Note: Traffic cop is available for all customers from Blossom/Growth onwards while the auto-refresh notification is available on Estate/Pro.
Agents sometimes open multiple tickets in different tabs so they can work on them all one after the other. While this is productive and a good way to estimate the number of tickets in the pipeline, by the time they reach the 10th ticket or so, there might be updates on the ticket that they aren't aware of. For example, the customer might have solved the issue themselves and sent a reply, or another agent might have taken up the ticket and replied to the customer. Sometimes these updates happen even as this agent is typing out a reply.
There are multiple ways in which Freshdesk tackles this problem in different stages:
- Agent collision detection - Agents get to see who else is viewing or replying to a ticket when they are.
- Auto-refresh - Non-invasive live updates on the ticket.
- Traffic cop - A feature that stops replies from being sent before the agent has seen the recent developments in the ticket.
The auto-refresh notification shows the number of updates to the ticket made by other agents or the customer ever since the ticket was open. If there are only property updates (like group or type update), the auto-refresh notification glows without showing a number.
If the agent still tries to send a reply without refreshing the page, the traffic cop will stop the reply. When the traffic cop is triggered, the ticket is also simultaneously updated with all the new information. This way, the agent can go through all the updated information before taking a call on whether the reply should be sent or not.
With all these checks in place, agents will be able to get all the context they can before replying to a ticket and they can hit Send in peace.