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The ticket status is one of the most important ticket fields in Freshdesk as it helps you define your core support process for your team. It is a part of your default ticket form and helps you manage the lifecycle of a ticket from the time it gets recorded in your system, to the point where it gets closed by one of your agents. 

By default, every ticket in Freshdesk (On the Free plan) can have one of 4 statuses: Open, Pending, Resolved, or Closed. 

Additionally, if you are on the Growth or higher plans, you can also create your own ticket statuses based on your business and use them to define specific stages that a ticket can be in or go through, during your support process. 

What are the default ticket statuses and what do they mean?

Open  - This is the default status of a ticket when it is created in your helpdesk. And, they are probably the ones that immediately need your support team's attention. Every time a customer replies to a ticket that has a different status, it always moves back to open so that you can take a look at it again and fix any issues, if necessary.  

Pending - A ticket can be moved into pending when an agent has replied to a ticket and is waiting for more information from a customer. By default, SLA timers are turned off for pending tickets because you don't want to face any violations when you are waiting on your customer. Sometimes, it can also be used with tickets that are on hold because of any third-party constraints that cannot be controlled by the support teams. 

Resolved - When your agents are reasonably sure that they have provided the right solution to a customer, they can mark it as resolved. Once they do, the ticket can remain with the same status until the customer confirms that his issue has been fixed, upon which the ticket can be marked as closed. 

Closed - A ticket gets closed when a requester acknowledges that his issue has indeed been resolved by the customer. However, even if the ticket has been marked as closed, it will move back to open if the customer replies to it again. 

Note: Default ticket statuses cannot be deleted.

Understanding custom ticket statuses (Blossom and above)

Custom ticket statuses let you bring additional steps in your support process and help you organize your tickets better. For example, you might want to create a field called “Waiting for customer response”, when you are waiting for information from your users.

 

With custom statuses, you can even decide what should be displayed to the customers when they check their ticket status and what is seen by your agents. That means you can show the ticket status as “Waiting on Customer” for your agents, but when your customers log in to your support portal, they can see the status as “Awaiting your Reply”.

Managing your SLA Timers with custom statuses:
 

By default, an SLA timer starts ticking with every ticket the moment it gets added to your helpdesk. This is used to let you know when the ticket is due to be resolved and is managed by the way you have defined your SLA policy under Admin > SLA Policies. 

However, sometimes, your team will be in a situation where they aren't in control of what's happening. And as they wait for more information from the customer or for assistance from a third party, the ticket timer would continue to run down, eventually leading to an SLA violation. To avoid such problems, you can create a custom status called Waiting on Third Party and turn off the SLA timer for it (just like you do for the Pending status). That way, your team will be able to use it and make sure that their ticket isn't affected by these situations. 

Similarly, you can choose to 'freeze' the SLA timers with each custom status by turning the corresponding timer 'Off'. All tickets with the SLA timer turned off will be marked as 'On Hold' and can be seen in your helpdesk's Dashboard. 

A quick guide to adding a ticket status:

• Login to your Freshdesk account as an administrator.
• Go to Admin > Ticket Fields. 
• Click on the Status field.
• Use the text boxes to change what your customers would see for different statuses.
• Click on the Add new choice button to include a new ticket status.
• Type in the name of your new custom status for both agents and customers.
• Turn the SLA timer next to the status on/off based on its purpose.
• Click on Done once you are done adding new statuses.
• Save your changes to make them available for your team.
• You can always come back and delete a custom status by clicking on the red - button on its left.