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What is the difference between a Solved ticket and a Closed ticket?

Zendesk Team
  • Edited

Question

What is the difference between a Solved ticket and a Closed ticket?

Answer

Tickets are set to solved first, and then, after a pre-defined amount of time, they move to closed status. The major differences between solved and closed tickets are below.

  • Solved tickets can be reopened and updated. Tickets in solved status, that are not closed by a trigger or automation, are automatically closed after 28 days through a system action.
    solved ticket status
  • Closed tickets are locked. They can't be reopened or updated in any way. Tickets can be closed by a trigger or automation, but not by agents. If an end user responds to a closed ticket, it will create a follow-up ticket. A closed ticket moves to an archived state automatically after 120 days. See the image below for an example of a closed ticket in search results in an account without custom ticket statuses enabled.
    Closed ticket in older account interface.jpg
    This ticket is closed and cannot be edited
      • When you enable custom ticket statuses, closed tickets retain a custom or default solved ticket status after they are closed. The closed tickets will also display a symbol that they are closed. You can use the search operator status:closed to filter for these tickets once they are archived. See below for an example of a closed ticket in search results in an account with custom ticket statuses enabled.
        Closed ticket in search results.jpg

By default, Zendesk contains an automation called Close ticket 4 days after status is set to solved that gives your customers four days to respond to a solved ticket before moving the ticket to the closed status. The best practice recommended by Zendesk is to close a ticket after three to five days. However, you can adjust this automation to run anywhere between one hour and 28 days.

In accounts with custom ticket statuses enabled, Closed tickets display a custom or default Solved status.

For more information on the other ticket statuses, see the article: About open vs. pending and on-hold tickets.

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6 Comments

  • Rob Bruggner

    Hi Zendesk - How can we assign new meta-data to closed tickets?

    Motivating use-case: We have a large number of tickets from the past 12 months and would like to now go back and classify them into different ticket types (ideally using tags) so we can see the volume of tickets, by type, for the past 12 months. We can do this with "solved" tickets. However, a large number of those tickets are now "closed" and it doesn't appear as though I can assign tags to closed tickets.

    How would we go about tagging closed tickets with additional meta-data/tags to enable examination of our historic ticket volume?

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  • Dave Dyson
    Hi Rob,
     
    Closed tickets cannot be edited: see Can I edit closed tickets?
     
     
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  • Rob Bruggner

    Thanks Dave. Does you know if there's a way to address the use-case (i.e. add meta-data to closed tickets so we can analyze/view trends in Zendesk dashboards) or is there no way to do this in Zendesk?

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  • Dave Dyson
    If it's possible to map your old deprecated ticket field values to new ticket field values, you could use standard calculated attributes in Explore to create new attributes based on any combination of tags associated with deprecated or current ticket field values.
     
    For example, let's say your deprecated dropdown values included "Value A" which by default would use the tag "Value_A", and in the new version of your ticket field, you'd like all "Value A" tickets to be considered "Value B" (tag: "Value_B"). You could create a standard calculated attribute that includes tickets that contain either the tags Value_A or Value_B and thereby report on them together. 
     
    See "Reporting on ticket tags using standard calculated metrics and attributes" here: Reporting with tags
     
    I realize that may not work for you, depending on the nature of your field(s).
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  • Scintex Support

    Is it possible to increase the time period from 28 days when a solved ticket automatically changes to closed? The issues we're using Zendeck to track will often exceed 28 days as often parts will need to be ordered in for customers from overseas. We end up with all these new tickets on the same issue and it gets very confusing and difficult to follow. We merge tickets to retain the history but it would be far better and easier if we could increase this 28 day value. Is there any reason this couldn't be a user defined value?  

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  • Gabriel Manlapig
    Zendesk Customer Care
    Hi Scintex Support,

    As of the moment, tickets can be closed earlier than 28 days, but not extended past that time. The way additional responses to that ticket are handled after it closes would be through reopened tickets.

    We found this article "Can I stop a ticket from closing after 28 days?" and it specifies we can't stop tickets from closing out. This is part of our system design. Keeping tickets open in any capacity in your account will cause performance issues when our system has to go through all the open tickets in your views. 

    I hope that answers your question. Thank you!
     
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