During a ticket's lifecycle, a there is often a need for further questions and requests for clarification, by both the customer and the handling agent. As part of this process, a ticket's status can change multiple times. Knowing how to manage ticket status changes, including when to use which 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 enabled by an administrator as described in Adding the On-hold ticket status to your Zendesk.
- Solved indicates the agent has submitted a solution.
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.
After you set a ticket to Solved, the next status is Closed. However, you can't manually change a ticket to Closed; it is set to that status using a predefined business rule called an automation (see Support default automations). An administrator creates automations and determines 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 is closed automatically 28 days after they're solved.
To manually change tickets 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.
8 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.
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