Let agents pick new tickets only if assigned tickets have other status than open?

Hey community,

our agents are not adapting to our ticket-status flow very well. First reply to new incoming tickets is usually quick, but after that the outstanding tickets queue just keeps growing. Some outstanding tickets will remain in status "open" for days after the enduser replied to the first reply from an agent - even if the end user just confirms the issue is solved after the first reply, the open ticket will remain open in their queue for days. They just keep piling up unsolved tickets to their outstanding tickets queue.

Is there a way/best practice to allow our agents taking on new tickets only if their already assigned tickets have a different status than open?

We have 5 statuses configured for our agents: New, Open, Pending, On Hold, Solved and Closed as a system status, just for information.

Thanks in advance. Best, Jan