Customer emails with reply-to threading, staff alerts for new, assigned and at-risk tickets, CSAT, and auto-close.
The helpdesk keeps both sides informed automatically — customers by email, and your staff in the notification bell and by email — and closes the loop with a satisfaction survey. This article covers what gets sent, when, to whom, and how it's configured.
Customers receive email at the key moments of a ticket's life:
Every ticket email carries the ticket number ([#1042]) in the subject and sets a Reply-To back at your helpdesk inbound address. That means a customer can simply reply to the email and their response threads straight onto the ticket — no portal visit required.
The recipient name is always resolved live from the customer's contact record, so it stays correct even if their details change.
When a customer opens a ticket in the portal, the form asks How should we tell you about replies?: Email me or Only here in the portal. It starts from the email setting in their portal profile. They can change it later from the ticket page, and your team can change it either way from the ticket. Every change is written on the ticket's thread, with who made it.
The choice covers every customer email about that ticket: the confirmation, replies (including any Cc), the resolved notice, the satisfaction link and email journeys. With Only here in the portal, nothing about the ticket is emailed. Each reply shows Not emailed: the customer chose portal updates for this ticket in grey on the thread, because it's their choice, not a problem to fix.
When a reply asks Did this solve it? (a person's Send & resolve, or the AI's answer), a portal-only customer sees the question the next time they sign in. If they don't answer, it still counts as resolved after the number of days set in Helpdesk Settings, or the days the sender chose for that reply.
A CRM email opt-out is about marketing. It does not stop email about a ticket the customer opened. Do not contact and a texting opt-out still stop texts, calls, journeys and campaigns.
Your team hears about tickets through platform notifications. Each alert can reach the notification bell, email, or both, and each person chooses for themselves on Notification Preferences — every row has an In app checkbox and an email setting (Off, Straight away, Daily summary or Weekly summary). Open it from:
Someone holding the settings:manage permission also sees a Mine / Workspace default switch there. Workspace default sets what everyone gets until they choose for themselves.
Whoever runs the helpdesk (the Manage Helpdesk Settings permission) manages ticket alerts from Helpdesk → Setup → Helpdesk Settings → Staff notifications, without needing access to the workspace-wide settings. The section shows:
The Teams page (Helpdesk → Setup → Teams) shows the same reach under each team: Ticket alerts reach all 4, or how many cannot see tickets.
| Alert (as named on Notification Preferences) | Who gets it | Starts as |
|---|---|---|
| A ticket is waiting with no one assigned | The ticket's team (members and lead). With no team, the helpdesk admins. Sent for a new ticket, and when a ticket moves to a team or loses its owner with nobody assigned. | Bell |
| A ticket is still unassigned | Up the ladder: the team's lead, else the helpdesk admins — once a ticket has waited with no owner for longer than your threshold (5 minutes unless you change it). Time spent waiting on the customer does not count. | Bell and email straight away |
| A ticket was escalated to a person | Whoever owns the ticket; with no owner, its team; with neither, the helpdesk admins. If you escalate a ticket you own, it goes to your team. | Bell and email straight away |
| A customer replied on your ticket | The person the ticket is assigned to. | Bell |
| One of your tickets was reopened | The person the ticket is assigned to. | Bell |
| Any new ticket arrives | The same people, for every new ticket — including ones already assigned. | Off |
| A ticket is assigned to you | The new assignee. Not sent when you assign a ticket to yourself, or when a change leaves the assignee where they were. | Bell |
| A ticket is close to missing its SLA | Whoever owns the ticket; with no owner, its team; with neither, the helpdesk admins. | Bell |
| A ticket missed its SLA target | The same people, once per deadline. | Bell and email straight away |
| A promise on one of your tickets is overdue | The same people, once per promise. | Bell and email straight away |
| Someone mentions you | The teammate you @mention in an internal note. | Bell |
Helpdesk admins are the people with the Manage Helpdesk Settings permission — tenant admins always have it. If nobody holds it, the alert goes to everyone who can see tickets, so it never reaches no one. The person who logged a ticket is never alerted about their own ticket.
What an alert says. The ticket number and subject, the customer (read from their contact record at the time of sending), the channel, the priority, the team, and one line saying why you are getting it — "Alex assigned it to you.", "Assigned to you by your team's round-robin.", or for SLA alerts which deadline it is and when it falls due. SLA deadlines are shown in the timezone of the ticket's SLA policy. The email's Open in Karmaflow button and a click on the bell row both open the ticket.
Who was told is written on the ticket. When an alert is about a decision on the ticket, the ticket's conversation gets a line saying who it reached, from what was actually delivered — not from who was supposed to get it. That covers:
Changes made to many tickets at once from the ticket queue send one alert, and still write the line on every ticket it covered.
For example:
Copied counts the addresses under Also send to, separately from people.
The line is shown in amber when nobody could be told: no one in the alert's audience can see tickets, or the alert failed to send, and no Also send to address got it either. If you can manage Helpdesk Settings, the amber line ends with an Open Staff notifications link that takes you to the section where this is fixed.
These lines are not amber:
Customer replies and reopens do not add a line: the reply or reopen is already in the conversation. The line can take a few seconds to appear after you assign or escalate a ticket; the page picks it up on its own.
Email limits. Each person gets at most six alert emails an hour; the rest arrive in their next summary instead of being dropped. Quiet hours (on the same page) hold email that can wait until the morning. The one exception is the SLA warning: an email that would only arrive after the deadline has passed is not sent at all, because it would no longer be true — the bell row still shows it.
When an AI agent works the ticket first. If your default helpdesk agent is on (or an email agent answers your support email), a new ticket's no one assigned alert waits up to two minutes for the AI's first look. If the AI moves the ticket to another team in that time, the alert goes to that team. If the AI solves the ticket, or answers it and is waiting for the customer's Did this solve it?, nobody is alerted — the customer is not waiting on your team. If it still needs a person, the alert goes out and says the AI already looked. The still unassigned alert never goes out during those two minutes either.
Whether the alert went is written on the ticket. The ticket's conversation shows a line such as "No one assigned" alert · alerted 3 on the team (in app), or "No one assigned" alert not sent — it was answered and is waiting on the customer.
Bulk changes. Escalating or reopening many tickets at once from the ticket queue sends one alert per owner or team, listing the tickets, rather than one alert per ticket.
Escalations. When the AI agent escalates a ticket to a person, the alert goes to whoever answers for it after any team change the escalation made, with the AI's reason.
Ticket events are also orchestration triggers — for example Ticket SLA breached… and Ticket reply added — so an Orchestration can act on them too.
Customers control their own email notifications from their portal Profile:
The helpdesk respects these preferences on every send.
When CSAT is enabled (in Helpdesk Settings → CSAT & auto-close), a solved ticket invites the customer to rate their experience:
Each ticket collects one CSAT response. Scores flow into Reports, where you can see your CSAT average and — because attribution is explicit — how satisfaction differs between tickets resolved by AI and by humans.
Solved tickets don't stay open forever. Set Auto-close after N days (in Helpdesk Settings → CSAT & auto-close) and a solved ticket automatically moves to Closed after that window — giving the customer time to reopen if the fix didn't hold. Set it to 0 to never auto-close. A customer reply during the window reopens the ticket instead.