Team efficiency - What you need to know about Zendesk Statuses

During a ticket's lifecycle, there is often a need for further questions and requests for clarification, by both the customer and the handling agent. As part of this process, a ticket's status can change multiple times. Knowing how to manage ticket status changes can make the customer-agent relationship smoother.

One of the major benefits of using an online customer support software to handle your customer interactions is that, unlike an email inbox, the interactions in a ticketing system have a defined end-point: you mark a ticket as solved. This closed loop process is important for both your company and your customers; it puts you both on the same page: an agreement that the issue or request has been resolved and ultimately closed.

But of course, there are a few steps between a customer sending a ticket and you marking it solved. To handle these various stages, all tickets can be in one of five states (or, as you'll see on all tickets, five statuses ): New , Open , Pending , On-hold , or Solved . New and Solved might be self-explanatory -- they mark the beginning of the interaction and the end -- but what about Open, Pending, and On-Hold? By understanding and making use of these statuses, you can stay on top of your support workload and bring any outstanding tickets to solved in an efficient manner.

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Ticket Status Basics

There are five standard statuses you can apply to a ticket:

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  • New indicates that no action has been taken on the ticket. Once a New ticket's status has been changed, it can never be set back to New.

  • Open indicates a ticket has been assigned to an agent and is in progress. It is waiting for action by the agent. You can view all open tickets using the Open tickets view.

  • Pending indicates the agent is waiting for more information from the requester. You can view all pending tickets using the Pending tickets view. When the requester responds and a new comment is added, the ticket status is automatically reset to Open. However, there are some exceptions here which we will tackle further below.

  • Solved indicates the agent has submitted a solution.

  • Closed tickets are locked. They cannot be reopened or updated in any way.

    Tickets can be closed via a trigger or automation, but not by agents. Tickets marked as closed, then responded to by an end user create a new, follow-up ticket. Zendesk Support comes with an automation called Close ticket 4 days after status is set to solved that gives end users four days to respond to a solved ticket before the ticket moves to closed status. You can set this automation to run anywhere between 1 hour and 28 days.

    Best practice guidelines recommend that you leave a ticket in solved status for three to five days before moving to closed. This allows end users to re-engage with you on the same ticket. If you deactivate this automation, your solved tickets are set to closed by a system action (noted in your events and notifications as a 'batch close') after 28 days of inactivity in solved status.

  • On-hold indicates the agent is waiting for information or action from someone other than the requester. It is similar to the Pending status in that you as an agent can't proceed with resolving the ticket until you receive more information from someone else. However, the On-hold is an internal status that the ticket requester never sees. While a ticket is set to On-hold, the requester sees the status as Open.

When requested or updated, tickets will automatically have the New/Open status, while when communication between an agent and the customer is carried out, the status will change from Open to Pending (or On-Hold). Once confirmed that the request is settled, the agent will mark the ticket as Solved which will ultimately become Closed.

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Inborn system ticket rules

Some business rules in Zendesk Support are inborn, meaning that they cannot be reconfigured and are default behavior in Zendesk Support:

  • When a New ticket is assigned to an agent, the ticket status automatically changes to Open. You'll see the change after you update the ticket.

  • Once a ticket's status has been changed from New, it can never be set back to New.

  • If a ticket's status is set to Pending, Solved, or On-hold, and an end-user comments on the ticket, the ticket status will be set to Open.

  • A ticket's status cannot be set to Solved by an end user or agent without an assignee. If an agent submits a ticket as Solved and there is no assignee, the system automatically makes the agent who solved the ticket the assignee.

  • When a ticket's status has been set to Closed, it can never be updated, it can only be deleted. Instead, the requester can create a follow-up request that references the closed ticket.

  • Tickets are automatically closed 28 days after they're set to Solved, regardless of any triggers or automations.

  • When an end user comments on a pending, solved, or on-hold ticket, the ticket status changes to open. If an update of a requester does not change the status to open, it could be one of the causes below.

    • A trigger changed the status
      A trigger can update the ticket and change the status to solved. Check the events of the ticket to see what triggers fired on a particular update.

    • API updated the ticket status using agent credentials to perform the update
      If the status is not specified in the API request, then the API call may not update the ticket status to open. View the events on the ticket and check if the API was used to update the ticket. Updates made using the API show a By Web Service message when viewing the ticket events.

    • The requester is an agent
      It is expected behavior that if a requester replies to a ticket, and is also an agent, the ticket stays in whichever status was selected at the time of their reply. If the requester of the ticket is an agent, you can make the status change to open with a trigger.

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