At SPIC AND SPAN. Home & Office Cleaning we've been using Helpscout since April 2020. I picked this help desk tool mainly for its simplicity. One thing that I thought it was missing was the ability to create "tickets" without emailing the customer.

What do I mean by "tickets"? I mean tasks/open issues for customer support to solve.

For example:

We received a negative review from the customer. We need to follow up with them, but first want to discuss the issue with the cleaning service provider, to agree on the refund options. Let's say we got the review towards the end of the working day, and we know we'll have to reply to it the next day, and the task of following up with the customer needs to be assigned to an agent that is on duty the next day.

I briefly Googled the issue and this documentation page from Helpscout came up: What is a Support Ticket (& Why We Don’t Use That Term):

For some reason, after reading through the article I got the impression that you simply cannot create tickets in Helpscout, and we're stuck with emailing the customer each time we want to "open a ticket". I made my peace with it and left the issue for a year or so.

Then, a few days ago I started heavily exploring Helpscout and Zendesk functionalities since we're considerating the consolidation of our support tools into one (it's a separate story). I once again looked at the "phone call conversation" option:

And then something "clicked" for me. There's no rule telling us that we have to use this feature to log the notes from actual phone conversations. We can use this feature to create all kinds of tasks for customer support:

The assigned agent can then see this "ticket" in their list of "their" conversations:

It turns out Helpscout does have a way to create tickets. It was just me that got confused with their terminology :)