Form of initial ticket submission affects ticket structure, merging
I don't know why this hasn't been brought up before (not that I saw at least) but there is what I consider to be a pretty major oversight in the way tickets are initially created.
If a customer opens up a ticket via email, everything is fine. The text of their ticket goes into a normal reply that can be merged and retained.
If a customer opens up a ticket via the "Submit a ticket" tab on the web, the text of their ticket goes into the "Description" section. In fact, the Submit a Ticket window calls it "description".
When you go to edit the web ticket, the text within the "description" window is editable. When you go to edit the email ticket, there is nothing there.
When you go to merge the two tickets, you have to choose which "description" to merge. The other is lost, completely, as is any attachment they made to that initial web ticket.
So, why the difference in methods for initiating a ticket? It only causes potential problems down the line.
It would make more sense to have the "description" field be only a agent field, not visible to the ticket contact.
It would therefore make sense that any ticket initiation method would take whatever text and attachment was supplied and place that in the first "response" or "thread" rather than in the "description" as this is a more volatile field (i.e. it is editable and can potentially be deleted)
I have fallen into this trap more than once, where I merge tickets and lose the first submission because they did it as a web ticket. The ticket view interface presents them in much the same way, so it easy to miss. Luckily, I keep all emails so I have rarely lost information, but this to me is a hole that should be plugged