Use this article to understand when and how your customers are notified about their tickets — when a ticket is submitted, when a teammate replies, and when its status changes — and how to customize the notification email's branding and subject line. This applies to all workspaces with tickets enabled; customizing the notification email template requires permission to manage message settings.

Intercom offers three ticket categories. Each category is optimized for a core tickets use case, and has a pre-defined setting for customer visibility and notifications:

In short, a customer will always see Customer tickets, and will sometimes see Back-office tickets, but will never see Tracker tickets. While the teammate experience while working from the Inbox is different for each of these ticket categories, the customer experience is always the same to ensure consistency.

Whether the ticket is created by a teammate from the Inbox, by the customer in the Messenger, or via APIs, the customer experience is the same.

When a ticket shared with the customer is submitted:

After a ticket is submitted, the customer sees an event posted in the Messenger thread (the in-app chat widget customers use), and a ticket pill — a compact status card Fin shows inline in the conversation — appears at the top.

They are also notified via email. These ticket updates via email can be enabled/disabled from Settings > Channels > Email > Email settings in the "Email notifications" section.

You'll also need to go to Workspace > Security > Data and enable "Include conversation content in notification emails," in Settings > Workspace > Security > Data:

The customer can reply to the email directly if a follow up is needed.

When a teammate replies to a ticket that's shared with the customer, the customer is notified the same way a ticket submission notifies them:

Additionally, to ensure customers are kept in the loop and have a clear understanding of their ticket’s status, they are notified about any ticket state change.

You can style ticket notification emails to match your brand. Go to Settings > Channels > Email > Notification emails. From there click Set up to open the notification template editor. Changes are saved automatically as you edit, and take effect on the next notification email sent — emails already sent are not changed.

You can also write your own subject line for ticket notification emails. In the Notification Email section of the sidebar, use the Ticket email subject field to mix free text with the Ticket ID, Ticket type name, and Company name tokens, which appear as chips in the field. The subject can be up to 255 characters, and you can see it rendered live in the header of the email preview, or send yourself a test email to check it in a real inbox.

Customizable elements include:

Changes apply to all ticket notification emails sent after saving. The live conversation content itself is always included and can't be removed.

Each brand can have its own subject line; a brand with no custom subject set falls back to the workspace default. Once a ticket's first notification email has been sent, that email's subject stays fixed for the rest of the ticket's thread — later edits to the subject template, or renaming the ticket type, won't change the subject customers already see, so their replies keep landing in the same conversation even if your workspace has "split on subject change" turned on.