Conversations versus tickets
What a conversation holds, what a ticket holds, which of the two carries an SLA clock in CloudFly Helpdesk, and how to decide where a request belongs.
The console keeps two kinds of work records. Conversations live under Conversations; tickets live under Tickets. Neither replaces the other, and filing a request in the wrong one is a familiar way to lose track of it.
A conversation is a live message stream
This is where a customer and your team talk. Every conversation belongs to one inbox and carries the channel the customer wrote in from.
- Exactly three states and no others: Open, Snoozed, Resolved.
- One Assignee, plus any number of Teams pulled in; nobody is removed when the next team joins.
- Internal discussion sits inline in the chat pane, yet the customer never receives it.
- Presence, typing and read receipts run in real time on both sides.
No deadline is attached to a conversation. Its measure is the time since the last reply, and it ends when the customer has no further questions.
A ticket is a unit of work with a deadline
A ticket records something that has to be finished, including work that spans several days and several people.
- A global reference of the form
HD-0001, handed out by an atomic counter, so two tickets never share one. - Columns on the Kanban board, configured per team; dragging a card moves it and the move is written to the stage history.
- Four levels of Priority: Low, Medium, High, Urgent.
- SLA Policies attach by tag, customer or team, and the clock follows your Working Calendars rather than wall time.
- A single timeline where a Public Reply and a reply badged Internal share one list.
The two records are independent
There is no button that turns a conversation into a ticket. In the database
schema the tickets table holds no foreign key to any conversation; the contact
both records point at is what ties them together.
So when a request needs longer follow-up, open a new ticket, copy across the detail that matters, and keep answering the customer in the conversation.
Deciding where a request belongs
| Situation | Where it goes |
|---|---|
| A question answered in a single round trip | Conversation |
| Work spanning several days and several people | Ticket |
| A response time promised to the customer and measured | Ticket |
| Anything arriving from the widget, a Facebook Page, a Zalo OA or Telegram | Conversation — that is the only entry point |
| Internal work with no customer waiting | Ticket |
Large requests usually need both: the customer talks in the conversation while your team tracks progress on the ticket.
Conversation list endpoints have no pagination yet. The interface caps how many records it fetches and virtualizes the list, so narrow a long queue with filters rather than scrolling.
Read next
Shared inboxes and channels
How a shared inbox differs from a connected channel in CloudFly Helpdesk, and why every conversation belongs to exactly one inbox at a time.
Roles and per-feature permissions
CloudFly Helpdesk grants access along two independent axes: the workspace role, administrator or agent, and the permission groups that decide who may write.