Feature Request - Ability to edit closed tickets

Hey All,

Zendesk has been through a lot of changes in 2022 and unfortunately, this request still needs to be updated. However, this is an important change and is causing a lot of customer pain and we are working on a plan to enable some limited modification capabilities in the second half of 2023. I will share more information on the features and capabilities by May 2023.

@gaurav12 this is a huge pain point for us. If you need any customer use cases or anyone to run through product discussions with let us know. We have done a few in the past with Zendesk on different functionality. 

Thank you so much for that Reshma. I will reach out to you for use cases and pain points. 

Thanks,

Gaurav Parbat

@gaurav12 Thank you very much for coming back to the thread to update us, it's really appreciated!

I'd also happily volunteer to discuss this if you need use cases. I've been working with the Zendesk Support platform for almost a decade, both at small startups and large multinational companies with high volume, multi-product/language support teams and have a lot of experience with the challenges that being unable to edit closed tickets causes.

I'd be happy to take as much time as you need to answer your questions, validate assumptions and provide feedback, at any time! 

Since 2019 and this is not figured out yet?
When I edit some custom field so I can have more detailed data over my tickets, I want to be able to edit the past ones so we can measure them...

When you talk about " limited modification capabilities" you should ask us what is what we need to edit / update it cannot be chosen by you, due to the fact that every company uses on differente ways, i don't look like a good politics after all the data is ours, maybe your idea of limited is not what we need, for us we need to update the categories taht matches the one we use now, due to the changes over time have realized, how you make a statement very transparent about this, with real dates so all of us can give real data and update to the company where everyone work.
Remember we are the key users, we know what need to update, remember customer first, make a poll stuff like that, to get a good solution for all.

Realistically, the answer is pretty simple Gaurav Parbat: all fields on closed (archived) tickets need to be editable by administrators. That may be daunting but it's our customer data and not only does this product limitation make Zendesk less scaleable and usable, it can introduce real risk if the wrong user is associated to a ticket before it is archived. As an extreme hypothetical, if data for one customer was exposed to a different customer as the result of a ticket having the wrong user associated with it, that becomes permanent once the ticket is archived. As a Zendesk customer, our only recourse today would be to delete the ticket but that just removes the record of the incident both for us and the customer. Do you see the problem there??

All of us commenting in this thread have been negatively impacted by data integrity issues as a result of "archived" tickets. At the barest minimum, I'd say we need editing by administrators on archived tickets for the following system fields:

• Requestor
• Assignee
• CC
• Tags

... with custom fields (and the remaining system fields) coming shortly thereafter. Even just edit access by admins on archived tickets for Requester and Assignee would go a long way assuming the associated org would update when the requestor does based on the user's org membership. While I'm skeptical that last part could be accomplished given the architecture that appears to underpin this issue, I remain hopeful and encourage y'all to take this seriously as it is table stakes for an enterprise SaaS platform. Please feel free to reach out if you'd like some specific examples where we've run into trouble due to this product limitation.

To add to @billie11's point above ...https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4409217551642/comments/5473919102234

We have a number of operational systems (Salesforce and our CSM tool - Planhat) that integrates data about our customers so that we can take meaningful action on our customer accounts.

NOT being able to edit the data means our reports are wrong (wrong ticket being associated with the wrong accounts) because we can't change something as simple as the "ORG" in Zendesk. It can make an account health look better or worse. 

..and, please, do not forget the updating of the subjet ticket field!

Hello,

I also opened a ticket about that irritating feature. We use personnalised field on our ticket and if one of my employees forgot to delete it when the ticket change as closed we can't go back to change the status of the ticket for example. You should keep the logic that the ticket is put on the closed statuts after a maximum of 28 days but you should allow us to go back on it to change personnalised fields for example. The solution that was proposed to me was to add flow on my flow and I don't want that. I just want a solution to be able to edit the fields on the ticket (not the status).

Add my large organization to the chorus of voices who really need to be able to edit closed tickets, even if it's just bulk edits to large sets of tickets and it's not super performant. We've learned a lot about how we want our instance configured since we began and have thousands of mis-assigned tickets clouding the reports we need to generate for the executives who pay the bills.

We had a recent need for this where we needed to redact information on a ticket, but it was only discovered after the ticket had been automatically closed by our workflows. Because the ticket was closed there was no option for us to protect the information apart from completely deleting the ticket - the ability to modify/update/redact closed tickets is an essential piece of missing functionality for us.

Hey @paul88

If you're using Agent Workspace, you can redact data on Closed Tickets. 

Gaurav Parbat,

Since we are in May, are you finally able to share more information on the new features that will be available to edit closed tickets?

May 23, 2023...and counting...anything Zendesk?

Hi Zendesk Team, adding 1 more vote for enabling this feature. We are new to the platform and were quite surprised we could not edit closed tickets. Strongly recommend adding in this ability.

Hi @gaurav12

In March, you'd shared with the community that planning around Closed Ticket editing was in progress and that you would share more news by the end of May, 2023.

We're now at the end of May, are there any updates you can share with the Community? 

Thanks!

Hi Zendesk - my organization as well would very much like to have the capability of updating closed tickets via API. We need to adjust for some organizational reasons and update some custom fields.
When will the feature be available?

Any update on this, Zendesk? The most recent Product Team post from @gaurav12 states this was being looked into for last year (2022).

We have an instance that's coming up on 5 years old. Form, field, and ticket structures have changed drastically for us since first starting on the platform. It takes me days to write custom Explore formulas to account for all the various iterations of historic data we need in our YoY reporting.

I really need to do a big data clean-up & update all our old Closed tickets to our new Form + Field structure, rather than writing 200-line IF/THEN formulas to group old data with new data. This isn't sustainable...

+1 for this feature. I recently made a significant change to the way we category incidents and would love to go back and bulk-edit the old ones to match the new format. 

--Posting as a comment on the thread as well---

Hello Everyone,

Happy Friday! I have some updates. We have made the necessary platform and data layer changes needed to support editing closed tickets and can now move to the next phase. We will potentially plan an EAP later in Q3 -2023 with a small number of customers and partners and I would like to invite everyone to share their ideas and feedback, either through research or by participating in the EAP.  This form has more details. https://forms.gle/vJF9QXNMTmvxELjRA
Thank you for your patience. Please leave your comments in the form or on this thread. My team and I will actively monitor both channels. 

Kind regards,

Gaurav Parbat

Hi @gaurav12

Thank you for coming back to the community with an update, glad to see such positive news! I've just filled out the survey. 

I would happily volunteer to participate in the EAP. I've been waiting for this functionality every day in my almost 10 years of working with Zendesk, I'd be very very eager to help provide feedback!

Just filled the form for the EAP - any updates on this? 

Hi @gaurav12,

It's been a few months and we've not seen any updates in regards to this EAP.

Can you provide any updates on when the EAP will be rolled out to customers who signed up?

Thanks

@rob37, totally agree.
Would like to get this feature ASAP :-)!