Anatomy of a ticket – Gravity CX

Ref: A06 · Track: Agent Essentials · Time to complete: ~4 min

Why this matters

Every Zendesk ticket has the same three-column layout. Once you've mapped the parts, you can move through any ticket — email, chat, phone — without hunting for buttons.

The three columns

┌─────────────┬────────────────────────────┬─────────────────┐
│             │                            │                 │
│   LEFT      │         MIDDLE             │     RIGHT       │
│  Ticket     │      Conversation          │    Context      │
│   data      │                            │                 │
│             │                            │                 │
└─────────────┴────────────────────────────┴─────────────────┘

Left column — ticket data

Everything about the ticket, not its content: - Requester — the person who created the ticket (or whose email it came from). - Assignee — the agent who owns this ticket right now. You, hopefully. - Type — Question / Incident / Problem / Task. - Priority — Low / Normal / High / Urgent. - Status — New / Open / Pending / On hold / Solved / Closed (see A09). - Tags — free-form labels used for automation and reporting. - Followers — agents watching without owning. - CCs — third parties who get copied on every public reply. - Custom fields — whatever your admin has added (e.g. account number, region, contract type).

Middle column — the conversation

A vertical timeline of every event on this ticket: - Customer messages - Your replies (public) - Internal notes (yellow) - Status changes - Call recordings - Side-conversation emails and Slack threads

At the bottom of the timeline is the composer — where you write your next reply or internal note (see A07).

Right column — context and knowledge

A stack of collapsible panels: - Customer context — who the requester is, recent tickets they've filed, their org, any custom customer fields. - Knowledge — articles from your KB matching the ticket (see C18 for Knowledge Capture). - Side conversations — email / Slack / child-ticket threads attached to this ticket (see B11–B13). - Apps — any installed Zendesk apps your admin has added (often CRM or commerce integrations).

Tips for moving fast

Use the keyboard. ? opens the shortcut cheat sheet. Common ones: ctrl+alt+p to submit as Pending, ctrl+alt+s as Solved.
Collapse panels you don't use. The right column gets crowded; collapse apps you never open.
The requester link is clickable. Clicking the requester's name on the left opens their full user profile with every ticket they've ever filed.

Quick check — have you got this?

Where do you find the list of other tickets this customer has filed?
You need to know what type of contract this customer is on. Where is that?
You want to warn a colleague about something sensitive in the ticket without the customer seeing it. Where in the ticket does that go?

Answers

- Right column, "Customer context" panel — or click the requester's name (left column) to open their profile. - Left column — it'll be a custom field your admin added. - Middle column, composer, switch to "Internal note" (yellow). See article A07.

A07 — Public reply vs internal note
A09 — Ticket statuses explained
C18 — Knowledge Capture inside a ticket