Replying

Customer replies against internal notes, send and set status, and what one send actually writes.

Open a ticket from the Inbox and you get the conversation with the composer docked to the bottom of it. This page is about that composer.

Two modes, and the difference matters

The composer has two tabs.

Reply is customer facing. It goes onto the timeline as a reply and, on a channel with outbound delivery, it is sent to the customer.

Internal note is not. It is written on the same timeline so the next agent can read it, and it never leaves Auralis. The note box is tinted differently from the reply box so the two are hard to confuse.

Internal notes are always available. The reply tab is not always available, and that is the subject of the next section.

When there is no reply box

Some channels can receive messages but cannot send them. On a ticket that belongs to such a channel, the Reply tab is absent and a notice takes its place naming the one thing that would change it, with a link to Channels. Internal notes still work, because a note never needed the channel.

This is deliberate. A reply box that accepts your text and then cannot deliver it has already lost the reply.

A ticket that belongs to no channel at all, one opened by hand, raised over the API, or handed off by an AI agent, keeps its reply box. There is nothing to deliver on, so nothing to refuse.

Send and set status

The primary button does two things in one request: it posts your message, and it moves the ticket's status. It reads Send and set Pending, or Solved, or whichever status the button has picked.

The button offers the statuses this ticket can legally reach, preferring Pending, then Solved, then On hold, then Closed. The chevron beside it opens the rest of the legal choices plus Send only, which posts the message and sets no status of its own.

Both halves are one call. A send that succeeds cannot leave the ticket in the old status, and a status change that is refused does not cost you the message you typed: the whole request is refused before anything is written.

Ctrl+Enter, or Cmd+Enter, sends with the button's preferred status. Enter on its own makes a new paragraph, because a reply is prose.

Send only does not mean the status will not move

Choose Send only on an open ticket and a customer-facing reply still moves it to pending, because you are now waiting on the customer. Send only means the option sets no status of its own, not that the status will stay put. An internal note does not move the status.

What one send writes

This surprises people, so it is worth stating plainly.

A single send can write three entries on the timeline. A reply sent with Send and set Solved writes:

the reply,
a status change from the old status to solved,
and, the first time this ticket is ever solved, a CSAT request.

They are not duplicates. If you are reading the timeline, or counting events through the API, expect three from that one request.

A reply also stamps the first-response time the first time it happens, which stops the first-response SLA timer. See SLA policies.

Sending to a status the ticket already has

Choosing the status the ticket already holds is treated as doing nothing about the status. The message is still posted and answered normally. Nothing is written for the status and no status-change entry appears.

This is different from changing the status on its own from the ticket header, where naming the current status is refused. Editing a status is a status-only action, so naming the one it already has means nothing. A reply that happens to carry a status is a reply first, and it should never cost you your text.

Macros

The composer toolbar has a macro picker. Applying a macro fills in a prepared response and can also apply the field changes the macro carries. See Macros.

A terminal ticket refuses new messages

solved, closed, spam and merged tickets take no new events at all, replies and notes alike. Reopen the ticket first. See Merging, reopening and closing.

If a reply cannot be delivered

Delivery happens after your message is safely stored, never inside the same write. If the channel refuses the send, the reply is still on the timeline and the delivery outcome is recorded against it. You are not told your reply was lost when it was not, and you can see on the ticket you are looking at whether it went out.

Permissions

Replying, editing a ticket and reopening one are three separate permissions. An account that cannot post sees a notice where the composer would be rather than a dead text box. See Members and roles.