How to troubleshoot issues with tickets

Question

How do I fix general issues with my tickets?

Answer

Tickets track conversations between your customers and agents until agents solve the issue. This article provides a guide to identify and resolve the most frequent issues when you work with tickets.

Click each section below:

Why is my ticket marked as open?

Why did the ticket status change?

Why do replies to a ticket create a new ticket?

Who modified my ticket?

Can I customize a ticket status?

Why is my ticket marked as open?

The New status indicates that you took no action on a ticket. Once the ticket status changes from New, you can't set it back to New.

The ticket status changes to Open if:

An agent manually changes the ticket status to Open

You assign the ticket to an agent. When you assign a new ticket to an agent, the ticket status automatically changes to Open.

If your account has only one agent, the system automatically assigns all tickets to that agent, and the ticket status changes to Open

When you assign a ticket to a group with one member, that agent becomes the assignee, and the ticket status changes to Open

When an end user replies to a Pending, Solved, or On-hold ticket, the ticket status changes to Open

An automation or trigger changes the ticket status to Open. To find out if a business rule acts on the ticket group, see View all events of a ticket.

For more information, see About the system ticket rules.

Why did the ticket status change?

A ticket status changes for multiple reasons. Besides the reasons described above, other causes change the ticket status.

An agent manually changes the ticket status

A business rule changes the ticket status. To find out if a business rule acts on the ticket group, see View all events of a ticket.

Tickets close automatically 28 days after agents solve them, regardless of triggers or automations

For more information, see About the system ticket rules.

Why do replies to a ticket create a new ticket?

When the system receives a new email, it checks the message to determine if the email updates an existing ticket or creates a new ticket. The system follows these steps:

A user sends a message to Support

The system searches for the message-ID of the email

If the message-ID matches the message-ID associated with an existing ticket, the email threads to that parent ticket

If the message-ID doesn't match any message-ID associated with an existing ticket, the email creates a new ticket

View the original email to confirm if the email message IDs match. For more information, see Why do emails thread to the wrong ticket?

Additionally, if the user replies to a ticket with a Closed status, their reply creates a follow-up ticket. For other situations in which replies to a ticket create new tickets, see Why do replies to email-target notifications create a new ticket?

Who modified my ticket?

Check the ticket events to see all updates and notifications on a ticket. Whenever you're unsure why a ticket property changed, check the events of that ticket as explained in the video below.

Use ticket events to troubleshoot business rules. For more information, see How to troubleshoot your triggers.

Can I customize a ticket status?

Yes. If you use the Zendesk Agent Workspace, create a new custom ticket status that corresponds to one of the ticket status categories: New, Open, Pending, On-hold, or Solved. For more information, see:

Can I add custom ticket statuses?

Create custom ticket statuses

You can't edit or modify the priority ticket field and its values. For a workaround, see Can I edit the priority field?

For more information, see Why can't I access this ticket?