Working with Tickets

Every conversation your customers have with you — a phone call, an email, a WhatsApp message, an SMS, a Facebook message, or an Instagram DM — becomes a ticket in your Agent Portal. This guide walks through the full life of a ticket: creating one, reading it, replying on each channel, keeping internal notes, changing its status, handing it off, and (if it ever comes to that) closing it out for good.

Tip: Tickets are organized by channel. There is no single "All Tickets" view — you always work from one specific channel tab (Call, Email, WhatsApp, or a Social channel) at a time, the same way your Email page always shows one folder at a time.

1. Finding Your Way Around the Ticket List#

Open Tickets from the main menu. You'll see two parts: a narrow column on the left listing every channel, and the ticket list itself on the right.

1.1 The channel tabs#

• Call Tickets — opened automatically from phone calls into your queues. SMS replies also live inside a Call ticket (see "Replying by SMS" below).
• Email Tickets — opened automatically from incoming email, or started manually by an agent.
• WhatsApp Tickets — opened automatically from incoming WhatsApp messages, or started manually by an agent.
• Socials (collapsible group) — Facebook Tickets and Instagram Tickets. These can only ever be opened by a customer messaging your page or account first; see section 2.2 below for why.

Each tab shows a small red badge with the number of tickets in that channel nobody has opened yet. Click a tab to switch channels — the list, search box, and filters all apply to whichever channel tab is currently selected.

Tip: If you're only ever tiered into one queue, you won't see a queue-switcher at all. If you work more than one queue, an All My Queues dropdown appears next to the search box so you can narrow the list down to just one queue's tickets.

1.2 Reading the ticket list columns#

A small colored dot next to the ticket number means nobody has opened that ticket yet. Rows for sub-tickets (merged into another ticket) appear dimmed/grayed out, since they can no longer be edited on their own.

1.3 Searching and filtering#

Above the list you'll find:

1. A search box — matches against the ticket number, subject, requester name, phone number, or email address.
2. A Status dropdown — filter to just Open, On-hold, Resolved, or Closed tickets.
3. An All My Queues dropdown — only shown if you work more than one queue.

Type your search term and/or pick a status, then click Search (or just change the dropdown — it submits automatically). Click any column heading (Ticket #, Subject, Requester Name, Priority, Status, Age, Timing) to sort by that column; click again to reverse the sort order.

Tip: If you ever land on a ticket by clicking through from a Keyword Occurrences report (under Reports), you'll see a Back to Keyword Occurrences link at the top of that ticket, which returns you to the exact report and filters you came from.

The ticket list with channel tabs

Screenshot needed · ticket-list

2. Creating a Brand-New Ticket#

Not every channel lets you start a new conversation — it depends on whether the channel's own messaging platform allows a business to message first.

2.1 Channels you CAN start yourself: Call, Email, WhatsApp#

1. Click the Call, Email, or WhatsApp tab on the left.
2. Click the Add button (top right).
3. Fill in:
   • Subject (required)
   • Description (optional background info)
   • Priority (Low/Medium/High/Urgent — defaults to Medium)
   • Requester Name, Requester Phone, Requester Email as applicable to the channel
   • Assigned Agent — defaults to you; only a supervisor can hand it to someone else at creation
4. Click Save. The ticket is created and you're taken to its conversation screen, where you can send the first message using that channel's reply box (see section 3).

For a WhatsApp ticket specifically, you can also type the customer's phone number and your first message directly on the Add screen and send it right away — the ticket is created automatically the instant you hit send, without a separate Save step.

2.2 Channels you CANNOT start yourself: Facebook, Instagram#

Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct only let a business reply to a customer — a business can't message someone who has never contacted it first (this is a platform messaging rule, not a UCBC limitation). Because of this:

• A Facebook or Instagram ticket is only ever created automatically, the moment a customer messages your Page or Instagram account.
• There is no legitimate "type a name and start a new conversation" option on these two tabs. If you need to reach one of these customers proactively, use a channel where you're allowed to message first (phone, email, or WhatsApp if they've messaged your WhatsApp number before).

3. Opening and Reading a Ticket#

Click any row in the ticket list to open its conversation screen. You'll see:

• The conversation thread — every inbound and outbound message on this ticket, oldest to newest, refreshing automatically every few seconds while you have it open (you don't need to reload the page to see a customer's new reply).
• The ticket's own details sidebar — Subject, Description, Channel, Status, Priority, Category, Requester details, Assigned Agent, Queue, and the ticket's creation date.
• The reply box for that channel, at the bottom or side of the thread.
• The Ticket Tracking Thread card further down the page (see section 4).

Opening a ticket for the first time clears its "unopened" red dot and badge count.

An open ticket showing the conversation thread

Screenshot needed · ticket-detail

4. Replying to a Ticket#

Each channel has its own reply box, and a reply you send always goes out through that same channel — you can't, for example, send an Email reply on a WhatsApp ticket.

4.1 Replying by Email#

1. Open the Email ticket.
2. Type your reply in the reply box at the bottom of the thread.
3. Click Send.

Your reply is sent from your own agent mailbox (not a shared ticket inbox), with the original message's To/Cc list automatically rebuilt as Reply-All, so anyone else who was already on the email thread stays included. The customer sees it as an ordinary email reply in their own inbox.

Note: You cannot attach a file to a reply sent from inside a ticket — it's text/HTML only. (Attachments are only available from the separate Email compose screen for your own mailbox, not from a ticket's reply box.) Any file the customer attached to their inbound message still shows up for you to view inside their message in the thread.

4.2 Replying by WhatsApp#

1. Open the WhatsApp ticket.
2. Type your message in the WhatsApp reply box.
3. Click Send.

Your message is sent as a threaded reply so it shows the customer exactly which of their messages you're responding to. The customer receives it as an ordinary WhatsApp message from your business number.

4.3 Replying by SMS (from a Call ticket)#

SMS doesn't have its own channel tab — because it shares the same business phone number as your Call tickets, an SMS reply is sent from inside a Call ticket's own SMS panel.

1. Open the Call ticket.
2. Type your message in the SMS panel.
3. Click Send SMS.

Important: SMS in UCBC is outbound-only. If the customer texts back, that reply is not read or acted on anywhere in the system — if you need them to respond, ask them to call back instead of asking them to reply by text.

4.4 Replying on Facebook or Instagram#

1. Open the Facebook or Instagram ticket (it can only exist because the customer messaged you first).
2. Type your reply in the Facebook/Instagram reply box.
3. Click Send.

The customer sees your reply as an ordinary Messenger or Instagram DM reply. These platforms enforce their own standard messaging window (24 hours since the customer's last message) — if you try to reply outside that window, you'll see the platform's own error explaining why the send failed.

4.5 Call tickets#

A Call ticket is mostly a record of the call itself (who called, when, any recording) plus the SMS panel described above — there's no separate "voice reply" action, since the conversation already happened on the call.

5. Adding an Internal Note — the Ticket Tracking Thread#

Scroll down on any ticket to the Ticket Tracking Thread card. This is where you log what's actually happening on the ticket — what you found, what you tried, who you talked to.

1. Type your note in the text box under Ticket Tracking Thread.
2. Click Add (or the equivalent add-entry button).
3. Your entry appears immediately, timestamped with your name.

Important — this is NOT a fully private note. While the ticket is open, only agents and supervisors can see Tracking Thread entries. But when the ticket is Closed, every entry you've added is automatically compiled into a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) report that gets emailed straight to the customer (only if they have an email address on file). Write your tracking-thread entries the way you'd want a customer to eventually read them — factual and professional — not the way you'd write a private aside to a coworker.

Below the Tracking Thread, a collapsed Ticket Assignment Tracker section (click to expand) shows a fully automatic, read-only history of this ticket: who it was first assigned to, every reassignment, and every time it was closed or reopened. You can't add to this log yourself — it's written by the system as those events happen.

6. Changing Ticket Status#

The Status dropdown on a ticket offers four options, and each one means something different to the customer:

To change status: open the ticket, pick the new value from the Status dropdown, and click Save. The customer notice above is sent automatically on save — you don't send it yourself.

6.1 How a ticket reopens#

• A Resolved ticket reopens automatically the moment the customer replies again — any time, no deadline.
• A Closed ticket only reopens automatically if the customer replies within the stated window (48 hours for email, 24 hours for WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram). After that window, a new reply from the customer starts a brand-new ticket instead of reopening the old one.
• On WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, a customer can also start a ## message during that reopen window to deliberately open a new ticket about something different, instead of reopening the old one.
• You (an agent) can also manually reopen a ticket at any time by just changing its Status back from Closed — unless the automatic reopen window has already elapsed, in which case only a supervisor/admin can override it and reopen it anyway.

6.2 Bulk status changes#

You can change the status on several tickets at once without opening each one:

1. Check the boxes next to the tickets you want to update (sub-tickets can't be checked individually).
2. Use the Set status... dropdown that appears next to the search box.
3. Pick the new status. It applies immediately to every checked ticket (and cascades to any of their sub-tickets).

7. Priority#

Every ticket has a Priority: Low, Medium (default), High, or Urgent. Change it from the Priority dropdown on the ticket, or set it in bulk the same way as status (see 6.2, using the dedicated bulk controls). Priority doesn't drive any customer-facing message on its own — it's for your own team to triage what needs attention first.

8. Reassigning and Escalating#

8.1 Claiming a ticket for yourself#

If a ticket is unassigned (or even assigned to someone else) and you want to take it:

1. Check the box next to it on the ticket list.
2. From the dropdown next to the search box, choose Reassign to me.

It's immediately assigned to you.

8.2 Handing a ticket to a specific other agent#

Only a supervisor can assign a ticket to a specific other agent (a plain agent's Assigned Agent field is locked/read-only). A supervisor does this from inside the ticket itself, by picking the new agent from the Assigned Agent dropdown and clicking Save.

8.3 Escalation — what actually happens#

You will not find a manual "Escalate" button on a ticket — escalation in UCBC is automatic, driven by your domain's configured Escalation Matrix (set up by an administrator under Ticket Settings). In plain terms: if an open or on-hold ticket sits idle too long — past the idle-time threshold your admin configured for Level 1 — the system automatically sends an escalation notice to whoever is configured to receive it, without any agent needing to click anything. If it keeps sitting idle, further configured levels can fire the same way. Any genuine activity (a reply, a status change, a reassignment) resets the idle clock.

On your dashboard, a Tickets Needing Attention widget flags your own tickets that are heading toward (or already past) this threshold, so you can act before it escalates.

9. Merging Related Tickets#

If two or more separate tickets are really about the same underlying issue, you can merge them into one:

1. Check the boxes next to 2 or more tickets in the same channel (none of them already merged).
2. Click Merge Tickets.
3. Give the new combined ticket its own Subject and Description.
4. Save.

A brand-new "Super" ticket is created, and every ticket you selected becomes a dimmed, read-only "Sub" ticket underneath it — a sub-ticket can no longer be edited, replied to, or have its status changed on its own; everything happens on the Super ticket instead, and cascades down to its subs. To undo this, open the Super (or a Sub) ticket and click Unmerge — if that empties out a Super ticket entirely, it's automatically removed since it never existed for any other reason.

10. Handing Over Your Tickets at Shift End#

When you're going off shift and need to pass your open workload to the next agent:

1. From the ticket list, choose Hand-over from the dropdown next to the search box (no need to check boxes first — a hand-over always pulls in every one of your own open tickets, across every channel).
2. For each ticket, fill in the Company name (if relevant), the RFO field, and Status & Progress — both RFO and Status & Progress are required for every ticket.
3. Click Hand-over.

UCBC builds a PDF summary of every ticket in the batch and emails it automatically to the right recipient for your queue — you don't pick who receives it yourself. If you need to correct a hand-over you already sent, reopen that same batch and resend it with your changes.

11. Can You Delete a Ticket?#

No — there is no "delete ticket" button available to an ordinary agent, and this is by design. What you can do instead is request that a ticket be deleted:

1. Check the box next to the ticket (or tickets) you want removed.
2. Click Request Delete.
3. In the window that opens, choose the supervisor (or type the admin's username) you want to decide on it.
4. Submit the request.

The request shows up under the Requests tab in your own left-hand navigation (with a badge showing how many of your own requests are still pending), and — separately — on the target supervisor's own Requests view, marked as awaiting their decision. Only that supervisor (or an admin) can Approve or Deny it; if approved, the ticket (and any sub-tickets merged into it) is genuinely deleted from the system. If denied, nothing happens to the ticket.

Closing a ticket, not deleting it, is the correct everyday way to end a conversation. Reserve a delete request for genuine mistakes — a duplicate, a test ticket, spam — not for a ticket you're simply done with.

Tip: A supervisor can also act on several pending requests at once, checking multiple rows on their own Requests view and clicking Approve or Deny in bulk.