Ticket Update Status Rules

Hi Zach, could you explain what the goal is here? The purpose of Pending status is to indicate that you are awaiting a reply from the user. But usually when a ticket is created, it was the user who created it, and the next move is yours, i.e. Open or Hold, not Pending.

Or are you referring to manually created tickets where the agent creates the ticket, and is waiting for a response from the user? And in this case, why not just train the agents to submit the ticket as Pending?

Thank you for your attention here, Jonathan!

I have a colleague who was informed by some clients, that stated creating tickets requires the status to be submitted as Pending upon creation in order for the customer to receive the email. I don't believe this is true and tested this myself in one of our instances, but I just wanted to make sure there isn't a rule/setting for a ZD account that prevents an agent from creating a ticket unless it is submitted as Pending upon creation. I'm not aware of a rule/setting that has this as a requirement when creating a ticket. 

Thanks for elaborating, Zach.

As you correctly say, there is normally no such rule. It would be possible for you or other admins of your ZD instance to create such a rule (e.g. to include the condition "Status is Pending" on any trigger that sends a notification to users) but I would consider that to be a bug in how the admins set up ZD.

P.S. If some of your customers are not receiving expected notifications, the first step is to look at the event log for the ticket, to see whether ZD actually sent the notifications.

See https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203691176-Viewing-all-events-of-a-ticket 

Is there a way to set up a ticket status automation for when an internal message is left by a follower on a ticket "light agent" the status goes from our in house status "with light agent" to "open" so that the full agent knows the light agent has responded? I was also wondering if this can be done when the requestor responds when the ticket goes into pending status. After a requestor responds in the "pending" status, it would then update to "open" so the agent knows the person has responded. 

Hi Jacquelyn, thanks for writing in! For light agents making an update, you can make use of the trigger to reopen it automatically. However, normally the intended workflow is light agents will submit the ticket manually as open after making an update also a trigger can be used to send a notification to the assignee that a ticket has been updated so that the assignee will work on the ticket. Otherwise, you can use a trigger to reopen and send a notification at the same if there is an update. 

For end-users, when they reply to the pending tickets, it will automatically reopen by default. Is this not happening to your pending tickets? Also, there is a default trigger that will notify the assignee of a comment update.