Adding the On-hold ticket status to Zendesk Support

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18 Comments

  • Kate Ambash

    Trying to understand if I'm using "on-hold" and "pending" correctly.


    When my user writes in and I send back a question, is that ticket status supposed to be "pending" (ie pending user response)?

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  • Jean Cesar Martínez

    Hi @.... Yes. The way I see it is:

    • Pending - Agent is waiting for the customer's reply. (i.e. pending for user response)
    • Open - Customer is waiting for the Agent's reply.
    • On-hold - is like an internal status that could mean whatever your organization wants. It is important to know that customers will see On-Hold status as Open from the HelpCenter. Agents will see it as On-Hold.

    I hope this helps.

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  • Mike Bielby

    Wow! this little feature has been in play for 7 years now and I'm not sure it's resolved.  It seems there is a standard use case that everyone that has a development group wants,  but you taking 7 years to understand it/develop it/issue the feature. As an agent I want to set an open ticket to "on-hold" status so that the end customer understand that the ticket is either in the Development team as a bug or a pending feature request (in other words, it's not needing any further input from the customer). We'd like this feature as we run a report of all open issues > 7 days with no input from agent. At the moment that includes all the usual suspects that are in R&D or are with Offer management as feature requests to be assessed. 'urry up with this one please. BTW it's a great product and you should be very proud. Still... we need this!

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  • Dave Dyson

    Hi Mike,

    Can you help me understand what's not working for you with the existing On-Hold ticket status? It seems like it would work for you needs – agents can set the status to On-Hold when they assign tickets to your development team, and then you can filter those tickets out of your "open issues > 7 days with no input from agent" reports. If a customer responds to an On-Hold ticket (not that they need to, but customers will sometimes ask for a status update), Zendesk will automatically change the status from On-Hold to Open so that the assignee knows the customer wants a response.

    What's missing here for you? Thanks!

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  • Mike Bielby

    Sure, and thanks for the reply. It's true the agent can set the ticket that is now being looked at by R&D, but when we review the defects weekly we want to see only "Open" and > 7 days old with no updates that are not "on-hold". It seems tickets with "on-hold"  status are treated as "Open" and so we get the "Open" and "on-hold" defects.  We don't want to see the "on-hold" ones. We are going to try something on Thursday and I'll update the community then.  Thanks for the reply.

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  • Joel Glynn

    Hi there,

    FYI the link in this heading no longer works:

    "Community Tip! Check out this tip to see how Andrew sets reminders for On-hold tickets."

    I tried to search for this manually but can't seem to find the corresponding article, does one still exist? We're looking at enabling On-hold status, and would like to understand the reminders setup but assuming this will be done with either automations or triggers.

    Thank you,

    Joel

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  • Nicole Saunders
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Hi Joel, 

    Thanks for mentioning this. We had an error that deleted a number of posts this week. We're working on restoring them, so standby, and we should have this back up and available for you again soon.

     

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  • Christy

    Hi Team,

    Just a suggestion on the status ordering.

    Currently, in our view we have New>Open>Pending>On Hold>Solved. It will be great if we move On Hold after Open, so it should be Open>On Hold>Pending. It is normally we got lots of tickets pending for client's reply but serval on internal investigation. And mostly the On Hold tickets required agents proactively follow-up action. If the order is going after pending tickets, it's no way for the agent to easily check the ticket on the first page. The first page of the current view will be flooded with pending tickets most of the time

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  • Dave Dyson
    Hi Christy –
     
    Welcome to the community! As it happens, our product team is conducting user research on custom ticket statuses, and I think your use case would be helpful information for them. There's a link to a feedback form in Gaurav's official comment here – would you mind clicking through and filling out the form? Customize Status Field Values
    Thanks! 
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  • David Brown

    I'm noticing in testing that setting ticket status to On-hold is not stopping SLA timers. I am using first reply time and next reply time SLAs. To stop SLA timers from running when a ticket may be on-hold for a prolonged period of time, is the best course of action to create a trigger to add a tag when on-hold is set, have the SLA policy check for presence of tag to apply or not apply policy, and a cleanup tag to remove the tag once status is set to anything other than on-hold? Maybe there is a simpler way, but this is what I am thinking.

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  • David Brown

    I've validated my own solution to disable SLA timers when using On-hold status. Steps to achieve this are:

    1. Set trigger - Meet All Conditions: Status is On-hold, Action add tag "on-hold"
    2. Cleanup trigger - Meet All Conditions: Status is not On-hold, action remove tag "on-hold"
    3. SLA policy - Meet All Conditions: tags contains none of the following, "on-hold"

     

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  • David Brown

    Solution to force ticket status to On-hold even with end-user update (this is also using triggers mentioned in my prior post):

    set trigger - Meet All Conditions: ticket is updated, role is end-user, comment is present, tags contain "on-hold"; actions: status is on-hold, add tags "on-hold"

    My prior cleanup trigger for status is not on-hold removes the tag "on-hold" so I add it back, this is why I am testing for presence of the tag and then re-adding it because the default Zendesk behavior is for an end-user reply to set the ticket status to Open. This has a fast bump to open and right back to on-hold. It was interesting to find that in testing my set trigger that this solution would not work if my all conditions met had status as on-hold, with everything else being the same an end-user response would flip the ticket status back to open. If however I did not check for ticket status and instead checked for presence of tag "on-hold" the trigger would flip the incoming end-user response back to on-hold. It's weird, but it works.

     



     

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  • Dave Dyson
    Hi David, 
     
    Thanks for sharing your solution – there's some information on how the On-Hold status interacts with SLAs here: Can I pause the SLA timer or reset it under certain conditions?
     
     
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  • Kelly 😇

    This link is still not working, I saw it mentioned above in 2021. Thanks
    Community Tip! Check out this tip to see how Andrew sets reminders for On-hold tickets.

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  • Colleen Hall
    Zendesk Documentation Team

    Hi Kelly 😇, thank you for pointing this out! I've updated the link.

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  • Jordan Bogart

    Our team is testing out the Agent Workspaces in a sandbox mode right now, and it seems like these instructions don't quite match up for this new view. Is On-hold now a custom ticket status, or are the instructions different for enabling the On-hold status different in Agent Workspaces?

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  • Colleen Hall
    Zendesk Documentation Team

    Hi Jordan Bogart! Do you have custom ticket statuses activated? If so, you can activate and deactivate the On-hold status from the Ticket statuses page in Admin center. Please see Activating the on-hold status category for custom ticket statuses for instructions.

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  • Jordan Bogart

    Hi Colleen, thanks for the links! I was able to find what I needed there, and successfully add the "On hold" status to our sandbox.

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