---
title: Working a Ticket
description: "The individual ticket screen is where the actual support work happens. It puts the conversation in the middle, the customer's context on the right, and a composer that can reply and set the resulting status in one action. This article…"
url: "https://rackhelm.com/documentation/working-a-ticket/"
updated: "2026-09-24"
category: Support Desk
---

# Working a Ticket

The individual ticket screen is where the actual support work happens. It puts the conversation in the middle, the customer's context on the right, and a composer that can reply and set the resulting status in one action. This article walks through every part of it and is for the agents who live on it.

## Before you start

> **Note:** Opening a ticket requires `view_tickets` *and* that the ticket is in scope for you: it is in one of your departments, it is assigned to you, or it has no department at all. A holder of `tickets.view_all_departments` — Super Admin via the `*` wildcard — sees every ticket. Replying requires `reply_tickets`; changing the properties requires `assign_tickets`; closing requires `close_tickets`; deleting or marking as spam requires `delete_tickets` and `close_tickets` respectively. Every one of those abilities carries the same scope check, so a permission on its own never lets you walk into another department's thread. See [Roles & Permissions](/docs/roles-and-permissions/).

![An open ticket showing the subject header with status, priority, department, assignee and SLA chip, the conversation thread on the left and the customer panel on the right](/wp-content/uploads/rackhelm-docs/support-ticket-view.png)
The ticket screen: header meta and SLA at the top, conversation left, customer and properties right.

## The header

Under the subject you get the ticket's status, priority, department, assignee and the date it was opened. A ticket with no department reads **None**, and an unassigned one reads **Unassigned**; both are legitimate resting states, not faults. If the ticket names a package, a **Related package** chip sits alongside them, linking to that package's admin record and carrying a status badge when the package is anything other than active.

Two buttons follow:

- **Assign to me** — sets the assignee to your account.
- **Close ticket** — shown only if you hold `close_tickets` and the ticket is not already closed. Closing emails the customer a closure notice, and assigns the ticket to you if it had no assignee.

> **Warning:** **Assign to me** has no endpoint of its own — it fills in the **Assigned agent** field in the properties panel and submits that whole form. Any unsaved change you have made to **Status**, **Priority**, **Department** or **Related package** is saved at the same time. If your own account is not in the assignable staff list you get a browser alert instead.

### The first-response SLA chip

When you have set a **Response time goal** in [Ticket settings](/docs/ticket-settings/), a chip appears in the header measuring the gap between when the ticket was opened and the *first* message written by a staff member. It reports one of four things:

| Chip | Meaning |
| --- | --- |
| **First response 2h 14m — within 8h goal** | A staff member has replied and did so inside the goal. |
| **First response 19h — over 8h goal** | A staff member has replied, but late. |
| **First response due in 45m** | No staff reply yet. Turns amber inside the final hour. |
| **First response overdue by 3h 10m** | No staff reply yet and the goal has passed. |

The chip disappears entirely if the goal is blank or zero. It measures first response only — it does not track resolution time or subsequent replies.

> **Note:** The clock is stopped by the first message that carries a staff author. An **Automated notice** has no author at all, so a suspension notice or an auto-close warning sitting at the top of a thread does not count as your first response and the chip keeps counting down.

## The conversation

Messages and internal notes are interleaved in one chronological thread, oldest first. Customer messages sit on the left with a grey **Customer** tag; staff messages sit on the right with a blue **Support** tag. Internal notes are full width on a yellow background with the ribbon "Internal note — not visible to the customer".

Message bodies arrive as HTML — customers use a rich-text editor and inbound email is HTML — so each one is sanitised and rendered inside an isolated container. That stops a customer's email styling from leaking into the admin theme and stops any script surviving into your session. Attachments on a message appear as chips underneath it, showing the original filename and size in KB; clicking one downloads it.

### Automated notices

Some messages on a thread were written by the platform, not by a person: the overdue-suspension notice, the "domain renewal failed" notice, and the message the **Auto Close Tickets** job leaves when it closes a stale ticket. These carry neither a staff author nor a customer author.

![A ticket thread with a message labelled Automated notice carrying a System tag and a bell avatar, sitting on the support side of the conversation](/wp-content/uploads/rackhelm-docs/support-ticket-automated-notice.png)
An authorless message reads **Automated notice** with a **System** tag, on the support side of the thread.

They are shown on the support side of the conversation, headed **Automated notice** with a **System** tag and a bell in place of initials. The customer sees the same wording in their portal, labelled **Automated notice** rather than being told they wrote it.

> **Note:** Until 1.0.1.1 these messages were treated as customer messages because they have no author, so staff saw them as **Unknown User** and the customer saw them as **You** — a suspension notice appeared to have been written by the suspended customer. If you are reading an old thread, that is what those entries were.

The first message on an *add-on setup request* ticket is the exception: it is deliberately attributed to the customer, because it restates what they ordered. Only the department it lands in is automatic — see [Ticket settings](/docs/ticket-settings/).

## Replying

The composer has two tabs. You only see a tab you have the rights to use; if you can use neither, the composer is hidden altogether.

![The composer showing the Reply to customer and Internal note tabs, a canned reply selector, the rich-text editor, the attachment field and the split Send button](/wp-content/uploads/rackhelm-docs/support-ticket-composer.png)
The composer, with the canned-reply selector above the editor and the split **Send** button below it.

1. Optionally pick a saved reply from **Canned reply**. It is inserted *at the cursor*, never replacing what you have already typed, and its `{variable}` placeholders are filled in from this ticket. See [Canned replies](/docs/canned-replies/).
2. Write the reply in the editor. Bold, italic, lists, colours, links and a code view are available.
3. Attach files if you need to. Allowed types and the size cap come from [Ticket attachments](/docs/ticket-attachments/).
4. Press **Send**, or open the caret next to it to choose what the status should become.

### Send and set status

The caret menu decides the ticket's status the moment the reply is stored:

| Option | Effect | Requires |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Send, keep status** | Posts the reply and leaves the status untouched. | `reply_tickets` |
| **Send & set awaiting reply** | The default. Marks the ticket as waiting on the customer. | `reply_tickets` |
| **Send & set open** / **Send & reopen** | Sets the ticket back to Open. Labelled "reopen" when the ticket is currently closed. | `assign_tickets` |
| **Send & put on hold** | Sets the ticket to On hold. | `assign_tickets` |
| **Send & close ticket** | Posts the reply, closes the ticket and emails the closure notice. | `close_tickets` |

When the ticket is already closed the button defaults to **Send & reopen** and a banner reminds you that replying will reopen it. The status you choose is authorised *before* the message is written, so a transition you are not allowed to make never half-applies.

### What RackHelm adds to your reply

- The message is sanitised with HTML Purifier on the way in — the note "Sanitised on send" under the composer refers to this.
- Your **ticket signature** is appended automatically, with `{Staff member name}`, `{Staff member role}` and `{Company name}` resolved. Configure it in [Ticket settings](/docs/ticket-settings/).
- If the ticket has no assignee and **Auto-assign on reply** is on, you become the assignee.
- The customer is emailed a "reply posted" notification a few seconds later, and the reply is written to the activity log as "Staff posted a reply."

## Internal notes

An internal note is plain text visible only to staff, stored separately from the conversation and never emailed. Adding one writes the note's text into the ticket's activity log. There is no screen for editing or deleting a note once it is posted.

> **Warning:** Internal notes are effectively **Super Admin only**. The `addStaffNote` ability they are gated on has no policy method and no matching permission you can grant from the Roles screen, so it resolves to deny for everyone except Super Admin, who passes every gate. A Support Agent or Administrator sees the existing notes on the thread but has no **Internal note** tab. Plan on notes being a manager-level tool until that changes.

## The customer panel

The right column opens with who you are talking to: name, email, the month they joined, and three counters — **Tickets** (all time), **Open** (everything not closed and not awaiting guest verification) and **Services** (their active order items). **View full profile** jumps to the customer record.

Below that, **Recent tickets** lists up to four of the customer's other threads with status and age, and **Active services** lists up to five active services with status and renewal date. Both are shortcuts for the question "is this the same problem again, and what are they actually paying us for?"

> **Note:** The counters and the **Recent tickets** list are scoped to what you may see. If you are not a holder of `tickets.view_all_departments`, a customer with threads in another department will show a lower **Tickets** count here than a Super Admin sees. That is deliberate — the panel must not leak other departments' subjects.

## Ticket properties

The properties form is the full-fidelity way to change a ticket.

| Field | What it does |
| --- | --- |
| **Status** | Open, Pending, On hold, Awaiting reply or Closed. Choosing Closed requires `close_tickets` and emails the customer. |
| **Priority** | Low, Medium or High. |
| **Department** | Moves the ticket. Moving it out of your own departments removes it from your queue. A ticket that currently has no department — or one whose department has been deleted — gets an extra **— No department —** option, selected by default. |
| **Related package** | Only shown when the package picker is on ([Ticket settings → Ticket form](/docs/ticket-settings/)). Lists the ticket owner's own packages plus **— None —**, so staff can attach, correct or clear the link after the fact. |
| **Assigned agent** | Any staff account, or **— Unassigned —**. Non-staff accounts are rejected by the server. |

> **Note:** All the fields submit together, so **Update details** always saves the current state of the whole panel. Closing a ticket that has no assignee assigns it to you.

> **Warning:** **Department** is one-way. A blank leaves the ticket's department as it is, and a ticket that already *has* a department must keep one — the field becomes required. You can file an automatic ticket into a department, but you cannot take it back out again from this screen.

A department change is written to the ticket's activity log as *Department changed from 'X' to 'Y'.* A ticket that had none reads *from 'Unknown'*, because there is no department record to name.

If **Notify assignee** is on in Ticket settings, assigning a ticket to someone else emails them. Assigning a ticket to yourself never sends an email.

## Mark as spam and delete

The last card holds the two destructive actions.

- **Mark as spam** adds the customer's email address to the global spam blocklist *and* closes the ticket. The confirmation names the address it is about to block. See [The spam filter](/docs/support-spam-filter/).
- **Delete ticket** moves the thread to the trash, where it can be restored. See [The ticket queue](/docs/the-ticket-queue/).

> **Warning:** Marking as spam blocks that address for *every* department, not only yours, and silently drops all of its future inbound mail. Never use it on a real customer who has merely been rude — close the ticket instead. It is also useless on an **\[UNVERIFIED SENDER\]** ticket: the address it blocks is the ticket owner's, and those tickets are owned by the shared `unverified-sender@unverified.invalid` placeholder, which no mail ever arrives from. Block the real address from **Support → Spam Filter** instead.

## Troubleshooting

| Symptom | Cause and fix |
| --- | --- |
| No composer at all | You hold neither `reply_tickets` nor the internal-note ability for this ticket. |
| No **Internal note** tab | Expected for anyone but Super Admin — see the warning above. |
| No SLA chip | **Response time goal** is blank or zero in Ticket settings. |
| The SLA chip still counts down although a message is already on the thread | That message is an **Automated notice** or the customer's own. Only a staff-authored message stops the clock. |
| "Send & close ticket" missing from the caret menu | You do not hold `close_tickets`. |
| A message reads **Automated notice** and has no author | Expected: the platform wrote it (suspension, failed renewal, auto-close). There is nobody to reply to on that message. |
| No **Related package** field in the properties panel | The package picker is **Off**, or the `tickets.order_item_id` column is missing on this install. See [Ticket settings](/docs/ticket-settings/). |
| Department reads **None** | An automatic ticket filed with no department, or one whose department was deleted. It is visible to every staff member until you move it. |
| A reply is rejected because of an attachment | The file is over the size cap or its extension is not in the allowed list. See [Ticket attachments](/docs/ticket-attachments/). |
| "Your account is not in the assignable staff list." | Your role is not flagged as a staff role, so you cannot be an assignee. |
| 403 "This ticket belongs to another department." | The ticket is outside your departments and is not assigned to you. Ask a Super Admin to move it or assign it. |
| Formatting from a customer's email looks plain | Message bodies are sanitised and rendered in isolation on purpose; scripts, event handlers and page-level styling are stripped. |