Tickets in the customer portal

With tickets on, the people you invite to the customer portal can raise a ticket in their own words, see where it is, and reply to your team without writing an email. A customer that has its own IT staff can work its tickets first in a team queue and pass you only the ones they can't fix, with a written brief of what they already tried.

Tickets follow the same switches as the rest of the portal. On a company's Portal tab, each person has a preset, and the company has a ceiling that no person can go past. These switches open tickets:

The presets hold them like this: Viewer can see and reply to their own tickets; Requester can also raise tickets; IT team and IT admin hold every ticket switch. Projects viewer holds none, so a person moved over from the old project portal sees no tickets until you give them a preset that has them. A module a person can't use is not shown to them at all, rather than shown and greyed.

• Home starts with a "What's going on?" box and then their tickets as one line each, such as "Sam at <your company> is on it. Expected today." or "Waiting on you: Sam asked a question."
• New ticket asks in their words what is wrong, at most two follow-up questions, and how much it is in their way: It can wait, It's slowing me down, or I can't work. The urgent priority is your team's call and never set from the portal.
• A ticket shows a track (Received, Being worked, Waiting on you, Fixed), the conversation with your team, and a reply box. They can attach pictures, PDFs, Office documents, text files and emails, up to 25 MB each and 10 to a message.
• On a ticket your team is working, they can press This is fixed. A reply on a ticket that closed in the last 7 days opens it again; after that they start a new ticket.

Your team's internal notes never reach the portal, and no bell or email the portal sends carries the words of a ticket.

On each company's Portal tab, Who gets new tickets first decides where a new ticket goes: Their own IT team first, or Straight to <your company>. With the IT team first, a ticket waits in their Team queue. It does not reach your service desk or your PSA until someone on their team escalates it.

1. 1
   Their team works the ticket

   They assign it, change its status and write team notes. Team notes say "Only your IT team and <your company> can see this"; the person who raised the ticket never sees them.
2. 2
   Escalate

   Someone holding the Hand tickets to switch presses Escalate. The brief is drafted by AI from their team's notes, and they can edit it or write their own. They pick the urgency and press Escalate, and a 10-second Undo bar follows.
3. 3
   Your team gets it

   The ticket reaches your team with the chip Escalated by <company> IT and the brief at the top. In the portal it reads "With <your company>" and stays in their queue.
4. 4
   Hand back, if it's theirs to finish

   Hand back to <company> IT sends it back with a note. It returns to the top of their queue with the note, and your copy of the ticket is closed with the reason Handed back.

If they escalate the same ticket again, your team gets a new ticket, and the brief lists the earlier escalations. When your team marks an escalated ticket fixed, it goes back to their queue as fixed, where they close it or escalate it again.

• A ticket raised in the portal carries the chip Raised in the portal. One escalated by a customer's IT team carries Escalated by <company> IT and the brief.
• Hand back to <company> IT is offered to a desk manager and to the person the ticket is assigned to. Handing back closes the ticket on your side. It can still reopen if someone presses Reopen, if Undo is used within 24 hours, or if the requester replies to one of its emails, and a reopened ticket is not linked to their team's ticket again, so check with them first.
• The company's Portal tab shows the customer's IT team tickets (read only), and Preview shows a person's tickets exactly as they see them. Preview never writes anything.

Tickets in the portal need your service desk switched on. In a workspace that runs without the service desk, people in the portal see their projects and nothing about tickets.

Remove a ticket switch from a person or from the company's ceiling and the Tickets or Team page disappears for them at once. Turn a company's portal off and nobody there signs in. Their tickets stay where they are on your side.