We have been using this system for a couple of years now, and I had no idea our customers weren't seeing the same ticket status that we see for On Hold tickets. It makes no sense. We train our customers to know that Open means we have the next step, and that Pending (aka Waiting for your Reply) means they have the next step.

On Hold means the ticket is On Hold and our agent does not have an immediate next step at this point. The reason it is on hold is sometimes per our process (we are awaiting a bug fix from the software vendor) or per the customer's request (it's something they want to do in the future).

We are a software reseller and consulting firm working with repeat customers. Our customers need help with the software they've implemented with our help and the custom solutions we've built for them. Many of our tickets are complex tasks with much back and forth, involving multiple people including those from 3rd parties. And we work with the same customers over and over. It seems like Zen Desk is less geared towards this business to business type of model. The intent of your On Hold feature as described on this thread, the lack of views for cc'd tickets, the limited ability for customers to update tickets via the portal (a change in priority, for example), and the lack of much functionality/out of the box reporting at the Organization level (which is our customer) have limited us in how far we've been able to come with the system.