One of the major benefits to using an online customer support software to handle your customer interactions is that unlike an email inbox, the interactions in a ticketing system have a defined end-point: you mark a ticket solved. This closed loop process is important for both your company and your customers; it puts you both on the same page - an agreement that the issue or question has been resolved and ultimately closed.
But of course, there are a few steps between a customer sending a ticket and you marking it solved. To handle these various stages, all tickets can be in one of five states (or, as you'll see on all tickets, five statuses ): New , Open , Pending , On-hold , or Solved . New and Solved might be self-explanatory -- they mark the beginning of the interaction and the end -- but what about Open, Pending, and On-Hold? By understanding and making use of these statuses, you can stay on top of your support workload and bring any outstanding tickets to solved in an efficient manner.
Ticket Status can be manually set within each ticket via the Status Dropdown, located at the bottom of the ticket.
An Open ticket is defined as a ticket assigned to an agent. Open tickets are the heart of your support workload -- they indicate those issues that you're working on. Once a ticket's status has been changed from New, it can never be set back to New.
Where this begins to be important is when you set up Views , Triggers , and Automations based on a ticket's status. It is probably useful, for instance, to see a grouping of all your Open tickets; all your tickets that need to be solved.
But, of course, oftentimes to solve a ticket, you need to collect more information from the requesting customer, e.g. you need the specific text of the error that they are seeing, or you need their account number, etc. So you write them back. In those cases, you want to be able to move the ticket off the list of things that need your attention but at the same time not forget about it. This is why the Pending status is so useful; it's like saying: "This ticket is not yet solved but I'm waiting on information from the requester before I can work on it further."
The On-hold status is similar to Pending, and used to indicate that you are waiting for information or action from someone other than the requester, for instance one of your supervisors or an internal developer. On-hold is an optional, internal status. It can be enabled by an administrator, and if it isn't enabled, you will not see it in your status options. Ticket requesters do not see this status -- On-hold tickets appear as Open to your customers.
To see how these states might be useful, let's take a look at how you could set up a View that shows you all your unsolved tickets but groups them according to whether they are Open or Pending. (Views are collections of tickets that you can customize according to your support workflow.)
To set up a new View , go to Manage > Views on your Zendesk Support admin page. Click on "add view" in the upper right. We'll keep this simple and just collect all our tickets that are not solved, or in this case "Less than Solved":
Next, we'll set the Format Options to display by Table , and then choose to Group the tickets by Status:
Now, when we update and return to this view, we'll see our tickets grouped according to whether they are New, Open, Pending, or On-hold. This way, we can see those tickets where we've written back to the customer or internal expert for more information but they are separate from those that require our active attention.
When our customer or internal expert replies to us with the information we requested -- the error message or account info -- Zendesk Support will automatically change the status from Pending or On-hold to Open. So the next time we look at our "All Unsolved Tickets" view, then, that ticket will appear in our Open list, and hopefully closer on its way to Solved!
34 Comments
Do we have the ability to add a manual field option to this list?
for example: Duplicate (or closed as duplicate)
Hi Larissa -
I see that this is your first post - Welcome to the Zendesk Community! I encourage you to head over to the Welcome Thread in The Lounge to introduce yourself.
To answer your question, the ticket statuses are not customizable. There are a few workarounds, though none that change the status from the user side. Let me know if you'd like links to where other users have described how they handle it.
Hi there,
If the agent has assigned a new ticket to herself, but has not looked at the ticket - is this now an open ticket?
Hi Terrie!
Once a ticket is assigned to an Agent, it automatically switches from New to Open, unless the Agent chooses a different status, such as Pending.
I hope that helps!
Thanks, Jessie.
I would have thought, from a reporting point of view, it would be better to have it sitting as new until the agent starts working on that ticket.
Cheers,
Terrie
When a ticket is "On-hold" if a customer sends in a response - such as asking for an update, does the ticket stay on-hold or does it update to "open?"
Thanks!
Stephanie
Hi Stephanie! Welcome to the Community!
The ticket will be changed from On-Hold to Open, unless you've set up a trigger to automatically change it back. I would recommend against that; doing so would make so your agents won't know that a customer has updated the ticket.
I have been experiencing where other agents are responding to tickets in pending and it does not automatically change the status back to open.
How do I set up a trigger or automation to change status from on hold/pending back to open when the requester responds?
Hi Janiece, The expected behavior is that a ticket will set to pending while awaiting a response from a requester (customer). Pending tells the agent no action is currently needed.
When the assignee (agent) responds to the ticket, it will set to pending. Then, when the requester follows up, the ticket will be set to open.
If you want to set a status for agents who are CCed on the ticket and make a comment, you could use Current User is not end-user, and Assignee is not Current User in a trigger's conditions. That would help you narrow down that the comment was made by a third party. You may want to apply some additional conditions, based on the cases you're looking at!
Ben Koehler
Customer Advocate
bkoehler@zendesk.com
Hey Janiece,
Thanks for reaching out!
So there seem to be two parts to your question and I'll answer them in the order that they came:
Again, please note that the scenario for end user updates is different from that of agent updates, given that agents have more agency/functionality in the ticketing interface than end users do in their respective email platform.
If you were curious about setting up a trigger that automatically sets the ticket status when an agent responds to a ticket, this would be an ill advised action. Ticket updates done by agents require a level of dynamism that gives the freedom to set the ticket status according to the situation at hand. It's not always the case that agent updates should set the ticket status to open. It is, however, possible to construct triggers that set ticket status in the trigger actions based on the relevant conditions being met. So you and your team could consider constructing a trigger to set the status to open for specific use cases.
Hopefully this helps to clarify things a bit!
Hi Joe!
Thank you so much. That clarifies things a lot and makes total sense!
I think that what I am asking for is that if they respond via email and they are the requester that it automatically switches to open because they are the requester. If they are responding via email then they are unable to manually change the field back to open.
There should be some type of rule exception if the requester is not the If this is not possible to set up please let me know.
Best,
Janiece
Hey Janiece!
In cases like this, you could build a simple trigger with conditions like the following:
Meet ALL of the following conditions
Ticket is > is > updated
Comment > is > Present (public or private)
Requester > is > (current user)
Current user > is > (agent)
Actions
Status > Open
This kind of trigger would would set a ticket back to open when an agent who is the requester on the ticket responds with a comment.
Hope this helps you conceptualize a way to do this yourself, I'll be happy to clarify as needed!
Jon you are the BEST!!! This is exactly what I wanted!
Thank you!
Is there way to make "Submit As Pending" as the default option when reps are responding? Instead of having to change it for every response.
Hi Manny!
When you open a ticket, the status will display as whatever the current ticket status is. If you're having trouble with your agents forgetting to set the tickets as pending when they update, you can create/update macros to set the status for them, or you can set up a trigger to automatically change the status to pending when an agent updates a ticket with a public comment.
Hi all!
Are there any best practices that you can recommend for dealing with 289 "pending" tickets, the earliest of which dates back to Jan 2016?
I don't see any triggers that set pending tickets to automatically close or solve after a certain amount of time which is why I think they go so far back. My question is twofold; how do I deal with the backlog and what's the best way to deal with this going forward.
Also - I've been having a hard time getting clarity how tickets that are pending or on-hold affect SLA's, if at all.
Thanks!
Hi Ayal,
It sounds like what you're looking for is an automation that will fire based on the time the ticket was created. I've attached a sample automation from my test account below:
You can either use the Hours since pending or possibly the Hours since created condition and choose the time frame based on when these ticket's were originally created/set to pending.
Hope this helps!
Thanks!
I was also looking for confirmation that this - automatically closing pending tickets after x - is the kind of thing that other Zendesk users do...
Hi Ayal,
It's pretty common to have a plan in place to address those tickets that have not received a response from the requester of a ticket. Typically you can use automations that send an email reminder to the requester if you've not heard back after a certain amount of hours. We actually have a Support Tip that references this workflow which I've attached for you: Zendesk on Zendesk: Bump Bump Solve
Hopefully this answers your question but let me know if you're looking for anything else :)
If we have an automation that changes Pending tickets to Solved after X number of hours (for example 60 hours), and an agent adds a comment the next day and resubmits the ticket still as Pending status.
Would the 60 hour counter restart from the new submission or stay from the initial Pending submission ?
Hi Shiri,
The counter should restart from the new submission to pending and NOT the initial pending submission.
If you do experience anything different please let us know and we can take a look for you :)
Cheers!
Hi,
how can i create a ticket with the status NEW?
I create a ticket but i don't assign it to any agent, but it is created as open and not new.
When I create a a ticket, it always become open and not new.
Can you help me?
Thanks,
valentina
Hi Valentina,
If you view the events of the ticket do you see a trigger that's automatically setting the ticket as open?
When creating the ticket do you also see the option to Submit as new?
Let me know!
Hi Brett,
in my events of the ticket, there is amy trigger that set my ticket as open. There is only this trigger Active: "
Can you help me?
probably it depends on the fact that I am the admin and my account doesn't have no agent. In this case when i create a ticket, it become assigned to me.
Is it correct?
Hi Valentina,
If you're the only agent on the account then the ticket would automatically be assigned to you and the status would be set as Open. This is expected functionality so apologies for the confusion there!
If you intend to add additional agents, I'd recommend doing that first and then testing. The status should remain new since the ticket will not automatically be assigned to you.
Regards,
Morning,
I have an automation which sets a hold ticket back to open after 4 hours. The automation is working as expected but it returns the ticket to the individual inbox not to the unassigned inbox where i want it to be.
How do i solve this?
thanks in advance
Hi Patricia -
It sounds like you need to add an action to your automation that reassigns the ticket back to the inbox when it fires. If a ticket has been assigned to or taken by an agent, that assignment will remain until an agent or business rule changes it.
Thanks Nicole, I've done that now and it's successful
"When the assignee (agent) responds to the ticket, it will set to pending. Then, when the requester follows up, the ticket will be set to open."
Except it doesn't actually work that way. Once a ticket is submitted as Pending, for example, it stays that way no matter if it gets a response from the submitter or agent.
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