Working a ticket
Open a ticket and you get three things: the controls along the top, the conversation in the middle, and everything the ticket knows about itself down the right.
The controls
Section titled “The controls”State, Priority, Queue, Owner, Responsible and Type sit across the top and change immediately — there’s no separate save.
Owner and Responsible are two different jobs, and it’s worth being deliberate about the difference. The owner is who is working it now. Responsible is who answers for it — often the same person, sometimes a lead who stays on the hook while someone else does the work.
Replying, and not replying
Section titled “Replying, and not replying”Under the conversation is the composer, and the first thing it asks is where does this message go?
- Reply to customer — an email. The composer tells you the address it’s going to, so you can’t send it by accident and find out later.
- Add internal note — stays inside. Your colleagues see it; the requester never does, including in the portal.
You can add Cc/Bcc, and attach files — up to 10 files and 20 MB in total, sent along with the reply.
The history
Section titled “The history”Everything is in the timeline, newest first: customer emails, your replies, internal notes, and the system events (state changes, reassignment, SLA milestones). Hide system events strips it back to just the conversation when you’re trying to read what actually happened. Expand all opens the collapsed entries.
Moving it along
Section titled “Moving it along”The states that come as standard:
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| new | Nobody has picked it up |
| open | Being worked |
| pending reminder | Waiting, and it’ll nudge you |
| pending customer | Waiting on them, and it closes itself if they go quiet |
| resolved | Done, pending confirmation |
| closed | Finished |
| merged | Folded into another ticket |
pending customer asks for a date, and that date is the point of the state — it’s what wakes the ticket up again. A pending ticket with no date is one nobody will ever look at.
If your organisation has defined a workflow, the state dropdown may only offer the next steps that workflow allows.
The right-hand panels
Section titled “The right-hand panels”- Requester — who asked, their email, their company.
- Time logged — total and billable hours booked against this ticket, and a Start timer button that starts a timer already pointed at the right project. See Time on tickets.
- SLA — the response and solution deadlines, and whether you’ve met them. See SLAs and business hours.
- Coverage — whether this customer has a live subscription or contract covering the work. Advisory: it never blocks a reply.
- Config items — the kit involved. See The CMDB.
- Hierarchy and Related tickets — parents, children, and links to tickets that aren’t in the same tree.
- Documents — links to where the information lives.
Splitting, merging and escalating
Section titled “Splitting, merging and escalating”The menu at the top right has the bigger moves:
- Split… — pulls part of a conversation out into its own ticket, for when one email turns out to be three problems.
- Merge into… — folds this ticket into another. The survivor keeps everything; this one goes to the merged state and points at it.
- Flag for sales — creates an opportunity from this ticket, for when a support request turns out to be a sale. It takes the ticket’s title and company, drops it into the first open pipeline stage, and links the two so the deal remembers where it came from. Flagging the same ticket twice just points you at the opportunity you already made. It needs the Sales module switched on, and a company on the ticket.
- PDF summary — the whole ticket as a document.