Understanding how Talk calls become tickets

Zendesk Talk automatically creates a ticket in Support for many types of call. Use this article to understand how these calls become tickets.

This article contains the following topics:

• About tickets created from calls
• Understanding how phone numbers are linked to end-user profiles
• Merging users
• Merging tickets when a call is about an existing ticket

About tickets created from calls

Zendesk Talk creates a new ticket for calls in the following situations:

• When you accept an incoming phone call
• When you place an outbound call from the console, and the call is answered
• When a caller leaves a voicemail

You cannot disable the creation of tickets.

Details about the call or voicemail, and the call recording are added to the ticket as a comment, similar to the example shown below. If you place an outgoing call from an existing ticket, the comment is added to the existing ticket.

You might see different results for the length time shown next to your recording and the Length of phone call time under Call Details. The time shown next to the recording includes only actual talk time. The Length of phone call time includes talk time and events that were not recorded, like hold time, transfer time, and time spent in queue.

You can configure Zendesk Talk to prevent users from accessing the live call recordings (see Enabling Zendesk Talk and configuring general settings). If your administrator has allowed the recordings to be accessible, the user can click a link to the recording from the notification email to hear it.

You can delete recordings from tickets, by clicking the delete recording link (see Deleting recordings from tickets).

You can add a comment to the ticket and update the ticket properties while you speak with the customer.

Understanding how phone numbers are linked to end-user profiles

Zendesk Talk identifies users by their phone numbers.

• If the caller is an end-user with an existing profile, and calling from a number already added to the profile, their existing profile is set as the ticket requester.
• If the number has not yet been added to a profile, a new profile is created using the calling number as the user name.

Zendesk Support can store two types of phone number in end-user profiles:

• Direct lines are used to identify a user. When you add a unique number to a user's profile, it's automatically set as a direct line. If the caller is an existing end-user calling from their direct line, the user's existing profile is set as the ticket requester. Users can have more than one direct line.
• Shared numbers are linked to multiple user profiles. A shared number always starts out as a direct line for one user, but when the same number is added for another user, it's added as a shared number. An incoming call from a shared number will be associated with the user that has that number as a direct line.

When receiving a call, Talk checks to see if a user is associated with the number that is calling. If no user has the number as a direct line (for example, if it’s been deleted from the user), then a new user will be created that has that number as a direct line. The number will no longer be associated to the users that has that same number as a shared number. A user can have only one shared number on their user profile.

To add a number to a user's profile

1. Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Manage > People.
2. Select a user and click edit.
3. In the user's profile, click + add contact and select Phone.
4. Enter a phone number for the user. If you have phone number validation enabled, this number must be in E.164 format.
5. To add additional numbers, repeat steps 2-4.

Merging users

Calls received from new, unknown, users generate new end-users that are identified only by the telephone number they're calling from. Unknown users can also be existing users if they're using a telephone number that they haven't added to their user profile. In this case, you can merge the new user account with their existing user account. For more information, see Merging a user's duplicate account.

When merging users, all phone numbers that the merging user has will be added to the receiving user. The only scenario where a number is discarded during merging is when two users both have a shared number. In this case, the shared number of the merging user will be discarded.

Merging tickets when a call is about an existing ticket

Sometimes, callers might contact you about an issue for which a Zendesk Support ticket has already been created. To handle this situation, complete the call and add comments as needed to the new ticket. You can then merge the new ticket with the existing ticket.

The phone number shown at the top of a ticket is the phone number that caused the ticket to be created. When merging two tickets that both have a voice comment, the number that caused the creation of the ticket being merged into will be shown.

For details, see Merging tickets.