UX best practices for a help desk/ticketing system? Views and steps

I am building a "help desk/ticketing system" app from the ground up. I am quickly finding out that I am reinventing the wheel in terms of workflow for the admin and users.

Where can I find best practices for things like ticket workflows and UI flow? For example, after a user submits a ticket, what happens? Should they see a dashboard view? When does the user get an auto email stating his ticket is in the queue? Etc!