About the ticket lifecycle and ticket statuses


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Every ticket has a lifecycle. A ticket’s lifecycle consists of the
different stages it goes through from the time it’s created in Zendesk
Support until it’s closed. The different stages in a ticket’s lifecycle are
represented by standard ticket statuses.
A ticket’s status can manually be updated by an agent or automatically
updated by a business rule depending on how your account has been
configured. When a ticket’s status is updated, it keeps requesters updated
on the progress of their support request and moves the ticket to another
stage in its lifecycle.
This article provides an overview of the ticket lifecycle and standard
ticket statuses, how tickets are eventually closed, and exceptions to the
ticket lifecycle.
This article contains the following topics:

About standard
ticket statuses

Overview of the
ticket lifecyclee
Understanding
how tickets are closed
About reopened
and follow-up tickets

Related articles:

Updating and solving
tickets
Working with
tickets



About standard ticket statuses

Zendesk includes a set of standard ticket statuses which are
used to help you manage your ticket workflows. These statuses
represent the different stages of a ticket’s lifecycle.
You can also create custom ticket
statuses if the standard statuses don’t meet your
needs. When custom ticket statuses are activated, then the standard
ticket statuses become ticket status categories. See Understanding how custom
ticket statuses impact your account.
In Support, ticket statuses have different colored visual
indicators that represent their status or the status category to
which they belong.
There are six standard statuses or status categories:









Visual indicator
Standard ticket status
Description





Orange

New
Indicates that no action has been taken on
the ticket. After a New ticket's status has been
changed, it can’t be set back to New.



Red

Open
Indicates a ticket has been assigned to an
agent and is in progress. It’s waiting for action
by the agent.



Blue

Pending
Indicates the agent is waiting for more
information from the requester. When the requester
responds and a new comment is added, the ticket
status is automatically reset to Open.



Dark gray

On-hold
Indicates the agent is waiting for
information or action from someone other than the
requester. 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. On-hold is an optional status, and
can be activated by an admin.
It’s 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.




Light gray

Solved
Indicates the agent has submitted a
solution.



Light gray

Closed
Indicates that the ticket is closed by the
system and the requester can no longer reopen it.
Tickets can’t manually be set to
Closed.





If your account was created on or after February 13, 2024, an additional
ticket status, In Progress, may be available depending on how your
admin has configured your account.



Overview of the ticket lifecycle

Throughout a ticket's lifecycle, both requesters and agents
often need to ask questions and seek clarification.
As agents work with tickets,
they’ll likely change a tickets’ status multiple times. Changing a
ticket’s status moves the ticket through the different stages of its
lifecycle until it’s eventually closed.
The image below illustrates the stages of a ticket’s
lifecycle:

For example, a ticket’s lifecycle might consist of the
following stages:

A ticket arrives in Zendesk Support and is
automatically set to New.
When an agent is assigned to the ticket, the ticket is
automatically changed to Open.
The agent has a follow-up question for the customer,
so they set the ticket to Pending.
When the agent resolves the issue, they set the ticket
to Solved.
Finally, after a certain number of days, the ticket is
automatically Closed and archived for later reference.
Agents never manually close the ticket and setting a ticket
to the Closed status is not an option.

A ticket doesn’t necessarily move through the stages of its lifecycle in
order though. Its status can often change back and forth between
Open, Pending, and On-hold depending on the complexity of the
support request.

A ticket may also change from Solved to Open if a requester replies to
the solved ticket. See About reopened and follow-up tickets.
For example, the stages of a tickets lifecycle might occur in
the following order:

A ticket arrives in Zendesk Support and is
automatically set to New.
When an agent is assigned to the ticket, the ticket is
automatically changed to Open.
The agent has a question for the requester and sets
the ticket to Pending.
The requester replies and the ticket is reset to
Open.
The agent must confirm something with another
department internally and sets the ticket to On-hold.
After confirming, the agent sends the resolution to
the requester and sets the ticket to Solved.
The requester does not understand the resolution and
replies to the ticket, which sets it back to reopened

In this example, the agent must follow up and move the ticket
through the various stages of its lifecycle again until it’s
eventually closed.



Understanding how tickets are closed

The final stage in a ticket’s lifecycle is being closed. A ticket being
closed means that the requester can no longer reopen it and it can’t
be modified, except in certain cases (see Modifying closed
tickets).
Tickets can’t manually be closed. Instead, tickets are closed with an
automation, which is a
predefined business rule. Automations automatically change the
ticket’s status to Closed, or, if custom ticket statuses are
activated, it moves the ticket to the closed state.
An admin creates automations and determines how long tickets remain in
the solved state before being closed. The default automation setting
is that a ticket is closed automatically four days after it has been
solved. If an admin deactivates the automations that close tickets,
the tickets will be closed automatically 28 days after they're
solved. This 28-day rule is a system ticket rule
that can't be changed and any business rules created to close
tickets longer than 28 days won't be honored.
While requesters can no longer reopen closed tickets, they can create a
follow-up
request that references the original, closed, ticket.
Agents can also create a follow-up for a closed ticket.
You can view closed tickets by searching for them or by creating views of
closed tickets. See Using views to manage ticket
workflow. You can also delete closed tickets if you
have permissions to delete tickets. To delete tickets in bulk,
admins can use the API. See the Bulk Delete Tickets
endpoint.


About closed tickets solved with a custom ticket status

When custom ticket statuses are activated, any
tickets that are solved with a status in the Solved status
category retain that ticket status even after they are
closed. This helps provide context of how or why a ticket
was solved.
For example, if a ticket is solved with a custom ticket status
named "Refund processed" and it’s then closed, the ticket
retains the "Refund processed" ticket status. The ticket is
still in the closed state though.

There are also visual indicators that a ticket is closed. For
example, if you have a view that includes closed tickets,
then closed tickets are identified by an icon ( ). You can hover
over the icon to view additional information:





About reopened and follow-up tickets

Reopened tickets and follow-up tickets are exceptions to the
typical ticket lifecycle.
Reopened tickets are created when a requester responds to a
solved ticket with a new comment. For example, the requester may
disagree that their issue was resolved or something new occurred
that invalidated the resolution.
When a ticket is reopened, it’s automatically assigned to the
agent who solved the ticket. An admin may set up a trigger that
resets the ticket’s assignee field so that another agent can work on
the reopened ticket though.
Follow-up tickets are automatically created when there is a
response to a closed ticket. A follow-up ticket is a new ticket that
references the closed ticket and includes most of its data. Agents
can also create follow-up tickets from the Agent Workspace.
Tickets that are follow-up requests for a closed ticket are
marked as such. For example:

See Creating a follow-up for a
closed ticket.

