A ticket, in a support helpdesk, is any issue raised by a customer that the company has to take care of. A customer could raise this issue through email, phone calls, chat messages or even through tweets. The process of converting these issues raised in multiple channels into tickets in a helpdesk is called ticketing.
Tracking the issues raised by the customer, prioritizing them and categorizing them is difficult even if it’s just one channel (like email) that the company provides support in. And for a company that wants to support multiple channels, managing them all separately will be a nightmare. Ticketing helps in creating a common pool of issues that, no matter how or where they are created, can be dealt with from single helpdesk.
Ticketing also enables the use of SLAs which dictate when a ticket needs to be responded to and resolved based on its content and the channel through which it was created.