What a ticket is and the life it goes through

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A ticket is one conversation about one question. Understanding its life explains most of what Zendesk does around it.

What a ticket carries

  • A requester. The person whose problem it is.
  • An assignee. The agent responsible, and usually a group as well.
  • A status. Who has to act next.
  • A channel. How it arrived: email, the web form, a message, a call.
  • The thread. Every public reply and internal note, in order, with attachments.
  • Fields. The standard ones plus whatever your organisation added.

How a ticket is born

Tickets are created whenever a message reaches you through a channel you have set up, or when an agent creates one by hand. Whichever route it takes, the result is the same kind of object, which is why a customer who phones and then emails can end up on one ticket.

Zendesk matches on the requester's email address. That is why two people sharing a mailbox, or a customer writing from a second address, produces surprises.

The life it goes through

  1. New. Nobody has picked it up.
  2. Open. Someone is on it and the ball is with you.
  3. Pending. You have asked the customer something.
  4. On-hold. You are waiting on somebody who is not the customer.
  5. Solved. Dealt with, but still able to reopen.
  6. Closed. Locked. A reply now creates a follow-up ticket instead.

Closing is not something an agent does. Zendesk closes solved tickets automatically after a period your admin sets.

Why the status matters more than it looks

Triggers, automations, SLAs, views and every report read the status. A queue where everything sits on Open because nobody moved it produces figures that describe your habits rather than your work.

See also

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