Customize Status Field Values

Completed

152 Comments

  • Official comment
    Gaurav Parbat
    Zendesk Product Manager

    Hey Everyone, 

    I am happy to let you know that Custom Ticket Statuses is now GA! Any customer on the Agent Workspace will have access to CTS and can use the feature in their Trial, Production, and Sandbox accounts.

    The Announcement & Documentation can be found here.

    Customers can now create new ticket statuses based on their business needs, use them in SLAs, Omnichannel routing, Automations, Triggers, Views, and report on them in Explore. 

    Post GA, we are focusing on adding more functionality such as deleting custom statuses, modifying status columns in views, and building support workflow specific statuses so processes such as Finance Review, Refund Requests, HR onboarding each can have a sub set of statuses unique to their workflow. All of these features will be delivered in 2023.

    Thank you for your patience and help in building this feature!

    Best Regards,

    Gaurav Parbat

  • thomas osowski

    I'd like to have a few 'place holder' status values that represent the progress of the ticket.  As we will likely integrate w/ a bug tracking system, it would be nice to have a In Progress and Pending Release.  These would react to customer actions by changing to Open as per existing Status.

    Additionally, I'd also like the ability to rename a Status, such as Pending to With Customer.  That said, this isn't a deal-breaker in our eval, but a nice to have.

    9
  • Peter Sterkenburg

    I neeeeeed this. For our workflows and for reporting afterwards.

    I want to edit the Status field and add some new ones. Dividing up further. We have several other departments that hook into tickets and I want to make sure not everything just ends up on one big pile.

    To try to work around it I made a new dropdown list of statuses, but as I cannot disable the system one it is useless anyway.

    4
  • Maykel Rodriguez

    This would be a great feature. Any plan to support this? For example, there are some tickets that don't require an immediate response or they depend of an action that will occur in the future or we just need to follow up with the client after several days to confirm the problem is fixed, having different status values for these situations would help us responding each ticket in an optimal way.

    6
  • Erin the mentor

    Hi all,

    While we are still not planning to allow custom or renamed statuses, we are ready to open up our beta for a new status called "On-hold."  On-hold means the ticket is waiting on some third party other than the requester or assignee.  If you're interested in participating in this beta, please fill out the form below.

    https://zendesk.wufoo.com/forms/status-onhold/

    Thanks,
    Erin 

    -2
  • Matt Picio

    Hi Erin,

    The form you linked is no longer accepting submissions.  What is the status of that feature?  Does Zendesk plan to implement it, or were the results of that beta unfavorable?

    2
  • Erin the mentor

    Hi Matt,

    The new On-hold status is now available in production, you just need to enable it by going to Manage > Ticket Fields > Status.  Here's a link to the announcement:  https://support.zendesk.com/entries/22433218-introducing-the-new-on-hold-status

    Best,
    Erin 

    -2
  • Janet Del Aguila

    Just checking in to see if anything has changed in allowing 'custom' values for the Status field. Has this request been retired? Thanks!

     

    2
  • Tyler Gould

    We would also like this feature.

    1
  • Colin Piper

    It appears that I have not commented on this thread regarding the 14 status values I use. It is not too difficult to create your own custom status field however there are some drawbacks. Primarily that only the official status values will be displayed to the customer. Likewise, unless you use Cloudset, the submit button in the agent interface will continue to display the system status values. Cloudset have an app that actually addresses the agent interface item.

    I found that my customers were too confused by 14 possible statuses so mapping these back to the system status fields using triggers actually solved that. the custom status may be something like "Pending Release" but the value displayed to the customer is "Open" or "On Hold". This may not be true for you and your customers however.

    I just told me agents to set the custom field and click on the submit button without changing it and the status will update automatically. They were ok with that. 

    If you would like more details on what I set up then I will be happy to share more. 

    4
  • Suresh Kumar

    Hello Erin,

    Is there way we can upgrade and customize our status field. I know custom fields are available, but we would like to have a transparent status with our clients to reduce to confusion. We have at least 10 internal status linked to 4 major group that you have in Zendesk. 

    Please advise.

    Regards,

    Suresh

    3
  • Erin the mentor

    Hi Suresh,

    No, we don't allow any customizations of the Status field.

    Best,
    Erin

    -6
  • Ted Duffy

    Erin,

    Why? What's the argument for denying users the ability to create different 'buckets' to keep track of work in?

    6
  • Melissa

    I'd like to create a custom ticket status field called "In Process" which would help agents and managers better sort and identify tickets that have moved from a "Pending" status once the customer responds. Currently these tickets are given an "Open" status, which is cumbersome for agents dealing with a high volume of open tickets. 

    Since ZD doesn't seem inclined to listen to our requests for custom status fields (something supported by the majority of their competitors), can anyone recommend a workaround? 

    3
  • Colin Piper

    Melissa, I am sure I have posted here before about the fact that I have 17 status values. I use a custom field to manage it all. On one of my deployments I have Cloudset that has a Custom Status app and does an excellent job in the background, on another I just use triggers. 

    The main note is that unless you plan to hack the Help Center pages then this custom value will not be visible to customer, only the system value. In my case I only want the distinction internally so I use the system values externally.

    I can elaborate if you need.

    0
  • Christina Doane

     Colin,

    I would like to learn more about how you set up custom status codes.

    Can you reach out to me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinadoane?

    Thanks,

    Christina

    0
  • Danial Schaffer

    I think that having some customization to the status' would be beneficial to our workflow. Has their been any plans in the works to add this feature?

    3
  • iMIS 20-100 Support

    Hi Colin,

     

    I would like to learn more about what you did as well. 

    I need to add an internal status so that we know that a client ticket is being held open until development is complete. 

    It's not typical but we are tracking to see the rate at which we can close these tickets. 

    I would only need to add one more status internally. Having it remain as 'open' or 'on hold' externally would be sufficient. 

    Can you please help?

    kdrosos@advsol.com

    Thanks,

    Kristina

    0
  • Colin Piper

    @Christina, first an apology, I did not see your request and sadly no one point it out to me.. 

    All, below is a flow of how I use my custom status field. I use the CloudSet Custom Status field to sync the custom field to the system field and the colour coding in the flow matches the system status values. Although I only show one On-Hold status, I actually have several allowing me to create views by who I am waiting on. External teams, developers, account managers etc etc. I used to do this with another field but agents found it too difficult to set two fields.

    Where I have a clock, this is an indication that an automation is used to move things through the workflow.

    One other small change in my production workflow is that the "Updated by Customer" now reflects the previous status, this way I can move things back to the previous status with ease if needed. Especially On Hold. 

    1
  • Gortemaker Coen

    Currently i'm also facing a process flow dilemma. Let me explain it.

    Currently the status a ticket can have is, open, pending, on-hold, solved, closed.

    Our interpretation is as following

    Open, the customer asks something and an agent need to respond

    Pending, we are waiting for a customer reaction.

    On-hold, it’s at a 3th party at the agents side.

    Solved / closed is self-explanatory.

     

    The only thing we are missing, maybe because we want to use the system differently than the process flow it was designed to.

    Because we use triggers based on when a ticket is pending a customer will get a email and needs to respond. And after 10 days the ticket will be set to solved.

    But when a customer needs to do something which is planned in 15 days the ticket will be closed or we will have it on “open” which is not something we want.

    So I would like to see something like “in progress” which means it’s planned to be done by the user. The end-user needs to be able to set this status himself.

    And we want to see the difference from the statuses in a glance in the views from the agent.

    The new status field will then look like:

    Open, the customer asks something and an agent need to respond .

    In Progress, a customer has something planned in. This is an action that needs to be done by the end-user, like scheduling work.

    Pending, we are waiting for a customer reaction.

    On-hold, it’s at a 3th party, a programmer or such at the agents side.

    Solved / closed is self-explanatory.

     

    So for our needs it's really important to have a bit more flexibility in the status field of Zendesk. 

    2
  • Colin Piper

    It sounds like you need the "Pending customer update" status that I have in my chart above. Ithen modify my chasing notification to not chase on this status value.

    I have not heard even a whisper that Zendesk will be allowing customers to customize the system status values and given the possible impact on reporting and help center, it does seem a little unlikely. Therefore adding a custom field and using triggers to keep this all in sync (or Clousdset) seems the best approach.

    0
  • Gortemaker Coen

    well "pending customer update" is like the normal pending state, the customer needs to give a reaction. But what i mean is, a status the end-user can set himself like the on-hold status a agent has.

    It's because a end-user wants to be able to see in a glance what his/her tickets are that they need to respond on. If something is pending it's shows "awaiting for your response" in there ticket view and that's not completely true because it's work which is planned in the next week or so.

    And because a end-user cannot set his/her status to anything else than open, which is annoyingly because it has a red icon.
    So in the current situation i need to create triggers or automation's for every possible combination of "we are planning to get this fixed in the next week" to put it in on-hold.

    So still getting back to the main request in the whole story. The possibility for a "in progress" status or the end-user can set his ticket to on-hold.

    With the second one we can create workflows to automate responses etc, When it's the pending status this is way more difficult with other triggers that are in place.

    1
  • Jeff Lee

    Hi Colin,

    Do you know what package I need with CloudSet to change the ticket status options seen by agents?

     

    Thank you.

    0
  • Will Strohl

    I too would like to have a customized status available.  For a product development team, it would be useful to have a status called something like, "Pending Release" to let both parties know that there's nothing left to be done until the update is pushed in a product release.  

    I see some mention of a status here called "On Hold" and we'd be able to re-purpose that, but I don't see that as an available option.  In fact, that link is no longer valid.  

    1
  • Erin the mentor

    Hi Will,

    You can add the on-hold status by going to Settings > Ticket fields and clicking edit next to the Status field. You should see a checkbox at the bottom of the page that allows you to enable this extra status.

    Best,
    Erin

    0
  • Eddie

    How do you add the ability on the "end user" side for the user to select a check box changing the ticket status to solved? I have seen this on a few other Zendesk portals and I was wondering how to add this to my tickets.

     

    It had an actual line at the bottom that said "please consider this request solved" with a check box.

    1
  • Kendall Chandler

    Is Zendesk's position still to not allow any customization of the ticket statuses? In particular, the customer-facing statuses?

    We are finding that are customers are frequently asking us for updates on Open tickets because other than adding a comment, there is no way to indicate to them that something is In Progress.

    We very much need an additional customer-facing status that would allow us to differentiate between things that are Open (because of a new updated from the customer) or In Progress (so open, but either in a dev queue or being actively worked on). Internally, we currently use the On-Hold status to indicate this, which is helpful for our own purposes, however to the end user this continues to display as Open so to them there appears to be no difference. 

    It would seem obvious to me that there should be some additional status of this type that can display for the end user. 

    Is there any chance you are developing additional statuses, or the much requested ability to customize statuses?

    5
  • Dario Neugovsen

    I too would love to be able to customize the ticket statuses!

    I don't think I'll need to explain the reason, since there have been posted enough reasons in this (and many other) topic(s) as for why this would be needed, and they fit in seamlessly with why we would like this.

    Please look in to this!

    5
  • Jon Corpany

    As has been mentioned by so many on this forum since 2011, additional custom statuses are needed.  I would expect Zendesk to post something on this thread as to the reasoning to not allow this type of customization. Not listening to customers needs is not a good way to run a successful business. I appreciate many of the features Zendesk offers and find it to be a reliable tool but I would appreciate more detail of what causes additional status additions to not be a reasonable and deployable request.

    3
  • Andrea Saez

    Interesting. As a product manager myself, I usually ask the question, "what problem are you trying to solve?" - so I can only ask the same, what problem are you trying to solve by using custom statuses that you can't use with current statuses? I saw someone earlier mention having a 'pending release' status, which can be replaced with the on-hold. The on-hold status is actually meant to be used like that, as SLA's don't affect it.

    You also have to keep in mind that Zendesk is ITIL based. You don't need a million different statuses (likewise, even types!) and even within development there are only a few types and statuses involved. Still curious to understand the need behind so many different statuses. Also keep in mind different statuses affect and involve SLA's, and by adding more, you're then changing how SLA's + ITIL practices interact with each other.

    The gang at Zendesk are incredible, and I don't think they aren't listening to customer needs, but rather trying to solve problems that make sense.  ✌🏻

    -8

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