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Ability to show On-hold Status on Customer Portal

Planned


Posted Feb 24, 2014

When our customers view their list of tickets on the portal they are unable to determine which tickets are open vs on-hold as both open and on-hold show as open. We need the ability to show the On-hold status on the customer portal.


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89 comments

My use case is an internal software provider to a multi-national organisation.  We put all tickets on-hold that are either:

  • Waiting in the development backlog
  • Waiting on resolution by a third party provider of a solution component

If a user looked at their tickets, 99% of them would be on-hold, apart from solved or closed tickets.

I would like custom statuses to let our clients know which of the two above states their request is in.  In the meantime, is there any easy way to change the text "on-hold" to "waiting for development"?

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+1 for me as well. Did not know until today that our customers could not see the 'on hold' status! 

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I +1'ed this, I don't see why our clients shouldn't be able to see the 'on hold' status. 

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+1. I cannot see any reason to hide the real status of a ticket from a client. Disguising 'on hold' tickets as 'open' misleads clients into thinking an issue is under active investigation when it is not. It is also confusing for agents who assign a status to a ticket expecting it to keep a client informed, only for that information to be filtered out.

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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Thanks for the feedback, Harry. 

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Could someone from the Zendesk Product Team maybe clue us in on why the status for "on-hold" shows as "open" to the end-user? Maybe us knowing the thought-process behind that decision would help us connect the dots, as customers.

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Clearly allowing customers to see the "on-hold" status is very important to the Zendesk customers as stated above. BUT, the response I keep hearing from Zendesk is that "This isn't something on the roadmap at this time" and "We don't have any immediate plans to change this"!!! This is the same response I get for all other requests such as allowing our customers to query and filter their logged tickets in a nice way!
When I asked what is Zendesk working on since none of these requests are planned, the response I got that they cannot share this information!!

Do you all feel the frustration? Do you see the red flag?

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But display "On-Hold" instead of Open is not enough.

We should be able to define a Sub Status for On-Hold like:

On-Hold -> Appointment Planned

On-Hold -> Development Working on a Fix

On-Hold -> Waiting you come back from Holiday

Something like this from my point of view.

 

/Tobias

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I too would like on-hold to display for customers, so why not make it configurable? This thread started in 2014 and nothing has come of it, that I can see. Also, why can my customers only see back 2 months? Some of our tickets are older and we want them viewed by our customers. Any help is appreciated!

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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Hi all - 

One of our community moderators, Andrew J, explained the logic of the on-hold status nicely in another thread

"On hold shows to users as Open. From my perspective this is the correct functionality.

On hold can be used in a number of ways - but from a customer's perspective, if a ticket is ‘On hold’ rather than ‘Pending’ , it isn’t waiting on something from them, it is awaiting some action, event or update from us or a third party that we are somewhat responsible for. Fundamentally that is ‘Open’. The ‘On Hold’ status is great for agents though as it moves a ticket that might be awaiting a third party or some event out of their actionable ticket queue." 

The product team does not have plans to change this status or make it configurable at this point in time, as it operates as intended and as is needed for a majority of customers. You are welcome to continue to up vote the original post in this thread and to share your detailed use cases in the comments, but we do not expect to have any further updates on this in the near future. 

To see what the teams are working on, check out the current Betas and EAPs, and follow the Product Announcements and Release Notes sections to be notified of new releases. 

Irene, your customers should be able to see their tickets further back than that. I'll open a support ticket so that we can troubleshoot that issue - look for an email from us soon. 

-4


Totally disagree Nicole but then again as you said you do not intend to change this, so please stop sending me emails about this thread as its a waste of time!

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I disagree with Nicole as well. We should have the ability to either show Open for those that want to but for those that want the end users to be able to see the On Hold status we should be able to have that ability for our end users. 

Not everyone works the same but based on this thread it should have been enough to warren a change in the help center. 

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It looks like customers priorities are different from Zendesk's product management priorities! Why the disconnect?

My own customers have issues with the ticket reporting tool (Zendesk) but not with our product itself.

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Hi Nicole,

The clear message from this thread is that people want to let their customers see when an issue is in a development backlog, as opposed to waiting on an agent's action, research, work-around, etc.

To turn this around a bit, what would you recommend as best practice to do this without changing the ticket status?  We can create another ticket field to represent its development status, i.e. next release, release 19.1, wish list, etc.  Personally we use JIRA and it would be great to automatically expose the version number to the customer.  Is this an approach that you recommend?  Do you have a nice example to guide people on this?

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I understand some of the reasons some may not want the status to show in the My Activities page but in other cases the status means something to the end users versus say "open".  Since we have the option to use it in the Support page I feel it makes sense to make it an option to display it in the My Activities page to get the actual status of the ticket for the end users.

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Looking at the CSS, the ability is somewhat there. I appreciate that this might not suit all of your clients but clearly, this has affected some of your clients for a long time now. Making this change with a switch on and off seems like a logical thing to do and would help us alleviate a lot of our issues. 



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So, it's been more than 4 years and people are still asking for it, myself included.

Can we stop arguing about the pros and cons (whatever it's UX wise or anything) and actually have the choice to tick this checkbox or not?

Please implement this.

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I just like to know, what features is Zendesk adding if they are not doing this important feature?

I can easily create a top 10 list after 15 min of going through the software. What does it take to get a request into Zendesk? and what is the product management team working on for the past year?

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I'll chime in with a "Please Zendesk, some of us paying customers would at least have the option to show the on-hold status to our customers".

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Same use case as the other software companies. We deliver reports that show the status as on-hold for bugs and change requests. Customers are expecting to see the same from the activities page. 

thanks-

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Same use case for my company. We classify the ticket in "on-hold" status when a fixed version is expected.

Our customers want to see the same status.

Thanks

 

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If they add this feature, it will only become available on Professional or Enterprise plans, just like the majority of their so-called "new, innovative, never seen before unique set of features which you can only find on ZD". 

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We have an inconsistent work-around for this problem.  Pre-pend the ticket subject with On-Hold: or On-Hold: Reason, then the rest of the subject.  Yes, this is manual and no, it still doesn't solve the big red "Open" icon problem, but it may alleviate it somewhat.

Since it does not seem this will get taken up by Zendesk, any app developers out there want to crack this open and build an app?  I'm sure people would be willing to spend a few dollars for such a thing.

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+1 for us

We are a software company, we need the Zendesk product to enable us to send direct communications B2B,  We are interested in transparency! This level of communication enables us and our business partners to understand and report which aspects of our companies and products are performing successfully or need development.

I agree with @... on configuration and status wording.  We want to be able to enable the visibility of the On-hold status to the organizations.  As well as decide what wording displays to the customer on Awaiting response as our clients evolve.

I agree with @... It is also beneficial for internal communication that our services and development teams have transparency on the Zendesk support tab to understand the clients' concerns, sense of urgency or sense of patience.

I agree with @..., B2B end-users need transparency, it is a must-have for them to communicate with their clients and measure their agents' performance as well as ours.  

This applies to all tickets that need to be placed on Onh-Hold, regardless of the circumstances of the hold, the comment field describes the circumstances of the hold.  The reporting clarifies that its on-hold, not open for the client and us. As well as the wording of the status on Pending can be more direct.

The option to make On Hold visible to end-users was over 5 years ago.  It is time for a change!  

I'm with @....  Please advise if you now have an option for us to complete this now? Is this on the roadmap? If so, when will this be available, please? 

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@... and others, this is something that can be accomplished using Zendesk's theme editor and some Javascript customisations.  It would involve a request to Zendesk's Help Center API to fetch additional data about the requests, and then injecting some html for 'hold', and finally altering the styles for the new hold items.  If necessary for operations it seems like a fairly straightforward customisation.

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Yeah, but @... - that seems CRAZY to have to do all that when they could just give us a STATUS of onhold just like open, closed, ect... 

I'm going to look into the API but... I'm not using that for anything else and now I'm going to need to wire this whole thing up to just show an ON HOLD badge? Madness.

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I can understand the feeling @vince, but at the same time, perhaps a better way to look at it is that zendesk isn't able to develop all the features users wants, however they provide a framework for users to extrnd the functionality, so even though its not there by default, its CRAZY that a powerful framework and accessible API are provided!

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When will this be possible?

When our customers view their list of tickets on the portal they are unable to determine which tickets are open vs on-hold as both open and on-hold show as open. We need the ability to show the On-hold status on the customer portal.

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This request has been open for over 6yrs.  Any thoughts on mayb implementing this?

 

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Isn't this an easy thing to fix? Why discuss this for 6 years... :)

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