Agent Permissions for Customers and Linking Tickets to CI's

[adupre01]

I am trying to setup the agent permissions so that they can create tickets, look up customer information, and link those tickets to config items in the cmdb. The problem is that if I do not give RW access for the agents to the Users group then the "Options: [ Customer ] [ Link ticket ]" located between "Subject" and "Text" in a new ticket window (email and phone) disappears regardless of what permissions I give the agents for to the group ITSM-configitem. However, I do not want these agents to have RW access to customers, only RO (so they can look but can't touch but it appears that without it then the entire option line disappears instead of just access to the customers. Does this make sense? Any solutions?
Thanks