Tickets

Use Tickets for member questions that need a staff reply. Managers and admins can open it. It is in the Reach group of the menu. Tasks, your staff to-do list, is a separate page that you open from the My tasks card on Home.

The row under the page title also links Member questions: what members asked the Ask a question box in their portal and what it answered, before any of it became a ticket. See Member questions.

Your club's staff get a "New ticket" email with a link to the ticket whenever one opens. That covers a member writing from Contact us in the portal, asking for a person after Ask a question, or emailing the club in a way that opens a ticket, and a staff member or a workflow opening one for a household. The email says which household the ticket is for. A member's later replies on the same ticket don't send another email. They show up as unread on the list.

So that one household can't flood everyone's inbox, a household can start up to 5 new conversations an hour and 10 a day from Contact us and Ask a question together. After that the portal tells the member to wait or to reply in a conversation they already have. Email to the club is never turned away: it still opens a ticket, just without the "New ticket" email to staff, so check the list now and then.

Automatic replies, such as out-of-office messages, don't open tickets or land on one. A message whose subject only looks like an automatic reply ("Automatic reply:", "Out of Office:") still opens a ticket, without the "New ticket" email.

The list shows open tickets by default. Switch Status to Closed to see finished ones, narrow by Assignee (All, Mine or Unassigned), or search the subject line. Board view lays the open tickets out in two columns, Waiting on staff and Waiting on member, so you can see at a glance whose turn it is. Clear filters puts the list back to everything.

Open a ticket to read the conversation and the household it came from (use View household to jump to their record). Write your answer in Reply and select Send reply. Use the Assigned to menu to give the ticket to a staff member, or back to Unassigned. The person you assign it to gets an "Assigned to you" email with a link to the ticket, once for each time it is given to them, even if two people pick them at the same moment. Nobody is emailed when you take a ticket yourself or set it back to Unassigned.

If you have replied and are now waiting to hear back, Mark waiting on member sends the member a short note saying so and moves the ticket to the Waiting on member column.

Keep financial changes, membership changes, and refunds in their own product areas; link the ticket to the outcome when needed.

Opening a ticket marks it as read for the whole team. A connected AI tool can do that too, without asking first. Assigning also goes straight through, closing needs a quick confirmation in the tool, and a reply, which emails the member, waits for your approval on the website.

The box where you write your answer helps in three ways before you send.

• Begin with the point. The email already opens with a greeting to each person, so start with what you want to say; a greeting of your own would greet them twice. The First name fill-in field ({{firstName}}) works well inside a sentence.

• A warning when the email is turned off. If your club has turned off the "Reply to a help request" email (under Messages, then Automatic emails), a note appears under the box before you write anything. It says nobody is emailed, and that your reply is still saved on the conversation and shows in the household's portal. When you can open that page, the note links to the email so you can turn it back on; your draft stays in this browser while you do. The same kind of note appears when the household's account is closed or your club is in practice mode. A pause on your club's email is not known until you send, and the note after sending says so. If the page cannot check whether the email is turned off, it shows no note; the one after sending still says what happened. Use it to decide whether to reach the member another way.

• Saved replies are named once. Under Start from a saved reply, each one shows its group after its name, such as "Where you stand (Waitlist)", and leaves the group off when the name already says it.

Your reply always goes on the thread, where the member sees it in their portal. The email copy is a separate thing, and it does not always go out — your club may still be in practice mode, your club may have turned off the "Reply to a help request" email, the address may be on your do-not-send list, the account may be closed, or the member may have no email address on file at all.

The banner after you reply says which happened. "Reply sent and emailed to the household" means the email left. Anything else names the reason it did not, so you know to reach the member another way.

Once in a while the email service does not answer in time. Your reply is still saved, and the banner says we could not confirm the email left. It may well arrive, so do not send the reply again: that would put a second copy on the thread and email it a second time.

A staff member can start a conversation with a household from the Waitlist or a household's page, using Message, if your club has turned on messaging a household. It shows here as a ticket with a Started by staff label. The first message is yours, and the ticket reads as waiting on the member until they answer. Everyone in that household can see it under Contact us and reply there, and a reply puts it back in your unread. The conversation is assigned to you, so it is under Mine and not Unassigned, and a member's answer lands in your queue; you are not emailed about it, because you started it. Use Assigned to to give it to someone else. Your later replies go to the same people you chose for the first message, checked again each time, and anyone who isn't emailed still sees it in their portal; when a reply goes to several people the banner says who was emailed and who wasn't. See Message a household, and saved replies.

When messaging a household is on, the reply box on any ticket also has Start from a saved reply. It adds the reply's words under anything you have typed, with the member's name and other fill-in fields filled in, so you can read and change it before you send. If a fill-in field can't be filled in, it stays in braces, and the reply won't send until you replace it.

If your club has turned on Members can answer conversation emails by replying (Club > Club info, under Contact), a member can answer the team's email about a conversation by hitting Reply. Their reply is added to the same conversation as their own message. A closed ticket reopens, and it shows as unread for the team, just as if they had written in the portal. Swim Ops has to have switched on its shared reply address first. Until then turning the setting on changes nothing, the email does not mention replying, and replies keep going to your Reply-to address for member email. It is off until you turn it on.

• What the email tells them. When replying works (your club's setting is on and Swim Ops has switched on its shared reply address), the team's email says so under the View & reply in the portal button: "You can also answer by replying to this email. Write your answer at the top, above the earlier messages. Files and photos can't be added, so please don't attach any." Swim Ops adds that line itself. It is listed as a part of the email that stays as it is in Messages > Automatic emails > Reply to a help request, so you can't change or remove it, and it comes before any closing you have written. It is on every copy of a message sent to several people, on the first message of a conversation you start and on every later reply, and it is never there when replying is off, so the email does not promise something that wouldn't work. The email's preview there has a second version that shows it on a reply; the first and later messages of a conversation you start carry the same line.

• Who can. Any adult in the household, writing from the confirmed email address on their account. On a conversation you started, an adult you did not pick who replies this way is added to the people your later replies go to.

• What is added. Only what they typed above the earlier messages quoted beneath it and above their signature, up to 10,000 characters. Anything typed below the earlier messages, or between their lines, is left out, and a reply written only below them is sent back asking the member to write above. Files are not kept; a line at the end says that one was left out.

• What is refused instead. A reply from any other address (a different one the member happened to use, or a variation of theirs), from an address that is not confirmed, from a household whose account is suspended or closed, or one that is too long (or over 256 KB, such as a message with a photo), is refused: the sender gets a short explanation and nothing is added. They can reply in the portal instead. A member who sends many replies in a short time is asked to wait. So is anyone whose email provider, school or workplace (the part of the address after the @) has sent a lot of replies lately to any club on Swim Ops, not only yours: the explanation tells them to wait a little while or reply in the portal, and it clears on its own within the hour or the day. Out-of-office replies are never added to a conversation, and cannot reopen a closed one.

• The same email twice. If a mail system delivers one email a second time, it is added once. The repeat is ignored without an error to the sender, because their first copy did arrive; it does not reopen a closed ticket or change who the conversation goes to. This only recognises a copy of an email that is already in this conversation, from the same person. It does not stop someone who sends the same words again as a new email, or sends an old email to a different conversation.

• If a member says their reply never arrived, ask them to reply from the address that is on their account, above the quoted text. The portal always works.

Select Close ticket when the question is resolved. It leaves your open queues. A closed ticket cannot be reopened by staff, but a new reply from the member reopens it automatically. Your draft reply is saved in this browser for up to seven days until you send or discard it. See Tasks for staff follow-up work.