Using the Pending feature to your advantage

Definitely important David. So important that Zendesk already has these automations set up for you when you first create a help desk. They're disabled by default though... so my suggestion would be to pop on over to Manage -> Business Rules -> Automations and enable them (there's one set for 24 hours, and another reminder set at 5 days).

While on the subject of the 'Pending' status, I'm reminded of a blog post I wrote called "the Premature Solve" that might be helpful to those of you implementing Zendesk. More here: http://benlucier.com/blog/customer-pet-peeve-421the-premature-solve/

Ben, that is a great article. Thanks for sharing, I'll definitely make sure to pass it on to our team here at Outright.

We actually found that many of our clients were getting our feedback or instructions, but not fully understanding them or implementing them, and since the tickets were automatically closing we were unaware of their dissatisfaction, unless they rated the ticket as bad, which they rarely did.  

So we've just changed our automations. We are going to try NOT solving our tickets until we have gotten a confirmation from the client that it is resolved. So after 7 days a pending ticket is automated to now change back to open and the assignee is notified that it's time to CALL the client for followup.  

We are very hands-on with our customer service to our clients, and consider this an important part of our client retention.    It's far too easy, at least with our industry and client base, for them to slip off the radar and find they've moved to a competitor system due to some frustration we might have resolved with a phone call.  

We'll see how this new plan goes!  We do know it's going to take more CS time, but we hope that our clients will quickly learn that we want to hear back from them before resolving.  

Hello Spike,

Could you give us an update about your approach ? Im curious if it was succesfull and thinking about implementing something similar here myself.

You can also email me at s.v.d.westerlo {at} infoland.nl

Hi Simon. Sorry for the delay I missed seeing your comment.  I'd say that our approach of bringing back tickets that were pending for followup has been a complete success.  We are known here for our customer service. It's one of the things our clients rave about, and that our sales team sells on.  We've had many referral sales based on our customer service alone. Our clients have an assigned CS Rep who they know on a first name basis.  Barring changing in staffing that require shifting, a client has a rep from setup, right on into ongoing support. That person is very hands on with setup assistance, answering questions, proactively contacting them to check in, etc.  Our ticket ranking is generally 100%.  So having this kind of followup has greatly helped us ensure that our clients are not ending up in the dark, afraid to ask questions or frustrated in confusion.  We'd rather spend the time ensuring that they are clear and understanding everything before we close a ticket.  Thanks for asking! 

Thanks Spike, this very usefull to me, we have the same kind of service organisation and I believe this could be something to consider.

Until now I haven't used any triggers or automations for our account as I have been getting our agents used to adding the correct states to tickets. Now I am confident that they are doing this I want to add trigger emails to Pending tickets that have been open over a certain amount of days as you have. Quick question; I have added the following conditions: 

Ticket: Status Is Pending

Perform these actions:

Notifications: Email user (requester)

But how do I meet the condition of say the ticket has been pending for 4 days?

Thanks in advance.

Hi Carly,

You'll need an automation for this and not a trigger.

In an automation you can select Ticket : hours since...

That's what you need.

Good luck !

Excellent, thank you Simon. ;-)

Sorry, I have another question.

I have added the condition, ticket hours since pending.

Perform these actions: email user (requester)

However, the automation could not be created as it must contain an action that nullifies a condition.

I want the status to stay as Pending so I am not sure how to get around this.

Thanks in advance.

Just add something like :

Precondition

Ticket tag doesn't contain: reminder_send

Action

Add ticket tag : reminder_send

Thats great thanks Simon