Zendesk supports a set of standard ticket statuses which are used to help you manage your ticket workflows. Activate custom ticket statuses to create additional, more-specific ticket statuses.
Make sure you understand how activating custom ticket statuses affects other features in your account, such as your business rules and the agent experience.
This article includes these sections:
- Activating and deactivating custom ticket statuses
- Understanding how custom ticket statuses impact your account
- Understanding how custom ticket statuses impact the agent experience
Related articles:
Activating and deactivating custom ticket statuses
You must be an admin to activate or deactivate custom ticket statuses.
To activate custom ticket statuses
- In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Ticket statuses.
- Click Activate custom ticket statuses.
You may want to review your triggers, automations, macros, and views based on standard ticket statuses and make sure you’re happy with how they were automatically updated.
Now, you're ready to create custom ticket statuses (see Creating custom ticket statuses).
To deactivate custom ticket statuses
- In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Settings.
- In the Customize Ticket Statuses section, deselect Turn on.
- Click Save tab.
- Review your triggers, automations, macros, and views
based on ticket statuses.
You may need to make some adjustments. For example, any instances of the Status category and Ticket status condition in your triggers will be automatically converted to the Status condition.
Understanding how custom ticket statuses impact your account
Zendesk supports a set of standard ticket statuses which are used to help you manage your ticket workflows. These standard ticket statuses are used in your default triggers and other automations that are based on status changes in a ticket.
When you activate custom ticket statuses, the existing standard ticket statuses — New, Open, Pending, On-hold (if activated), Solved, and Closed — become status categories.
A status category is a logical group of similar ticket statuses; it includes at least one default ticket status and can contain multiple ticket statuses.
Status categories, and the initial default ticket statuses inside of each status category, are named after the standard ticket statuses. The example below shows your initial default ticket statuses organized into their respective status categories:
Custom ticket statuses are created within these status categories. For example, you could create a custom ticket status in the Open category that describe why a ticket is open, such as Open - New customer or Open - Existing customer:
You can change the default ticket status of a status category, if needed. Every ticket status, including both standard and custom ticket statuses, belongs to a status category. You can’t create or edit status categories, and you can’t move ticket statuses from one status category to another.
The status category you use to create a new ticket status controls the state of the ticket and is dependent on the system ticket rules. All ticket statuses, including both standard and custom statuses, are dependent on these rules.
When you activate or deactivate custom ticket statuses, the status of your tickets are automatically updated based on status categories. For example, if you created a custom ticket status called Open Investigating in the Open status category, assigned it to several tickets, but then deactivated custom ticket statuses, the status of all those tickets is changed to Open.
How custom ticket statuses impact existing business rules
When you activate custom ticket statuses, the ticket status conditions and actions in your existing triggers, automations, macros, and views are automatically updated from Ticket: Status to Ticket: Status Category. The Ticket: Status Category condition and action uses the default ticket status of the status category, where applicable.
In the example below, the default automation "Close ticket 4 days after status is set to solved", contains the condition "Ticket: Hours since solved" and action "Ticket: Status Closed":
After you activate custom ticket statuses, the automation is updated to the condition "Ticket: Hours since status category solved" and action "Ticket: Status category closed":
It's recommended to review your existing triggers and other business rules after activating custom ticket statuses. Edit the "Ticket: Status Category" condition or action to "Ticket: Ticket status" as needed.
Understanding how custom ticket statuses impact the agent experience
When you activate custom ticket statuses, you and your agents will see a variety of changes to other features, including:
- Selecting a status from the status picker in the ticket interface
- The appearance of ticket statuses in views
- Searching for tickets based on ticket statuses
- Tickets in the "Closed" state retain the solved status (see About closed tickets solved with a custom ticket status)
- Tickets in the “Closed” state appear in search results if your search terms are included in their subject line or comments. See Searching Zendesk Support data.
85 comments
Josh
This is a great feature. I am unable to see it though.
Also, it would be great to have some examples in the "Zendesk on zendesk" series on how this helps for some examples.
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Sara Beaudet
Echoing Josh's comment above. I'm super excited about the custom ticket statuses, but it isn't showing up on my account either.
Edit: We haven't enabled Agent Workspaces which is likely why. It might be nice to throw that requirement in a callout for folks, I glanced over it without much thought
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Colleen Hall
Hi Sara Beaudet,
Thank you for your feedback! That's a good point. I'll make the Agent Workspace requirement more visible at the beginning of the article.
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Martin Sachs
This is indeed very exciting. We are heavy users of the Jira integration and use the post function on the jira side to reopen Zendesk tickets when they transition to certain statuses in Jira. I assume this uses the API. Will this integration continue to work as expected once activated since I don't imagine the UI in Jira will NOT update to reflect categories vs status?
Similar question for the Salesforce Integration. ZD Tickets are sync'd to SFDC cases - will the new status vs categories be fields we can sync in that integration?
0
Jacquelyn Redington
Will there be enhancements to change the color of a ticket status?
We currently have 2 custom statuses "with light agent" and "response received". I created a rule to have ticket status changed automatically when a comment is added by a light agent so that the full agent is aware that an update has been made. It would be nice to see if we could change the color of response received to something different.
3
Carey O'Neil
Are we able to report on the time a ticket is in a custom status? For example, if we create two custom "Open" statuses of "Working" and "Unassigned," could we report specifically on how long a ticket sits in "Working"? Up until now, I believe we're only able to report on the ticket status category.
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Phil Gates
Nice Feature. Thanks!
Question: I noticed activate and deactivate. Can you delete a custom status?
0
Colleen Hall
Hi Carey O'Neil,
You can report on custom ticket statuses now. Please see Metrics and attributes in Zendesk Support for more information.
Hi Phil Gates,
Custom statuses can't be deleted at this time. If you deactivate a custom status, it won't be available in the status picker and agents won't be able to use it. You can also edit a custom status and change its name, description, etc.
Thank you both for your questions! I hope this helps!
0
Daniel
Colleen Hall can you provide an example of a report that shows custom statuses? the link you sent hasn't helped me unfortunately
0
Max Hunter
Is there a way to create custom ticket statuses that would only be visible for certain groups or forms? I could see the list of statuses to choose from becoming quite large as custom statuses are created for different scenarios/forms.
18
Adam
Is it possible to group views on Ticket Statuses? I can only see a way to group by status category which means we cannot build views based on the new custom status where we want to group tickets based on these new custom statuses...
2
Colleen Hall
Hi Daniel,
Yes, we do have an example of a report that show's custom ticket statuses in the Explore Recipe: Creating KPIs for tickets by status.
For other reporting questions, such as reporting on custom ticket status duration, please note that this isn't possible at this time; however, you can add your feedback in the Explore community. Our product managers review suggestions submitted in this forum for consideration in our future updates!
0
Colleen Hall
Hi Adam,
You can create views based on the Ticket status condition and select one or more ticket statuses:
You can also create views with the Ticket: Hours since [custom status name] condition:
Please see Creating views to manage ticket workflow for more information. I hope that helps!
0
Adam
Hi Colleen, thanks for your reply. I was aware of creating views based on this, but what I was specifically asking about was being able to group an existing view by the custom status. As far as I can tell, this hasn’t been added, and we only have the option to group by status category…
1
Alexus L. Gammage
Max Hunter brings up a good point. We have several tiers in our company and it would be useful to give each group their own set of statuses due to each group having different task to complete.
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Colleen Hall
Hi Adam,
I apologize, I definitely misunderstood your question! Our product team is looking into this so I've opened a ticket on your behalf in the meantime until we have an answer.
0
Adam
Thanks Colleen Hall I see the ticket and will await their response. Seems like an obvious omission considering you can group on any custom field you like...
0
Jacob Hill
Can we limit the statuses to specific ticket forms? This would help me build out a change request process. The other ticket forms don't need to see the "Pending Approval" status for example.
The next step here is allowing us to build a workflow for these ticket statuses and forms! :D Can't wait to see what happens next, thank you!
10
Adam
Couldn’t agree more about being able to link custom statuses to specific forms. Would be a game changer for our use case as well…
4
Jacob Hill
When will we be able to reorder the statuses that we have created?
1
Testing Only
Hello!
Great feature, but it'd be absolutely amazing to be able to change the color of the label seen in the agent workspace. It's pretty confusing to have the same color as an already existing ticket status.
If possible to be kept up to date on this specific request, that'd be lovely. Thanks!
4
Dane
Thank you for providing feedbacks and recommendation. This will definitely be looked into by our Product Managers for roadmap planning.
Hi Jacob,
The custom status is account wide and for all tickets.
0
Adam
Dane
Just to give my feedback. To take this great new feature to the next level in my opinion the following would be amazing and I think all have been mentioned:
This in addition to my previous comment about being able to group ticket views by status (and not status category) would provide an absolutely amazing ability to customise our solution for our agents and customers.
Thanks for listening and delivering great new features!
14
Lisa Grant
I am also unable to see this new feature. We are on the Professional plan so not sure why I don't see the ability to enable.
0
Dane
You need to enable Agent Workspace for the option to appear. I took the liberty of checking your account and AW is currently disabled.
0
Shu Anne Tio
hi, after activating custom statuses we are no longer able to see if a ticket is Closed.
All solved tickets are shown as Solved, regardless if the ticket can be reopened or not.
Is there a way around this?
*we do not want our agents to be able to select the status as Closed, but we want to be able to see if a ticket can still be reopened
2
Dane
This is currently the expected behavior. As a workaround, you can create a view where it will show Solved tickets that is not yet closed. One of our Product Managers also provided a good explanation on this current behavior. They are also looking for different ways to differentiate such statuses.
1
Richard Bailey
I agree that this system would be more useful if we could limit it to either certain brands, groups so the list of conditions could be tailored to different workflows without becoming too large. Maybe consider using the same nesting programming that already exists for macros, articles, etc...
8
Shu Anne Tio
hi Dane Thanks for the reply. I'm not able to access that link. Possible to share more info here?
0
Michael Ciraco
Features we need to be able to implement this. We are a LARGE enterprise, and have been waiting for this flexibility for many years and appreciate the movement forward, but it has gaps preventing reasonable implementation.
- custom ticket statuses must be able to be tied to forms, roles, groups, and or custom field we use called "brand field" so custom statuses only appear on certain forms or based on this custom field. Preferable all of the above. Having users have to select from a list as long as we would use to eliminate more than 100+ automations and triggers that use custom tags to simulate what we were missing to this point is not viable.
- triggers and automations that can use "less or equal" like functions on status checks within a status category. Better yet, let us rearrange all statuses to our desire in a priority order.
- remove the requirement for use of agent workspace. Though we'd like to get there, our org is so complex this would take substantial effort and retraining of thousands of staff and adjustments to countless integrations.
- allow us to set an icon and ticket color unique to each status. even if it was just 3 characters it would be sufficient.
- return the status of closed, preserving the last status of solved as indicated above, or, allow custom solved statuses we can use automations to set specifically.
20