Close a ticket and approve the article it drafts
Close a resolved ticket with a plain-language reply, then review, edit, and publish the knowledge base article Elise drafts from it.
What you will have
- Close a ticket the normal way, by replying to the client and moving its status forward, without any extra step to ask for a KB article.
- When that closing reply reads as real diagnosis-and-fix knowledge, review the draft Elise wrote from it and decide whether to publish it as-written, edit it first, or turn it down.
Why it works this way
A close only drafts a KB article when it clears a few checks first: at least two replies on the ticket, a closing reply of real length (roughly 300 characters or more), and no trivial marker in the thread, such as duplicate, spam, or no action taken. A one-line closing reply, or a ticket merged into another, produces nothing.
A resolution that reads as an ordered, repeatable sequence, three or more numbered or bulleted steps, or a ticket about onboarding, offboarding, migration, or similar runbook work, is routed to Procedure Review instead of KB Review. A close only ever produces one draft, never both.
The draft is only ever produced once per close: a ticket that already has a KB article, or already has a pending or previously rejected draft, is skipped, so reopening and reclosing the same ticket does not pile up duplicate drafts.
Confidence is the model's own estimate of how novel and non-trivial the resolution is, not a pass/fail gate the reviewer has to trust blindly. It is shown on every draft so a reviewer can weigh a 0.9 differently from a 0.6.
The draft's wording comes from the tech's own closing reply and the thread, expanded into an article shape, not invented from nothing. Editing before accepting keeps that source honest without discarding the tech's actual words.
A closed ticket also gets a separate AI evaluation of its own (communication, resolution, and an overall score), and that evaluation can flag "KB Recommended" on the same ticket. That flag is a second, independent signal, not the thing that creates the draft.
Steps
Open ticket #24, "Front desk PC will not wake from sleep," already In Progress with one reply on it.
The ticket was opened by Bluebird Dental and a tech already replied once, saying they were on-site correcting the sleep and wake power setting. The ticket sits on In Progress with that email reply logged, ready for a closing update.
Open ticket #24, "Front desk PC will not wake from sleep," already In Progress with one reply on it. Write the closing reply in your own words.
Write what actually happened, in plain first person, the way you'd tell the client the job is done: "I finished testing the front desk PC and it's holding up well. After correcting the sleep and wake power setting, I ran it through several sleep and wake cycles over the last hour and it woke immediately every time, so the fix is holding steady. I also checked Windows Update and the chipset driver on the machine while I was there, since an outdated driver can cause this exact same symptom, and everything came back current. Priya confirmed the front desk staff have been checking patients in on it without any trouble since I finished, so I'm calling this one resolved." A reply this size, with a real description of the fix, is what a KB draft needs to clear the length check; a one-line "fixed it" does not.
Write the closing reply in your own words. Open Set status, pick Closed, and click Send & Close.
Set status offers Closed directly from In Progress on this board; there is no separate Resolved step to pass through first. Once Closed is picked, the send button relabels itself to match: Send & Close posts the reply, emails Priya Shah, and moves the ticket to Closed in the same click.
Open Set status, pick Closed, and click Send & Close. See the ticket's closed state and timeline.
The ticket now shows a CLOSED marker ahead of the closing reply in Communication, and the History card lists the two rows that one click just wrote: Reply created and Status changed, both timestamped to the moment Send & Close was clicked. Closing also triggers a separate AI evaluation of the whole ticket, shown further up the page, unrelated to whether a KB draft gets produced.
See the ticket's closed state and timeline. Open Elise > Review > KB Review and find the new draft.
The draft can take a little while to appear in the background, up to a few minutes; refresh the page if it isn't there yet. It shows up tagged Background, with a confidence score, the client, the source ticket, a proposed title, the drafted article body with a Resolution section, a handful of tags, and three controls: Accept, Edit & accept, and Reject.
Open Elise > Review > KB Review and find the new draft. Click Edit & accept, tighten a sentence, and click Save & accept.
Edit & accept turns the title and body into editable fields in place, with Cancel to back out. The generated resolution came out as a numbered list even though the tech's own reply wasn't one; that's just the article's own shape, not a sign it should have gone to Procedure Review. A small wording change here is enough to mark the entry Edited and Accepted rather than Accepted as-written; Save & accept publishes it either way.
Click Edit & accept, tighten a sentence, and click Save & accept. See the published article in Bluebird Dental's knowledge base.
The article lands on Documentation > Knowledge Base for the client the ticket belonged to, tagged AI Suggested, status Approved, with "From ticket #24" underneath its title. It publishes immediately; there is no separate publish step after Save & accept.
See the published article in Bluebird Dental's knowledge base. Open the article and check its Client Visibility panel.
An accepted article is internal by default. The panel's real controls are Not marked internal and Hidden from client portal, two independent toggles that gate whether the client can see the article at all, plus Visible to specific users with an Add User picker for sharing it with just the individual portal users who need it instead of the whole client.
Open the article and check its Client Visibility panel.
Other ways to do this
Ticket toolbar Status field
Open the ticket and set the STATUS dropdown in the toolbar directly to Closed, with no reply attached.
Client Portal
The client opens their ticket, turns on "Close on send" (or "Resolve on send" if ticket review is on) in the reply box, and sends. Only IT Admin, Primary Contact, and the account Owner can close from the portal.
Bulk actions on the list
Select several tickets in All Tickets and choose a bulk close action. Every selected ticket moves to Closed at once, with no reply attached to any of them.
Elise
A tech asks Elise, in chat, to close a ticket; Elise's ticket.change_status capability moves it through the same status machine and reviewer gate the toolbar and composer use.
Elise Auto-Close
When a RESOLVED ticket's ITSM evaluation score meets the configured minimum, Elise closes it on its own without waiting for a reviewer. A separate auto-close timeout can also promote a RESOLVED ticket to Closed after N days of no activity.
New Entry
On Documentation > Knowledge Base, click New Entry and write the article by hand, no ticket required.
Procedure Review
A close whose resolution reads as an ordered, repeatable sequence, or whose ticket is framed as onboarding, offboarding, migration, or similar setup work, drafts a procedure instead, reviewed the same way (Approve, Edit & approve, Reject) on Elise > Review > Procedure Review.
If it did not work
- If the closing reply is under roughly 300 characters, or the ticket has fewer than two replies total, no draft is produced.
- If the thread reads as a throwaway close, duplicate, spam, user error, no action taken, cannot reproduce, and similar markers, no draft is produced.
- If the ticket was merged into another ticket, or already has a KB article, or already has a pending or previously rejected KB draft, no new draft is produced.
- If the resolution reads as an ordered, repeatable sequence, the close routes to Procedure Review instead of KB Review, never both.
- If no AI provider is connected (and the trial's included AI isn't active), the background draft step fails quietly and the close still completes; there is simply no draft to review.
Questions this page answers
What is KB Review?
Resolved tickets generate KB draft entries - Elise pulls the question, the resolution steps, and the affected systems into a draft KB article. KB Review is where you Accept, Edit-and-Accept, or Reject each draft before it joins the searchable KB.
What do the draft statuses mean?
Pending - fresh draft, never reviewed. Edited and Accepted - you made changes before publishing. Accepted - went in as-written. Rejected - dropped, won't generate again for similar tickets. Statuses feed back into the rejection corpus so Elise learns the team's editorial preferences.
Why did a close land here instead of KB Review?
Each ticket close makes ONE decision: knowledge-base article, procedure, or nothing. A resolution that is a repeatable ordered sequence becomes a procedure; a one-off diagnosis with a non-obvious fix becomes a KB article. You will never get both queues nagging you about the same ticket, and a close only ever costs one draft.
What is Ticket Review?
Configured on Settings → Service Desk → Ticket Review. When ON, RESOLVED tickets need a designated reviewer to close them, the tech-side close button becomes "Resolve" instead. Reviewers are members of the Closer Permission Groups plus, optionally, the ticket's pod leaders (the Pod Leaders Can Close toggle). Use it as a coaching loop so a senior tech vets work before it leaves the queue.
Can I close my own tickets?
It depends on your role. IT Admin, Primary Contact, and the account Owner can close a ticket. Turn on "Close on send" in the reply box, then send. The button reads "Send & Close". If your IT provider reviews tickets before they close, that option reads "Resolve on send" instead, and the ticket goes to them for a last look. The User and Billing roles cannot close tickets. Your IT provider closes those once the work is done. Anyone can reopen their own closed ticket by replying to it. Open a closed ticket and the reply box shows a "Reopen Ticket" button.
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