Customize Status Field Values

Hello Everyone,

I understand that customizing ticket statuses has been a long outstanding requirement. I can confirm that Zendesk has this feature scheduled in our product enhancement pipeline. This community thread has been very helpful and I would appreciate if we get more feedback on our proposed solution and its impact on other Zendesk features that we have built over the years. I will be sharing a research study sign up link soon for customers who would like to collaborate with us in building a solution. I will keep this community updated on our plan and progress.

Thanks!

Gaurav Parbat

Product Manager, Ticketing

Finally!

Excited to see how this feature will be implemented.

---User Research Invitation--

Hello Everyone!

Custom Ticket Status has been a long outstanding request for Zendesk Customers. We would like to know how this would impact your Zendesk instance and understand your use cases while we build more flexibility into Zendesk.

If you would like to participate in our user research program, please sign up through the following request form. It should not take more than 5 minutes. https://forms.gle/imQLZktEdh5wFPb16

Hey all,

First off, I'd like to thank everyone here for your excellent feedback and exceptional patience regarding Custom Ticket Statuses. We hear you all and we really appreciate your passion for helping us continue to make Zendesk a better product. With that, I'm very excited to announce that we are officially kicking off the user research phase of Custom Ticket Statuses 🎉

We want to build the best product possible for you and to do that we need your help. If you're interested in using Custom Ticket Statuses at Zendesk, I would ask for five minutes of your time to fill in the Custom Ticket Status User Research survey 🙏 Looking forward to hearing from you!

Jacob Pandl

Engineering Lead | Ticketing

This feature would be very useful. We utilize a third party vendor for some issues. Through automations we are able to forward the request to them, but it causes confusion with our team when they receive a "Closed" reply. If the feature were available we would add something like "Forwarded" or something along those lines while having the internal value reflect "Closed." 

@Jacob  Any news on when will custom statuses become available?

Hi JJ,

We are currently working on this feature. The link is still open for feedback and I encourage all customers to share their use cases. Custom Statuses does impact a majority of the modules and features within Zendesk,  hence getting this solution right and into the hands of customers is taking time. I will share more updates about a Beta and GA timelines over the next three months.  We are working hard to get this out as quickly as we can. 

Thanks,
Gaurav Parbat

Hello,

Our use case is rather simple but tied to a strict Requester Wait Time SLA. We need a custom status that would pause the SLA for the tickets waiting for a defect fix. I've tried various options nothing really viable because the requester wait time is really paused only by Pending.

Thanks,

Traian

@Traian Vila We use the On-Hold status for that type of use case; here is how to enable it, if that would work for you.

@Amanda Morphew-Ulm thanks, unfortunately On-hold doesn't pause the Requester Wait Time, that would mean to use the Agent Work Time as resolution time SLA. We have various escalation points and wanted to use on-hold time to track that (support works = open/new vs others = on-hold) rather than customising metrics on field changes which is not very robust in Explore.

we need a new status called "in progress with Agent"

Hi All, 

Has there been any update to this product enhancement? We have customers also requesting the option as raised by Laura Runnels in a previous comment update in being able to select "Open" and "Awaiting your reply" at the same time OR have an additional status item that covers both conditions.

regards,

Randall.

Hi Randall, 

As Gaurav, the product manager, mentioned above, creating the ability for some custom statuses is currently being worked on. We'll be sure to provide an update once it is in beta or released. 

It would be extremely helpful for us to be able to distinguish between tickets that are Open (and being actively worked on by a technician) and tickets that are Open (and the last communication in the ticket was from the end-user eg. waiting on response). 

Without this, it is very difficult to see when an end-user asks a follow up question on a ticket that is in an open state.

Even something as simple as being able to just change the colour of the Open status icon from a red O to a green O or better yet, having the green O being the default colour when it's being worked on (instead of red for the traditional open state) and have the red O for when a customer responds to a ticket being worked on to let the technician know that they need to reply back to the end-user.

Hi Michael - 

The recommended best practice is to use the "pending" status for tickets where the last communication was from an agent. That's the intention of that status. So, open = it's being worked on by an agent/technician, and pending = waiting for the end user to respond. 

Hi Nicole,

I am aware of this, but the issue is not that we can't change the status to pending, the issue is that if someone is working on a ticket (open) and then a customer responds to the ticket (stays in open state) and then the agent sends a response to the customer and puts the ticket in a pending state, they may not see the response from the customer that was sent while they were working on it.

In this case, it would be good to have a state where the agent is working on a ticket, which is different from a state where a customer has responded to a ticket and is pending an action from the agent.

Please le me know if you need more clarification on this.

Dear @Jacob

Can you give us visibility on when this feature will be released?
Thank you!

Any updates on this?

It is incredibly frustrating to miss responses in tickets that are in an open state and get responded to by a customer and then stay in an open state.

We desperately need an additional status for tickets that are open but are waiting on a response from an agent.

Sorry, Andrea, I don't doubt that the Zendesk gang is incredible, but leaving a customer request 12 years without action (even though MANY use cases were given), then finally starting a "research phase" which lasts over a year now, and not providing ANY updates or first research results is NOT incredible. Or maybe incredibly non-customer-facing.

We simply need to get rid of the enforced "Ticket turns OPEN on Agent assignment" (we can't distinct an "Open, we were working on it and the customer needs more help" from an "Open, but nothing at all happened to this request yet". 

Of course there may be a million use cases that could be collected to produce the "perfect" status system. But allowing custom statuses, e. g. assigned to system statuses as @Colin Piper did, would solved probably 80 % of the use cases, if not more, by maintaining all logics below (SLA metrics/targets, reporting, and so on).

The research on this could have started 2014 or 2016 or 2018 already but it didn't. This is why some of the reactions here, including mine, may sound a bit harsh. After all, we're only expressing our needs here, and Zendesk saying "We keep the system as it is, period" would maybe had been a smarter response...

Still hoping to see change here (or here) and wishing you all the best!
Oliver

Is there any update from Zendesk Engineering Team? 

If I manually assign a new ticket to one of my agents, I would like the status to stay as new and not change to open. Will this be addressed with the custom status fields? 

@Nicole Saunders Are you able to please see if there's any update on when custom status' will be released?

Count me in; we have certain tasks that are laying at development and want to make a clear statement to the user showing the ticket. Currently this is one of the most missing features that others like Jira and Frehdesk offer (I know.. it's always a trade off but just saying).

Thank you

Nick

Any news on this feature?

Just adding a +1 here and hope that we get another update soon on this.