Work with Tickets

You found your way into an existing ticket, congratulations! Now let's have a look what you can do and how to do it.

Generally, working on existing tickets means keeping up with a customer correspondence in a thread/conversation in the ticket detail view. Any time you open a ticket, a new tab will appear in your navigation bar on the left side. To close a tab (in the sense of remove it from the navigation bar, not setting the ticket state to closed), just click the ✕ button in the tab. Zammad automatically saves your changes in opened ticket tabs, no matter if you already applied the changes or just edited things and switched to somewhere else. This means it is no problem to create a new ticket while editing an existing one. Simply switch back to the other tab.

For the most changes (except tags or title renaming, for example), an explicit update of the ticket is needed. So make sure to click the Update button on the right side of the footer bar when you are happy with your changes.

Changing Ticket Attributes

As you may know, there are additional ticket attributes such as group, priority and owner that you can set. If you haven't read ticket-basics yet, check it out to learn more.

Create a New Article

No matter if you create a new article from scratch or respond to a customer article, you can choose from different article types:

• Note: Write a reminder for yourself and other agents, ask a colleague a question by mentioning a user or add new information to the ticket. The default visibility is "internal", which means the customer can't see the note.
• Call: Note down a summary of a phone call you had with the customer.
• Email: Send an email to anyone about the ticket. The title of the ticket is used for the subject of the email.

To choose another article type, click the Channel dropdown and choose a different type. Click on the Visibility dropdown to change the article's visibility. Articles with "internal" visibility are displayed with a dashed blue border.

To write and edit text, make use of the powerful editor features. You can use the toolbar or keyboard shortcuts to format text and trigger special functions. Because of the amount of features and their importance, you can find more information on the separate editor page.

Every new article appears at the end of the conversation, which means below the existing articles. To see detailed information of an article, just click on an existing article which opens additional meta information.

You might wonder now how to delete articles. The answer is you can only delete articles that you have created yourself and which are not older than 10 minutes. To see the Delete article function in the ︙ menu, articles of a communication type (emails, calls) must be changed to "internal" visibility first.

Add an Article from Scratch

Click on one of the buttons at the bottom of the ticket detail view to add an article. Depending on what you choose, the article create screen gets pre-populated with the type and visibility. When choosing Add reply, the article gets sent out to the customer of the ticket. In case of an email based ticket, the email address of the customer is pre-populated.

Respond to an Article

To forward or reply to an article, use one of the response buttons under an article or in the ︙ menu. The behavior is similar to the behavior of an email client.

• Reply: Allows you to answer the article. The recipient is automatically pre-filled. The reply is sent via the same channel as the original message. This lets you easily send an answer to a customer or third party, if involved.
• Reply all: Same as above but uses all recipient addresses from the original message as recipients for your new article. Only available for email channels.
• Forward: This means you can forward the original message to a third party or anybody else. The original message and attachments are included in your new article.

Zammad even allows you to quote text from an existing article. This is especially helpful if an answer refers to different parts of the original message or the text is pretty long. This feature is limited to communication type articles like email where the response buttons are available. To quote text, simply select the text you want to quote and use the Reply or Reply all function. This adds the selected text with a timestamp in your article editor where you can answer it. You can use the quoting even multiple times to quote different parts of the text. Just select another part of the text, click on the same response action as before and it gets added as another quote to your editor. You can split quotations by using enter or shift + enter in the editor and disable quote format for your text.

Rename a Ticket

To rename a ticket, simply click on the title in the header bar and start typing. This title is used as subject in email communication and shows up in several places like overviews. Confirm with enter or click the button on the right side.

Copy Ticket Number

To copy the ticket number including a link to the ticket (e.g. to paste it in a third party chat app), use the icon next to the ticket title. It copies the complete ticket number with the ticket identifier to your clipboard, e.g. Ticket#50071. If pasting the content to a target which can handle HTML, a link to the ticket is included. If you just want to paste the ticket number, use plain pasting via ctrl shift v instead.

If you scrolled own in the ticket, hover over the collapsed header bar where you can find the button on the top left side.

But wait, there is even a keyboard shortcut for that. Simply press . and the ticket number is copied to your clipboard. To include the ticket title as well, press . twice. Example: Ticket#31004: Onboarding new colleague.

Simultaneous Ticket Processing

It can happen that two or more agents open a ticket at the same time. To prevent edit conflicts and customers receiving contradictory answers, Zammad shows you who is viewing or editing the ticket currently. You can find this information in the bottom bar where avatars of all agents are displayed.

Make sure to communicate with your colleagues to prevent these problems before they arise. Depending on the additional icon and if the avatar icon is faded, it means:

• Avatar: Another agent is viewing the ticket.
• Faded avatar: Another agent opened the ticket but is currently not actively viewing it.
• Avatar with pencil icon: Another agent is currently actively working on this ticket.

There are even more icons which represent additional states of the other agents (e.g. viewing ticket by mobile UI or is out-of-office). Just hover with the mouse if you are unsure what it means.

Ticket Actions

Additional actions are available in the ︙ menu in the ticket sidebar.

History

See a comprehensive list of updates to the ticket, performed by any user, since its creation. Useful to check who did what and when.

Merge

Migrate all messages/notes to another ticket. Useful if you have more than one ticket about a single customer issue. See Merge Tickets for details.

Change Customer : Reassign the ticket to another customer.

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You now know the basics and how to work with tickets in general. However, there are many more features in Zammad which can be very useful in your daily work. Read on in Advanced Features to learn more.