Tip of the Week: Closed vs Solved Tickets

Front of the Pack
Mojo Helpdesk helps you handle your customer interactions in an organized way as support agents work towards resolving customer issues. What is nice about the ticket system is it allows you to document every step of the process and ensures both you and the customer are satisfied before closing the ticket.
 
The key step in this process is for the agent to solve the ticket and leave it to the customer to close.  There are a couple of good reasons why helpdesk staff should not mark a ticket as “closed”.  The first, and main one is that once a ticket is in closed status, the ticket creator can no longer add a comment to the ticket (neither by email nor the web interface).  More importantly, the customer will not be able to give a rating to the ticket.  If it is important for your organization to track the performance of support staff, you are losing this piece of reporting functionality when an agent closes a ticket.  
Also, let’s say the agent marks the ticket as closed and the customer finds the problem is still occurring. Once closed, the customer would have to create a new ticket to continue the process of fixing an issue from the previously closed ticket. This can quickly become confusing for the customer, and duplicate tickets can make it very difficult to track a single issue from start to finish. This is why we advise all technicians to use the “solved” status when noting a ticket’s issue has been fixed.  This will allow customers to respond with feedback or at least rate the performance of the support agent before closing the ticket.
 
Conversely, there are times when a customer will forget to close a ticket. If the help desk is set up so customers only respond to tickets via email, there is no way for them to close tickets.  For these cases, it is best to create an automation that will close “solved” tickets that have not been updated by the customer within a specified period of time you select. While solving tickets helps ensure customers are satisfied with the solutions to their issues, creating an automation to handle zombies (unanswered tickets) provides the added bonus of clearing out any lingering, solved tickets.
 
Would you like to try our free, hosted ticket tracking/helpdesk application? No long-term contracts, signup fees, or termination fees. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel anytime. We offer a wide variety of plans to fit any budget.
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