Ticket types

A ticket's Type says what sort of work it is. A topic says what it's about. A cracked Chromebook screen is an Issue about Devices › Chromebooks.

The four types#

The types are the same for every account and department, so reports compare like with like.

• Issue. Something that used to work is broken for one person or a few. "My Chromebook won't charge."
• Outage. Something is down for many people at once. "The Wi-Fi is out in the whole east wing."
• Question. Someone needs an answer, not a fix. "How do I share a Google Doc with my class?"
• Request. Someone wants something new or changed. "Please set up an account for our new aide."

Who sets the type#

Every ticket has a type. A new ticket starts as a Question (the person needs an answer), and keeps it until one of three places sets something else. The closer to a person, the more it counts:

1. A person. An agent picks it on the ticket or the new-ticket form. Nothing replaces a type a person chose.
2. AI triage. When a ticket comes in, triage reads it and picks a type. Events says so ("AI set type to Issue"), with how sure it was. A person can change it.
3. The topic. Each topic has a default type, which its subtopics inherit unless they set their own. When a ticket gets a topic and nothing better has set its type, it takes the topic's. The ticket shows "From the topic".

A ticket still on the starting type shows the type's one-line meaning under the picker ("Needs to know how") instead of who set it. There is no "no type" choice: to change it, pick another type.

Changing a ticket's type never restarts its SLA clock. SLA targets come from the ticket's topic and priority, not its type.

Set a topic's default type on the Topics tab.

Find tickets by type#

The ticket list's Type filter and column show tickets of one or more types. In the Report Builder, group or filter tickets by Type.

What happened to the older ticket types?#

These four types replaced the ticket types each account used to make for itself. Those older types mixed two things: what the work was (Incident, Request) and what it was about (Printer, Wi-Fi). The first is now the ticket's type; the second is a topic.

When your account moved over:

• Older types named like one of the four became it: Incident and Issue became Issue; Problem and Outage became Outage; Question stayed Question; Request, Service Request, Task, Feature Request and Project became Request. Tickets with those older types got the new type.
• Where a department used older types as subjects (three or more, like "Plumbing", "HVAC", "Electrical"), each became a top-level topic, and its tickets without a topic got it.
• SLA targets set for an older type moved to the highest topic that used it, so its subtopics inherit them.
• Fields, routing rules, macros, chat routes and saved views that named an older type now name the type or the topic it became. A routing rule that matched a subject type with no topic to take its place was turned off, and its description says why.
• Past tickets keep their older type in their history, so older reports still add up.

The old Ticket types page now opens the Topics tab.