Customize Status Field Values

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152 Comments

  • Nnicolau

    Hi Nicole,

    Please feel free to read my previous post/comment. Should you require a more "hands on" overview of a case scenario, we have the "hijack account" function available for ZD Support Staff. 

    Let me know if you want to take a look, so, you or somebody from your team can take a look into that and see how we were forced to use a workaround with triggers to track additional statuses: "Reopened" and "Info given", with tags. It's a rather dissatisfactory solution, but that's what we came up to, so we can get the job done, for tracking and reporting.

    Flexibility on statuses + allow status renaming would be greatly appreciated.

    Regards, 

     

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  • Kendall Chandler

    Our use case is not even that we need custom statuses, only that we need a status that can display to the customer when we are working on something. Right now from the end-user view "On Hold" just displays as "Open" so to the end user there is no differentiation between something that is Open because no one has looked at it yet, or Open because we're working to fix it. There should be at last one status that can convey to the end user that their ticket is in our queues. I custom status would fulfill this, or the addition of a single new status type, or just making the On Hold status actually display to the end user (perhaps optionally so it doesn't break workflows for other Zendesk implementations that don't want it to be used this way).

    It's extremely important to us that we're able to convey to our customers that their issues are being addressed. Right now the only way to do this is through adding updates to the ticket which is more laborious for us to do, and for them to check. 

    Kendall

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  • Maggie St.Clair

    We too would appreciate having custom statuses. At least, and very least, please make it so that customers do not see OPEN when we have a ticket ON HOLD. It is so misleading to our customers since it shows as OPEN and they probably assume we are just ignoring it. If nothing else, please fix the ON HOLD status. But really, after 8 years it would be great if you could allow us to determine the statuses and add/remove as needed. We all operate our business differently so a small handful of generic statuses just isn't going to cut it for all of your users.   

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  • Gerald Crawford

    Hi Nicole,

    Here is another situation that my team is running across.

    We currently have the "Pending" status configured to automatically close in 7 days.  We have found this works for those situations in which we simply do not get a response back from a client.  

    However, we do have several enterprise customers that quite typically will have cases open for a month because they want us to review them at a monthly meeting.  And then from that meeting we get to close them.  So we could (had have) had tickets sit in the "Open" bin for 30+ days as we wait for approval to close the ticket.  

    We should be able to move them to "Pending" because we really are waiting on them to say "close it", but because we cannot create "Pending customer approval" or something similar, we have to let these tickets fester in the open buck.  I would love to even actually be able to have a "Closed" status that still shows up as open on the customer end.  Something I could say is closed for reporting purposes, but yet as far as the client is concerned it still displays as open.

    That is why Zendesk would be so much more powerful if the development team would strip the workflow from the actual status field and move that to a status type.  Then people could configure the fields all day long and just apply a status type to the status they create.  The ability to customize things from a client perspective would increase ten fold if not more.

    Just my two bits for the ZenDevTeam

     

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  • Nicole Saunders
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Thanks for the details, Gerald. 

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  • Shanta Nathwani

    We were just discussing this in our organization yesterday. Being able to close a ticket that was "Critical" vs. "Informational" is something we would really want to track. Helps us answer the question, "What kind of ticket was this?" and further, "How quickly did we respond to/resolve those types of tickets?"

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  • Nicole Saunders
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Hey Shanta - 

    Is there a reason that tags won't work for you for this purpose? 

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  • Shanta Nathwani

    I wanted to be able to track these as how we closed them. We're on a team plan and can't produce customize results. Can I do this with tags and get those kinds of reports on the plan we have?

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  • Aaron Knodel

    +1 on this feature. This is our number 1 pain point with the product that clutters and complicates our workflow.

    I'll add like a previous user that we don't even need a custom one - just one more status! Call the status "Pickles" and add it to Zendesk and we'll be happy!

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  • Len Smith

    I am evaluating a number of Support solutions and most all of them allow an administrator to change the allowable values in a status field.  This particular need has been banging around in this forum since 2010 and it's still not been resolved?  The ability to customize a status field isn't some esoteric need that isn't worth your time, it's a very basic and entirely foreseeable requirement.  The same issue exists with the Type field.

    I have been warned that while the ZenDesk may be pretty good, responsiveness of Zendesk to it's customer base is pretty poor.

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  • Nicole Saunders
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Hi Len - 

    It's true that we've had some communication challenges in the product feedback topic in the community in the past. We're doing a number of things to improve this, in our UI, processes, and particularly in the way that we take in, process, and act on customer feedback. That being said, not everything that gets requested is guaranteed to get built. Customer feedback is one data point, but it's not the only one we use to determine what is the highest priority and best use of our developer resources. 

    As for this issue specifically, the reason this hasn't been changed is that it is a very heavy technical lift based on the way our platform currently operates. All of the logic of the system is based on those statuses, so changing them - not to mention allowing every user to have a different set of them - would require rewriting a significant portion of the platform and operating logic from the ground up. 

    It's not that we aren't aware of the request, it's simply that changing this would require halting a lot of other things to address this one issue. We've opted instead to find other workflow solutions for the need and to continue to develop other aspects of the product. 

    All of that being said, the product team is looking to do some significant work on Support in the next year, and we have flagged the comments in this thread for them to review when they're deciding which problems to solve and what those solutions might look like. 

    Thanks as always for your participation and feedback. 

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  • Jess Healy

    Hi Nicole,

    Could the option to just create new status be added whilst it doesn't let us current edit the system default ones?

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  • Nicole Saunders
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Hi Jess et al -

    It sounds like the product team is starting to consider some updates to the status field, though they said it's not likely something they will be able to get to in the next 12 months.

    Please continue to share your ideas and, most importantly, your detailed use-cases so that they can get a better idea of what solution might work for the broadest number of applications.

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  • Tanya Anderson

    I've mentioned before in this thread, but now that Zendesk may be working toward this goal...  The reason we need a custom status is because we share one department's ticket with a 3rd party vendor who only bills once per month. So they leave the tickets they've worked on as Pending for up to 30 days.  This skews our metrics in this department to the point where we cannot even use metrics.    Neither we nor our 3rd party vendor can use On Hold or any other status is because in both of our cases those statuses have been assigned for other use within our organizations. Tags will not work for us.   Thanks for listening.

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  • Nicole Saunders
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Thanks for the additional comments, Tanya.

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  • Bradley Stewart

    +1 Custom statuses seem like a pretty basic request to me. Loved the ability to customize statuses in HappyFox

    1
  • Nicole Saunders
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Hi Bradley -

    Can you give us an example of your workflow and what kind of statuses you would like to see?

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  • Kevin Ford
    Community Moderator

    As an example of a workflow that could make use of custom statuses, we offer remote, billable support. We also offer on site service visits. In both cases, we use the ticket to track work. Typically, this involves a technician working to solve the technical issue and an administrator coming in afterwards to handle invoicing and other duties.

    I would love for the technician to be able to have Problem Solved status and then leave the Solved for the administrator. We've tried having the techs solve the issue and leave the ticket solved for the duration of administrative cleanup but the forced 28 day closing of the ticket sometimes presents a challenge due to trailing expenses.

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  • Brett Bowser
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Thanks for sharing your use-case Kevin.

    We'll pass this information over to the appropriate team and they'll follow-up in this community post if they have any other questions.

    Appreciate you taking the time to share this with us!

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  • Karen Lam

    +1 for custom statuses. My team works with different types of tasks (scheduled or planned tickets, questions, maintenance, vendor communications). Currently our main painpoint is our "open" queue is very bloated as it contains both actionable tickets (the requester has feedback to share) and scheduled updates which are ready but we are unable to push into production yet as the appropriate scheduled time hasn't passed. These tickets are in "open" because they require an action at some point in time, by the agent. We already utilize "pending" exclusively for any ticket type that is waiting for client feedback, and "On-Hold" for vendor communication or waiting for a company product release. So an additional status, or being able to customize/add additional statuses, would really help us with organizing our queue and correctly applying SLAs.

    Another issue which would be resolved with an additional status, is for SLA triggers. Currently our SLA breach reports are not accurate, as we have SLA timers for all open tickets (to ensure we're responding back to our clients), although we do use tags and at times manually modify the ticket urgency to reset or remove the SLA, there isn't an encompassing way, it seems, for us to maintain SLA breach reporting when our scheduled tickets continue to show a breach (scheduled tickets could range from hours, weeks or months before they are closed out).

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  • mgp

    +1 For custom statuses.

    Several issues can be addressed using this feature.

    1. Better visibility for the agent and customer about the current state of the ticket (fx. work-in-progress)

    2. Ability to set the triggers between each state:
    Currently we sometimes send tickets acting a customer but our role in zendesk is Agent. Replying to mails as an agent will not trigger state changes in the same way as a End-use will, this is very confusing for people with a double role (Currently we have a trigger in place to address this issue, but would be easier if it was definable for all "hardcoded" state changes. (fx. a end-user will set a ticket to open using a mail reply, an agent will not)

    3. Locate tickets with newly updated information
    If I have a view with say 50 tickets all in the open state, meaning the Agent / Company is working on them, maybe we are implementing a feature or fixing something for the user. If the user adds value to the ticket, it will still just be open, aka I can't identify the ticket as an agent where changes has occurred on behalf of the user.

    I would have to compare the updated timestamp and updated by an remember it since the last time I checked to see if any of my 50 tickets that are open have been changed. This is unpractical and would be addressed with a state like "working" or "in-progress" in a fx. green color. If the end-user adds value the ticket changes back to open and it's easy for the agent to identify it on the list and take the appropriate actions.

    Currently to address to issue in-house we use Zendesk in reverse meaning of Pending and Open. Open means the end-user just replied and the agent has to do work. Pending means, the Agent has seen everything the end-user has sent and now a team or other agent is working on the ticket until it's completed. (This confuses people who uses the customer portal, since all tickets are asking for a reply from them)

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  • Jason Fouchier

    I see that we can't change the statuses, but is there anyway to remove what we don't want people to see? I have a group of users that need visibility on the open tickets of an organization, but they do not need to see the "awaiting response" status. Is this at all possible?

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  • David Lievense

    Another vote for this feature.  This is really critical!  Need ability to edit/rename statuses as well!

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  • Laura Runnels

    Also, it would be nice not only to have the ability to modify statuses but also to multi-select them. 

    For instance, we would like to be able to select Open and Awaiting your Reply at the same time.

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  • Danny Reed

    Disappointing that this isn't available yet.  The lack of this feature limits the ability of Zendesk to support the processes of a business which are often more complex than 3 statuses can describe.  I've worked with other systems in the past and custom statuses allowed us to manage a ticket over it's journey through multiple departments.  

    I don't believe that the custom fields are a 1:1 replacement for this as others have mentioned.  Especially since you can't require a value in those.

    2
  • Amanda Morphew-Ulm

    This has come up as a need for our company, as we roll out Zendesk to more internal departments.

    Just the ability to change the wording of existing statuses - "Pending" to "Pending User Response", and "On-Hold" changed to "Waiting on Third Party" would help us eliminate a lot of training and re-training time. We have agents who use "On Hold" for every open ticket even though they've been trained otherwise; if we could put our expectation right on the button, that would help us all get and stay on the same page.

    1
  • IVO PEREIRA TROMM

    We understand that this suggestion is extremely valid. In addition, it would be important to be able to define what these statuses would look like for customers by defining the behavior and label presented internally to agents and externally to customers in the help desk.

     

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  • Andres Rincon

    This would be a great functionality to have.

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  • nouschka loijen

    We are working with a system in which we will put the tickets on solved when we have the issue fixed, so the customer (end user) can have a specific amount of days before the ticket will close. 

    However, this is not working because closed tickets are also shown as solved for the customer. 

    Is there a possibility that these closed tickets can also be shown as closed for the customer. 

     

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  • Brett Bowser
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Hey Nouschka,

    I did some digging on my end but it doesn't look like there's a way to display tickets as closed for an end-user at this time.

    Let me know if you have additional questions for me!

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