all of them have to be settled.
What lands on the ticket
The customer and shop come across automatically, and you are recorded as the reporter. If the bug needs an engineer urgently, mention them by name in a comment - the ticket says who to mention and how.
The ticket keeps the conversation itself, under the description: who the customer is, with a link to their page, who held the chat, and links back to it. Open Conversation there and the whole exchange is read on the ticket, in order, without going anywhere - read only, because a ticket is not a place to answer a customer from.