Freshdeskの親子チケット実践ガイド

We've all been there. A customer ticket lands in the queue, and it's a doozy. Their billing is wrong, a feature is acting up, and they're asking about a recent shipment. Suddenly, what started as one request needs input from three different departments. The conversation becomes a tangled mess of internal notes, forwards, and follow-ups. The time to resolve creeps up, and the customer is left waiting, completely in the dark.

It's a story most support teams know well. The best way to tackle a big problem is usually to break it down into smaller, more manageable pieces. This is the exact problem that Freshdesk parent child tickets aim to solve. The feature gives you a structured way to handle multi-part issues by splitting one main ticket into several smaller tasks.

This guide will walk you through the feature, where it shines, where it falls short, and how newer AI tools can take this "divide and conquer" approach to a whole new level.

What are Freshdesk parent child tickets?

So, what are they, exactly? In short, Freshdesk parent child tickets let you break down a main ticket (the "parent") into several smaller, related sub-tickets (the "children").

The easiest way to think about it is like a project. The main request, like "Onboard New Client," is the parent ticket. All the smaller tasks that need to get done, legal handling contracts, tech setting up the account, finance sorting out billing, become child tickets.

Instead of trying to manage all these moving parts in one cluttered ticket, you create a parent ticket for the main request and individual child tickets for each team's task. This setup keeps things organized and makes it clear who is responsible for what. Everyone knows what they need to do, and the work can happen at the same time, which can really help speed up the whole resolution process.

How to use Freshdesk parent child tickets

The idea is pretty simple, but it helps to know what the feature can actually do, and where you might run into some snags. We won't go through a click-by-click tutorial here, but more of an overview of the nuts and bolts.

Key features and functionality

Freshdesk gives you a few useful tools to manage these workflows. Agents can create new child tickets right from a parent ticket, or they can link existing tickets together under a single parent. This gives you some flexibility in how you organize everything.

For repetitive, multi-step jobs like setting up a new hire or looking into a common bug, you can build ticket templates. This lets your team quickly create a standard set of child tickets with all the right fields already filled in, which saves time and keeps things consistent.

Once it's all set up, the parent ticket works like a command center. You get a quick overview of the status of all the child tickets, so you can see how the whole process is going without having to chase down different people for updates. Freshdesk also has some basic automation, like automatically closing the parent ticket after all its children have been resolved.

A screenshot of the Freshdesk ticket dashboard where agents can manage and view parent and child tickets.

Limitations of the native feature

While these features are a good start, they have some real downsides. The biggest one? The whole process is manual. An agent has to read a ticket, realize it needs to be split up, figure out which template to use, create the child tickets, and assign them to the right people. It organizes the work, but it doesn't lighten the load on the agent who has to set it all up.

Then there's the issue of knowledge silos. The feature helps you assign tasks, but it doesn't help your agents actually solve them. The agent working on the "billing setup" child ticket still has to dig through your knowledge base, old tickets, and other docs to find the answer.

And trying to keep everything in sync can be a genuine pain. Syncing notes, replies, or custom fields between a parent and its children isn't built-in. To get that to work, you usually have to dig through the Freshworks Marketplace for third-party apps like Parent Child Synchronization or Parent Child Field Sync. This just adds another layer of complexity, another thing that could break, and probably another subscription fee.

Organizing tasks is one thing, but what if you could automate the actual solving of the ticket? An AI agent from eesel AI can look at a complicated ticket, see all the different parts, and pull together a complete answer from all your company knowledge at once. A lot of the time, this means you don't even need to create sub-tasks to begin with.

Common use cases for Freshdesk parent child tickets

To give you a clearer picture of how this works day-to-day, let's look at a couple of common situations where teams use parent child tickets.

Managing new client onboarding

Bringing a new client on board is a classic multi-department project. You can use a single "onboarding" ticket as the parent and then spin up child tickets for legal, finance, technical setup, and training. Each ticket goes to the right team, and they can all get to work on their part of the process.

The real win here is visibility. The account manager can track everything from the parent ticket. No more chasing people down with emails or Slack messages to get updates; it’s all visible right in Freshdesk.

Handling complex bug reports

When a customer reports a software bug, fixing it often involves a few steps and different teams. The first report can be the parent ticket. From there, you can create child tickets for engineering teams to investigate and reproduce the bug, develop a fix, run it through QA testing, and finally deploy it.

This approach creates a clean, clear record of the entire bug-fix process, all kept neatly inside your helpdesk. It helps make sure no steps get skipped and that everyone has the context they need.

Where the process breaks down

But even in these perfect-fit scenarios, the process is still completely manual. It organizes the work, but it doesn't reduce it. It all depends on your agents spotting the need for a parent-child ticket and then setting it up perfectly every time. One little mistake can cause delays and confusion.

It makes you wonder: what if you didn't have to manually create and track all those child tickets in the first place? With eesel AI's AI Triage, the system can automatically spot a bug report, tag it, and even use custom actions to create an issue in Jira or ping the right engineering channel in Slack, all without an agent having to do a thing. That's the difference between just organizing tasks and actually automating them.

Freshdesk parent child tickets pricing and plan availability

Heads up: the parent-child ticketing feature isn't included in every Freshdesk plan. If you want to use it, you'll need to be on one of their pricier tiers.

Feature	Growth Plan	Pro Plan	Pro + AI Copilot Plan	Enterprise Plan
Parent-Child Ticketing	✖	✔	✔	✔
Starting Price (billed annually)	$15/agent/mo	$49/agent/mo	$78/agent/mo	$79/agent/mo

Note: This information is based on public pricing as of late 2024. Please check the official Freshdesk pricing page for the most current details.

And don't forget, if you want fancier features like syncing notes between parent and child tickets, you'll probably need to install third-party apps from the Freshworks Marketplace. These apps often have their own subscription costs, so the total price can be higher and more spread out than you'd think.

Shelling out for a higher Freshdesk plan just to organize tasks better can be a tough pill to swallow. eesel AI works with your current helpdesk, letting you add powerful automation without forcing you into a platform upgrade. Our plans are straightforward and include triage, agent assistance, and full automation, giving you a much better return by focusing on solving tickets, not just shuffling them around.

Freshdesk parent child tickets: A good starting point, but not the whole journey

Freshdesk parent child tickets are a solid native feature for wrangling complex, multi-department issues. They definitely bring some order to the chaos and make it easier for everyone to see what's going on.

But, the process is completely manual, relies on your agents to get it right every time, and often needs extra apps from the marketplace to work smoothly. At the end of the day, it's a tool for managing tasks, not automating support. It helps you juggle the workload, but it doesn't actually lighten it.

So, what if you could skip a lot of that juggling altogether?

That's where the next step in support tooling, like eesel AI, really makes a difference. By connecting to all of your company's knowledge and taking action inside your helpdesk, eesel AI automates the resolution of tickets that used to need a complicated parent-child setup. You can get it running in minutes, not months, and even run a simulation on your past tickets to see exactly how it would have helped.

Ready to move from organizing tickets to automating them? Try eesel AI for free and see how it can transform your Freshdesk workflows.