What is it?
Ticket reopening management is a new workflows-powered solution that allows users to control if, when, and how tickets re-open based on new replies to closed tickets.
Why does it matter?
Once a support rep closes a ticket, their customer may reach back out for a number of reasons: to say thank you, to ask follow up questions, or to raise a completely new issue. Historically, there has been no way to prevent that closed ticket from re-opening or to auto-generate a new ticket. Whether the end user reached back out within five minutes, two days, or six months, that original ticket gets re-opened, causing issues for reporting, SLAs, and overall rep efficiency and organization.
Not anymore! Ticket reopening management workflows give support teams an automated solution that allows them to proactively manage their process for new replies on closed tickets and makes it easier for reps to respond, prioritize, and stay organized.
Often, a support team's process is to allow customers to re-open support tickets within a certain window of time after the ticket was closed, e.g. three days. If the customer responds any later than that, a new ticket should be created. This update makes that process possible.
How does it work?
With this update, ticket re-opening behavior can be managed in workflows, giving admins the flexibility to set up different processes depending on the needs of their team, pipelines, etc.
This feature includes access to a ticket re-opening management workflow template, so that users do not have to set up their enrollment criteria from scratch. To use the template, navigate to workflows > create workflow > "from template." The name of the template is "Control if closed tickets open based on new replies" (find it more easily by clicking the "Service Hub" tab on the left hand side of the page.
Users should of course customize the workflow to fit their process, but here is an overview of the enrollment criteria, properties, and actions used in the template:
Enrollment criteria:
- Automatically trigger enrollment when an event occurs:
- Ticket re-open date is known. This is a new ticket property that serves two purposes: it makes re-enrollment in this workflow possible, and it helps users identify exactly when the original ticket was (temporarily) re-opened rather than having to glean it from changes in other properties. Please note: although the original closed ticket will have a value for this ticket re-open date property, this does not impact SLAs, reporting, or its original close date. In step 4, we'll review how to keep the original ticket closed if you wish. And
- Only enroll tickets that meet these criteria:
- Last closed date. This is another new property that users can add to the enrollment criteria if they want new tickets to be created based on new replies after a certain amount of time. If you always want new tickets to be created for replies on closed tickets, you don't need this property in your enrollment criteria. If you want to allow closed tickets to reopen if there's a new reply within 5 days of the ticket being closed, and after that point a new ticket should be created instead, the enrollment criteria here would be "Last closed date is more than 5 days ago." (If that threshold should be 3 days, 7 days, etc., change this criteria accordingly.)
- Originating channel type is any of Email. This property ensures that chat tickets that have been split can still be enrolled in this workflow.
- Last message received date is after last response date. This makes sure the workflow is only enrolling tickets that are getting reopened by new incoming messages. If outbound emails from help desk users on closed tickets should make a new ticket, this could be removed (although in that case the recommendation would generally be to just create a new ticket).
- If you would like to enable re-enrollment, toggle re-enrollment on and check the box for "ticket reopen date is known."
Actions
- "Copy ticket." This creates a new ticket instead of letting the original one re-open. From here, you can select three more optional steps:
- Close the copied ticket: this make sure the original ticket (i.e. the closed one that received a new reply) stays closed
- Copy the latest help desk message: this grabs the message that the end user sent on the original ticket and copies it over to the new one so that the support rep doesn't have to flip between two tickets to find out why it was re-opened.
- Ticket properties to copy: users can select certain ticket properties to copy over, like the description, owner, or priority.
- Add ticket ID to the subject: append the new ticket's ID to the subject to make it clear that this is a brand new ticket.
Who gets it?
Service Enterprise