Set Up Parent-Child Ticketing

Parent-child ticketing lets you break a complex ticket into smaller sub-tickets for different teams, while keeping the customer's issue tracked in one place until every part is resolved.

Parent-child ticketing is available on the Professional and Enterprise plans.

How It Works

Any ticket becomes a parent the moment you add a child to it. Each child is a separate ticket you assign to another team, so several teams work in parallel. The parent stays open until every child is resolved, which stops a customer's issue from being closed while part of it is still in progress.

Children are internal. Customers see only the parent ticket, never its children.

Turn On Parent-Child Ticketing

Parent-child ticketing is an account-level setting. An admin turns it on once for the whole account.

1. Go to Settings → Ticketing.
2. Turn on Parent-Child Ticketing.

The feature is now available on tickets across your account. On lower plans the setting shows an upgrade prompt instead.

Add a Child Ticket

Open the parent ticket and find the Child Tickets section. You can add a child two ways:

• Create child- Enter the ticket details and assign it to the right team. You can copy fields such as priority or tags from the parent so you do not re-enter them.
• Link existing- Search by ticket ID or keyword and select an existing ticket to link as a child.

A ticket can have only one parent, and a child cannot have children of its own. You can link up to 20 child tickets to one parent.

Resolve a Parent Ticket

You cannot move a parent to Resolved or Closed while any child is still open. If you try, SparrowDesk blocks the change and lists the child tickets you still need to close. Resolve or unlink those children first.

The Child Tickets section shows a running count, such as "3 of 5 resolved," so you can see what is left. The agent assigned to the parent is notified when a child is created, changes status, or is resolved.

Tip: Filter the ticket list by "Is a parent ticket" or "Is a child ticket" and save the result as a view, such as open parent tickets assigned to you.

FAQs

1. Which channels support parent-child ticketing?
   It works on ticket, chat, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. A child is always created as a standard internal ticket, whatever channel the parent came from.
2. Can I unlink or move a child to a different parent?
   You can unlink a child at any time if you are an admin or an agent with access to the parent. To move a child to a different parent, unlink it first, then link it to the new one.
3. What happens if I delete a parent or a child ticket?
   Deleting a child removes it from the parent's list, and the parent's closure block updates automatically. Deleting a parent leaves its children as standalone tickets, with the parent reference cleared from each one.
4. Can I merge a ticket that is part of a hierarchy?
   No. Merging is blocked for any parent or child ticket. Unlink the tickets first, then merge.
5. Do child tickets affect my team's reports?
   Child tickets are left out of top-level SLA metrics like First Response Time and Resolution Time, so they do not double-count. You can still filter reports by parent or child, or group child tickets under their parent ticket ID.