Ticket Lifecycle
What this domain covers
Ticket Lifecycle tests your understanding of status transitions, priority, first response, resolution, reopening, auto-close, merge/split, and how customer and agent actions move a ticket from arrival to closure.
Core rules and concepts
- Standard statuses are Open, Pending, Resolved, and Closed; higher plans may add custom statuses. Open means work is needed, Pending means waiting on the requester, Resolved means a fix was delivered, and Closed is final.
- Priority is Low, Medium, High, or Urgent and is often used by Dispatch’r and SLA policies. Priority changes can move a ticket to a different SLA policy if the policy is priority-based.
- A customer reply to a Resolved or Closed ticket typically reopens it to Open, provided reopening is enabled. The auto-close timer for Resolved tickets is usually a Supervisor rule, commonly set to 48 hours.
- First response is the first public agent reply; private notes do not count. Resolution time is measured to the Resolved timestamp, not to Closed.
- Merging moves conversations into a primary ticket and preserves the primary ID; splitting creates a new ticket for part of the conversation. Both affect reporting and should be used deliberately.
- Ticket ID in the subject line drives email threading; removing it can create a new ticket instead of updating the existing one.
Worked example
A ticket is resolved Monday at 10:00 and the account auto-closes resolved tickets after 48 hours. It becomes Closed Wednesday at 10:00. If the customer replies Tuesday at 09:00, the ticket reopens from Resolved and the auto-close timer restarts. If the customer replies Thursday, after closure, the reply reopens the Closed ticket as Open, and the original resolution timestamp remains part of the ticket history. The reasoning: closure is a scheduled transition, while reopening is triggered by a customer reply and resets the working state.
Traps that cost marks
- Counting a private note as first response.
- Assuming Pending stops the resolution clock when the policy does not pause it.
- Confusing Closed with deleted; closed tickets remain reportable and searchable.
- Merging a newer ticket into an older one without checking which ID customers and integrations use.
- Letting auto-close run before agents have a chance to confirm resolution.