Waiting for an external reply

In short: If you are waiting for a supplier, carrier or other external party, set the ticket to Waiting for external reply. The ticket disappears from the inbox. When a reply comes in, it becomes Open again by itself. If you set a deadline, aishaa reopens the ticket on that date and suggests a reminder to the external party.

Where to find this

Two places:

• The Status dropdown in the top bar of a ticket or the status chip in the ticket overview: choose Waiting for external reply.
• The After sending block in the Forward to an external party dialog and in the Reply dialog to an external participant. There you can also add a deadline and a note.

Who: from the Agent role. The status applies per ticket.

Setting a ticket to waiting manually

1. Open the ticket.
2. Under Status, choose the option Waiting for external reply.

The ticket gets the banner This ticket is waiting for an external reply. and is no longer in Inbox. This way you set no deadline and no note; the ticket keeps waiting until a reply comes in or until you change the status yourself.

Setting up waiting when forwarding or replying

If you forward a customer message to an external party, or reply to an external participant, the After sending block appears below your message:

1. Tick Wait for external reply. After sending, the ticket goes to Waiting for external reply.
2. Optionally tick Set back to open if there is no reply and choose a deadline: Tomorrow, 2 days, 1 week or your own date and time in the date picker.
3. Optionally fill in a Note for your colleagues (and for aishaa).
4. Send the message.

The After sending block in the Forward to an external party dialog, with the Wait for external reply checkbox, the Set back to open if there is no reply checkbox, the Tomorrow, 2 days and 1 week buttons, the date picker and the Note field.

With a deadline, the banner shows This ticket is waiting for an external reply. Reopens automatically at (date) with your note below it. You can read how to forward in Forwarding a message.

An open ticket with the banner This ticket is waiting for an external reply. Reopens automatically at (date) and the note at the top.

What happens while waiting

• The ticket is not in Inbox. You find it via the Status filter with the value Waiting for external reply.
• If you send a reply to the customer yourself while the ticket is waiting, the status stays Waiting for external reply. With any other status the ticket would become Answered after a reply.
• The forwarded message has an External follow-up tooltip with Note, Deadline and Status: Waiting.
• If you want to remind the external party in the meantime, choose Send reminder on your forwarded message. The message goes into the same email conversation.

How the waiting ends

Good to know

• A reply from the external party ends up in the same ticket, with the header REPLY TO FORWARDED MESSAGE.
• Waiting for an external party is different from snoozing. You use snoozing to set a ticket aside temporarily until a moment you choose; waiting for an external reply ends as soon as the reply comes in. See Snoozing and wake-up calls.
• You can only add a deadline and a note when forwarding or replying, not via the Status dropdown.
• aishaa may only send messages on its own initiative to parties on the account’s External parties list. You yourself can forward to any address. See External parties.
• The ticket is reopened after the deadline by a background task; the exact moment can be a few minutes after the deadline.

Related

• Ticket statuses and lifecycle
• Forwarding a message
• Snoozing and wake-up calls
• The ticket overview: filtering, searching and sorting
• External parties