Conversation stages vs. ticketing resolution metrics

On October 8, 2024, Front introduced ticketing features to give teams greater control over the status of their conversations. This new functionality is designed to streamline the management of conversations, allowing for more efficient tracking and organization. Over time, ticket statuses will gradually replace the conversation stages feature.

Ticket statuses and conversation stages map to each other as follows: 

The conversation stages rule marks a conversation as “no action needed” if it was archived without a reply. This is useful to avoid skewing resolution metrics with irrelevant conversations such as newsletters or notifications.

When Front introduces custom ticket statuses early 2025, it will be possible to achieve the same goal using ticketing, by selecting statuses to exclude from the metric calculation.

If ticketing and conversation stages are enabled at the same time, the events from the conversation stage rule takes precedence. If a conversation stages rule applied a status to a conversation segment, the resolution metrics for this segment will be based on the conversation stages rule.

If a conversation was in an inbox with a stage rule, and is moved to an inbox without a stage rule, its resolution status will not update, even if its ticketing status is changed. Therefore, it is important to either completely remove the conversation stages rules, or to enable it for the same inboxes as the ticketing inboxes.

It depends on how much you rely on your current resolution metrics (resolution time, replies to resolution, etc.), and if you have a lot of conversations marked as “no action needed”.

If you aren’t reporting on your current resolution metrics or have few conversations marked as “no action needed”, we recommend removing the conversation stages rule and using ticketing statuses going forward. You might see a one-time spike in your resolution metrics, as their calculation is now based on ticket statuses. 

However, if you rely on conversation stages for reporting and have a high proportion of conversations marked as “no action needed,” we recommend keeping the conversation stages rule active until custom ticketing statuses are available. At that point, you can create a custom ticket status for “no action needed” and exclude those from the metric calculation.

If you wish to keep the conversation stages until custom ticket statuses are released, we advise to ensure that the rule applies to all inboxes with ticketing enabled.

Yes. We will deprecate the conversation stages rule some time after custom ticket statuses are released. Conversation stages-related data will still be available in analytics reports, exports, and API for an additional amount of time. We will notify impacted users well in advance before deprecating the feature.