During a ticket's lifecycle, there is often a need for further questions and requests for clarification, by both the customer and the agent solving the ticket. As part of this process, a ticket's status can change multiple times. Knowing how to manage ticket status changes, including when to use each status label, can make the customer-agent relationship smoother.
This article describes different scenarios and how they can (and should) affect ticket status. It includes the following sections:
If you haven't already, you should familiarize yourself with the Zendesk Support agent interface.
Ticket status basics
There are five standard statuses you can apply to a ticket:
- New indicates that no action has been taken on the ticket. Once a New ticket's status has been changed, it can never be set back to New.
- Open indicates a ticket has been assigned to an agent and is in progress. It is waiting for action by the agent. You can view all open tickets using the Open tickets view.
- Pending indicates the agent is waiting for more information from the requester. You can view all pending tickets using the Pending tickets view. When the requester responds and a new comment is added, the ticket status is automatically reset to Open.
- On-hold indicates the agent is waiting for information or action from someone other than the requester. It is similar to the Pending status in that you as an agent can't proceed with resolving the ticket until you receive more information from someone else. However, the On-hold is an internal status that the ticket requester never sees. While a ticket is set to On-hold, the requester sees the status as Open. On-hold is an optional status, and can be activated by an administrator as described in Adding the On-hold ticket status to your Zendesk.
- Solved indicates the agent has submitted a solution.
If an admin has activated custom ticket statuses, then you may have access to additional ticket statuses, for example:
Submitting updates and changing ticket status
The Submit button applies any updates you make to a ticket (status changes, public or internal comments, and the like), and allows you to select the ticket status.
To submit updates to a ticket without changing the ticket status
- Click the Submit button.
To submit updates to a ticket and change the ticket status
- Click
to open the status options menu:
- Click the status you want to apply upon submitting the ticket.
Solving a ticket and understanding how it is closed
Once you've resolved a requester's support issue, you change the ticket status to Solved, using the Submit button as described above. This should mean that you're done with the ticket and that the requester is satisfied with the resolution you provided. However, a requester can reopen the ticket after it has been set to Solved just by responding back and adding a new comment. For example, perhaps the requester disagrees that their support issue was resolved or that something new occurred that invalidates the fix.
An administrator creates automations and determines just how long tickets remain in the solved state before they are closed. The default automation setting is that a ticket is closed automatically four days after it has been solved. If an administrator deactivates the automations that close tickets, the tickets will be closed automatically 28 days after they're solved. This 28-day rule is a system ticket rule that can't be changed. This means that any business rules created to close tickets after longer than 28 days won't be honored.
To manually change ticket to Closed, you can create a trigger as a workaround (see How can I manually close a ticket? in our Support tech notes).
After a ticket's status has changed to Closed, the requester can no longer reopen it. They can, however, create a follow-up request that references the original, now closed, ticket. Agents can also create a follow-up for a closed ticket. See Creating a follow-up for a closed ticket.
Tickets that are follow-up requests for a closed ticket are marked as such. For example:
Closed tickets are saved indefinitely. You can view the tickets by searching for them or by creating views of closed tickets. See Using views to manage ticket workflow.
You can delete closed tickets if you have permissions to delete tickets. Open each ticket and select the Ticket options arrow in the upper right, then select Delete.
You can't delete closed tickets in bulk in a view. However, an administrator can use the API to delete closed tickets in bulk. See Bulk deleting tickets in the REST API guide.
Solving a ticket with a custom status
When custom ticket statuses are activated, any tickets that are solved with a status in the Solved status category retain that ticket status even after they are closed. This helps provide context of how or why a ticket was solved.
For example, if you solve a ticket with a custom ticket status named "Refund processed" and it is then closed, the ticket retains the "Refund processed" ticket status. The ticket is still in the "Closed" state though.
Being in the "Closed" state means the ticket is closed, no longer editable, and in the Closed status category. You can use the Closed status category when creating views of closed tickets and in reporting.
There are also visual indicators that a ticket is closed. For
example, if you have a view that includes closed tickets,
then closed tickets are identified by an icon (). You can hover over the icon to view
additional information:
Additionally, you can hover over the checkbox of a closed ticket and additional information appears.
20 Comments
Hi, When a ticket to the Pending/hold status, is the clock stop ticking for resolution time? thanks
Hi Rebecca,
In regards to your concern about the pausable time for tickets being put into pending status. Once you created an SLA target, there are certain ticket statuses that will apply.
A ticket's SLA target will be paused once a ticket is put into pending. A paused SLA target is one whose metric has not yet been completed, but we’ve temporarily paused the clock.
You can check our articles below for more information about this:
Viewing and understanding SLA targets
Defining and using SLA policies
Thank you and have a wonderful day ahead!
When I put internal notes in a ticket and submit it as OPEN, because I plan to continue with more notes or a reply, my view stays on that ticket. It does not disappear or take me to a new ticket. None of my coworkers have this feature. If they put in an internal note and submit at OPEN, it takes them back to their OPEN view and they have to go back and find that ticket they were just working on. Where is this setting?
Hey Karen.
Just to the left of the submit button is a setting for 'close tab' or 'stay on ticket' . It defaults to close tab by default. Each agent can set this for themselves.
I'm being asked to track the number of tickets being "Solved" that didn't actually get "resolved." Meaning that it was an issue that we weren't able to actually fix for the user. Is there an additional field I can add to my workflow so as to identify these tickets when I do my monthly reporting?
Is there a way to identify (ideally in a report) that shows me tickets that were solved but are now open. We have a number of tickets that get solved were customers reply "thank you" or similar which re-opens them. I have no idea how many of these tickets we have in our queue but it would be good to identify any that have moved from Solved back to Open again.
You can use the default metrics Reopens or Reopened tickets under the Tickets dataset. Reopened tickets will show you which tickets have been previously solved and then eventually reopened; Reopens will return the actual count of instances where a ticket has been reopened. You can slice the query by the attribute Ticket ID if you need to check the tickets that have been reopened.
Hi,
Currently I'm having a problem with my zendesk and the problem is that whenever a end-user submitted a ticket, the ticket status will go straight into close automatically and I tried to change the tickets view but it does not work
This can typically happen if you have a trigger set up that automatically sets your ticket status to closed. I would recommend checking there to see if that's the case. More on managing triggers here: Managing triggers
You can also check the events of the ticket to see what is setting the status to closed: Viewing all events of a ticket
I hope this helps!
Is it possible to have a ticket automatically change to Pending Status when the agent replies via email?
Hey Jack,
You should be able to set up a trigger similar to the following:
I hope this helps!
Is there a way to set it so that anytime notes are put in, forms are selected, etc that it auto saves/updates instead of having to click the submit button officially "update" the ticket? I'm looking for realtime updating based off of the form on the side
That's not currently possible -- Zendesk is built around the concept of ticket updates (in effect, a call to the Update Ticket API endpoint) which is kicked off when you click the Submit button, and each time a ticket is created or updated, all the account's Triggers are run through to see if any automated changes or notifications need to be made (see About triggers and how they work for more information on that process). So creating a ticket update each time a ticket field is changed could create overhead issues.
That said, our product team is always looking for feedback -- if you'd like to share your use case behind this desire, please post to our Feedback on the ticketing system (Support) forum, using this template to format your feedback. Thanks!
Hi,
For some reason whenever I submit a ticket with a text message as either Solved or Pending, it is submitted as Open instead, and so I have to press Pending or Solved again in order to change the status. How can this be changed?
Can you check the events of the ticket and see if there's a trigger that is automatically setting the status back to open? This has been known to cause similar issues in the past in which case you would need to just edit your trigger so it doesn't automatically set the status to open after an agent updates.
Let me know!
I am currently testing triggers on sandbox. We have some tickets that solve automatically and sends an auto response. However, when I respond to an auto solved ticket, it's not reopening? Is this to do with it being sandbox rather live version? or me being an agent? I'm not sure why it doesn't reopen automatically.
Hello Katrina,
Are you replying as an agent via email? As mentioned to our inborn ticket rules:
If you wish to reopen the ticket when you reply via email, you may use mail API.
I have a minor issue where when I change the status of a ticket, the ticket stays up on my screen. It used to auto exit when I changed the status of the ticket and now its no longer doing that. Is there a fix for this?
You should see a little drop down button next to Submit as (status) where you can set to either Stay on ticket, Next ticket in view, or close tab.
If you set that dropdown field to close tab then that should exit the ticket after you save. Hope this helps!
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