Working with tickets

Fastpath: Click the Views icon () in the sidebar.

As an agent, your primary responsibility is to solve your customers' support requests. To do that, you work with tickets, which can arrive in various ways such as via the Help Center request form, directly through email, by telephone and text chat, and from social media such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook. The options your customers have for requesting support are called channels. Your account owner or the administrator who set up your Zendesk Support determines what channels are included.

Depending on how you manage your ticket workflow, you may manually select and assign tickets to yourself or other agents. Tickets can also be automatically assigned to you and other agents via automations and triggers, which are referred to as business rules (you can read about these workflow management tools in Streamlining your support workflow in the Administrator Guide).

This article covers the following topics:

• About the agent home dashboard
• Viewing tickets
• Expanding and collapsing your views list
• Tracking your recently-viewed tickets
• Avoiding agent collision
• Using Play mode

Related articles:

• Adding comments to tickets
• Adding attachments to ticket comments

Tip: If you want to learn more about the agent interface and agent workflows, check out the Zendesk Support for Agents training course.

About the agent home dashboard

The agent home dashboard displays information about tickets assigned to you and your groups, including open tickets and ticket satisfaction statistics. You can view the agent home dashboard by clicking the Home icon () in the sidebar.

In the main window of the dashboard is a view of tickets requiring your attention and a list of up to the last 100 updates made to your tickets.

The tickets in this list:

• Have the status New or Open.
• Are assigned to you, unassigned in one of your groups, or not assigned at all.
• Are grouped by Priority, and by the latest Requester Updated date (oldest first). If the requester updates the ticket in any way, it is moved to the bottom of the list.
• (Enterprise only) Have the lock () icon next to the status for tickets assigned to private groups.

You can click on any of the columns (ID, Subject, Requester, and the like) to sort Ascending or Descending. However you cannot customize the dashboard view.

Viewing tickets

Tickets are organized into views, groups of tickets based on certain criteria. You can preview or open tickets from your view.

Tickets in a view are preceded with a colored icon indicating each ticket's current status.

The following system ticket statuses are included by default:

• New
• Open
• Pending
• On-hold
  Note: The On-hold ticket status is available only if an admin has enabled the On-hold status.
• Solved

If an admin has enabled custom ticket statuses for your Zendesk instance, then you may see additional ticket statuses:

Depending on your permissions, you may see the Deleted tickets view. For more information, see Viewing deleted tickets.

Within a ticket, comments use background colors to indicate the type of comment, such as yellow for private comments or blue (temporarily) for comments and other ticket updates added while you're viewing the ticket. The exception is the Zendesk Agent Workspace which doesn't support blue (temporary) colors for comments.

This section provides the steps you'll take to:

• Display a ticket view
• Preview a ticket
• Open a ticket
• Return to a view
• Move to the next ticket in a view
• Submit a ticket and move to the next ticket in a view

Note: Depending on your settings, you might only be able to perform these actions on your default Your assigned tickets view. For details, see Using the Play button.

To display tickets in a view

• Click the Views icon () in the sidebar to open the Views list.
• Click the title of any view in the list to display tickets in that view.

To preview a ticket in a view

• Hover your mouse over a ticket title or a ticket status icon. The ticket preview appears:

  

  Note: Formatting applied to ticket comments does not appear in the preview. Instead, preview text appears unformatted, or as Markdown syntax (if applicable).

To open a ticket

1. Locate the ticket in the view list.
2. Click the ticket subject.

   The ticket opens in the main window.

To return to the current view from a ticket

• Click the Views icon () in the sidebar.

To go to the next ticket in the current view

• From a ticket, click the Next ticket button in the upper-right corner of the ticket.

  

  The next ticket in the current view opens, even if another agent is currently viewing it. If another agent is viewing the ticket, you will see the agent collision notification.

  Note: If you click the Next ticket button after clicking Play, the Next ticket button serves the next ticket that is not being viewed by another agent. See Using Play mode for more information.

To automatically go to the next ticket in the view when you submit a ticket

• From a ticket, click the menu to the left of the Submit button, then select Next ticket in view.

  You do not have to select this option each time you submit a ticket. Once selected, the next ticket in the view will always open when you submit a ticket update. You can chose Close Tab if you prefer to open the current view after you submit a ticket.

  

Expanding and collapsing your views list

You can expand and collapse your list of views by clicking the arrow at the top of the views list. When collapsed, the views list will auto-show when you mouse over it, and auto-hide when you mouse away from it.

When the arrow is pointing towards your Views, the list is locked. When the arrow is pointing towards your tickets, the views list will auto-show and auto-hide.

By default, your views lists are expanded.

To collapse the views list and set it to auto-show

• Click the arrow at the top of the views list.

  

Your list of views collapses.

To expand the views list and lock it

1. Mouse over the collapsed views list to auto-show the list.
2. Click the arrow at the top of the views list to lock it in place.

   The views list is locked in the expanded position.

Tracking your recently viewed tickets

You can see the last five tickets that you viewed by hovering over the +add tab in the top toolbar.

Note: The recently viewed tickets list disappears after 72 hours if there is no action taken on any of your tickets (including viewing and updating tickets).

Avoiding agent collision

Note: Agent collision is not available on Team plans.

You can tell if another agent is working on a ticket from views or directly in the ticket. This makes it easier to avoid potentially conflicting updates to tickets.

In views, an eye icon appears next to tickets that are being viewed by another agent. You can also hover over the ticket to see details:

In tickets, collision details appear in the upper left corner:

You can tell how each agent is interacting with the ticket from the formatting of their picture or by hovering over it with your mouse.

• Agents with dimmed pictures have the ticket open, but have navigated away from it.
• Agents with regular pictures are viewing the ticket but not actively editing any fields.
• Agents outlined in blue are editing the ticket

In addition to other agents viewing or editing the ticket, you can also tell if a ticket has been updated.

• If a ticket you have open has been updated, you’ll see a Ticket updated message at the top of the ticket.

  

• Click Show more to see which agent made the update.

  

• Click the close box (x) to remove the message.

To avoid collision issues, when two agents update ticket tags at the same time in a ticket, the updates are merged and all tags are included, regardless of who saved the ticket first.

Using Play mode

The Play button guides you through the available tickets in a view automatically. Press the Play button or icon to open the first ticket in the view. After addressing the ticket, click Submit to update it and automatically move to the next available ticket.

The next available ticket is the next ticket in the view according to the view's sort order (see Using views to manage ticket workflow) that you haven't already skipped and that no other agent is currently viewing. Views are also refreshed every five minutes, so you might see a ticket that wasn't part of the view when you started Play mode.

Enterprise and Enterprise Plus customers have an additional option, Guided mode, which automatically launches Play mode when an agent opens a view. If your administrator has enabled Guided mode, some of the procedures described in this section may not apply. For details, see Setting up Guided mode.

See also Troubleshooting agent collision in Play mode.

To open a view in Play mode

1. Click the Views icon () in the sidebar and select a view.
2. Click the Play button in the upper right hand to open the first ticket. Depending on your settings, you might be able to skip this step.

   

3. The first available ticket in the view opens.

To update a ticket and move to the next one

• Click Submit. The next available ticket opens automatically.

To keep a ticket open after you submit it

• By default, the next available ticket opens when you click Submit. To stay on the ticket after submitting changes, click the menu from the left of the Submit button and select Stay on ticket.

  

  Change this option back to Next available ticket before submitting your final updates so you can move to the next available ticket.

To skip a ticket and move to the next one

• Click Skip to move to the next ticket without making any changes to the current one.
• If you are in Guided mode and your administrator has configured your role, you might also be required to enter a reason for skipping the ticket. Enter a reason in the window that appears and click Skip again.