How to Prevent Users from Creating Multiple Tickets

There is much you can do with the combination of business and other tools that create a dynamic and greater guided experience when it comes to handoff or any other workflow. The design technique outlined in this article is most often used to prevent customers from submitting multiple tickets back to back to varying degrees.

1. Create your normal handoff, whether that be a standard handoff or your default one. For assistance, please see this article for more information.
2. Within your ticket creation step. Click on the customize button on the top right-hand side of the ticket/case creation step. Set a context variable to output the ticket or case ID to this context variable. Forethought has a premade one you can utilize called $Ticket ID
3. At the beginning of the workflow, create a condition that checks if your Ticket Context variable is currently empty or populated. If it is empty we can assume the user has never submitted a ticket/case within this conversation. If it is populated, this means at some point prior to that point in the conversation, they already submitted a ticket.
   
4. The new path for $Ticket ID is NOT empty be what now happens if they come through that workflow a second time trying to create another ticket. You can configure any behavior you would like to happen here. Most commonly this:
   • Update the already existing ticket by using the ticket ID and a post request API that updates the ticket they already have
   • Ensure users that they will hear back on their ticket within a specific time frame and ask if they have any other questions.
5. The last path will always be “Otherwise”. This is a fall back in case anything errors within the condition step logic or the context variable has an issue. You can copy the path that you have already built in steps 1 or 2 and paste it as the behavior for this otherwise path.
6. Test this now through your live widget and create a ticket. Then try and create a second ticket and ensure you are correctly directed to the branch you built in step 4.

Notes: You can use the same CV across ALL hand-offs if you only want users to submit one hand-off for every conversation. If there are multiple requests that can be submitted (for example, one request in a custom handoff for password reset and another custom handoff for a refund request), then you should use individual CVs for each of those hand-offs.