The Freshdesk blog

Custom Statuses in Freshdesk

When you login to your support portal in the morning (or, if you are like us, right from your phone when you roll out of bed), you need to be able to see how many tickets are open, which ones are pending a response from your customers, how many have been resolved and closed, and, God forbid, which ones are already overdue.

That maps out pretty nicely to the status of your tickets. By default your tickets in Freshdesk are either Open, Pending, Resolved or Closed. But then again, we know every help desk in every business is different. That’s why, starting this week, you can create your own custom statuses in Freshdesk!

Custom Statuses : Get your help desk workflow into Freshdesk

In your support process, you might want need to further pinpoint ticket statuses as “waiting for customer response”, or “waiting for vendor”. That way you get to streamline your support workflows and know exactly where a ticket is lying and what’s stopping you from resolving the issue.

You could have as many custom statuses as you may need. For example, a software company may have statuses like “In QA” and “In Development”, and an ecommerce store can have statuses like “with Inventory team” or “checking returns”.

Choose what the customer sees

It’s great that agents can now set the status of a ticket to “Waiting on customer” when they need additional information from the customer. But wouldn’t it be a lot more personal if the customer saw a message that reads “Awaiting your Response” instead?

With Custom Statuses, you now get to also choose what should be displayed to the customer when they check their ticket status in your support portal. For example, you may have statuses like “assigned to agent”, and “awaiting verification from Order Management team”. Of course, you don’t want customers to see these statuses. Instead you might just want to tell them that you are “working on the ticket”. You now get to do all that with Freshdesk.

Choose when the timers go off

Till now, the clock would start running when a new ticket came in, and would continue running until the ticket got resolved. But it isn’t fair to your team to have SLA timers running (and risk getting violated) when they are waiting for the customer to give them some additional information. Now you get to choose when the SLA timers should keep running, and when they should pause. By default, the timers will now be on-hold when a ticket status is pending, and will fire up again when the customer responds or reopens the ticket.

You can customize your ticket statuses, what should be displayed to the customer, and when the SLA timers must be on-hold just like you customize any other Ticket Field in Freshdesk.
Just dive into “Ticket Field” under the Admin tab, and select the “Status” field to customize and bring your workflow into Freshdesk.

Jump right in to check on what’s On-Hold

Getting back to the part where you check your help desk right out of bed, now you get even more visibility into which ticket is where, the moment you login to Freshdesk. The Dashboard will now show you five options in the Ticket Summary. The older ones are still there – Overdue, Open, Due Today and Unassigned. The fifth tab is the new ‘On-Hold’ tab under which are stored all the tickets whose SLAs have been put on hold in such cases where the customer hasn’t replied yet or because a third party response is awaited.

Neat huh? So, what’s your status today?