I have customers who have a habit of replying to an old email related to a previously closed ticket as a means to initiate a new ticket. As you can imagine this automatically reopens the old ticket and appends the details of a completely unrelated issue to the end of ticket that was previously closed.
There is currently no way in hubspot to avoid this or prevent this from happening today. Regardless of how long a ticket is closed it will always reopen when an email is received that is related to that ticket. To say this is unfortunate is an understatement.
Zendesk has the concept of an archived ticket. Once a ticket is in a closed state for a configurable period of time, the ticket is archived. This archived state does not remove the ticket from the system, it puts it into a sort of read only state that;
Will not reopen with an email response
Cannot be reopened manually
Cannot be edited.
Zendesk provides the option to create a follow up ticket that references the archived ticket. This new ticket will have a link to the old ticket and does have a true link at a reporting level to the old ticket.
So what is the suggestion I am making?
Add a reopened state for tickets that were previously closed and reopened as a result of some action.
Add a reporting field that has the following attributes, reopened source (manual, email response, workflow action)
Add a property to indicate the reopen time.
Add a status that is systemically assigned based on the ticket being in a closed state for some configurable period of time. example 5 days.
For 5 days after a ticket is closed, the ticket can be manually reopened or be reopened due to a workflow action (receipt of an email or call associated with that ticket)
Tickets that are reopened should be in a reopened state or have some attribute data to indicate that the ticket was closed and was reopened during the 5 day interval.
Tickets that are not reopened within the 5 days will enter an archived state. These tickets are closed, can be reported on, can be referenced, and be the basis of follow up tickets. But they cannot be reopened and they cannot be edited.
I am certain that there are other customers who would benefit from this type of option.
@JMarigliano That's odd. I didn't run into that at all. Sorry, not sure why that would be. I wonder if it would align if you set the close date as 1 day ahead?
I ended up having to turn off my process because of the contact/company/ticket history association. It was creating a new ticket, referencing the previous one as expected, however when the customer replied to the re-created ticket, it would reply to the original as well, and then create a new ticket. Things quickly escalated from there.
It's very odd, because in the case of deal associations, once moved from one contact/company to another, are completely seperated, i don't understand why ticket associations don't also work like this. I could have kept the process going without history, but it would be a bit annoying having to search for context.
I haven't ran into the problem you describe. I just let the tickets sit in closed for a number of days, before the workflow moves them to the Archived pipeline.
I haven't played around with archiving yet - I'd need to revamp all of our KPI reporting to pull from that new pipeline to get closure times and the like.
It's a shame they haven't come up with anything else to help out the ticket side of this - having 'Closed' be just a status name and not a full fledged feature is really hurting a lot of functionality.
This should be standard, out of the box functionality. Set number of days to allow ticket to reopen. Boom, done. I have no interest in the hacky workaround because it will F all of reporting up.
In workflow 1 I am assuming that you are not allowing re-enrollement into that workflow, otherwise you would overwite the Ticket Status 'Closed' date value when you closed the ticket the second time. Is that fair?
@JMarigliano I was running into something similar on a workflow that I created for a different problem. It could be related to the type of custom property you created and timezone that you are in.
There is a section in this document that describes the limitations.
Specifically there is some oddities that occur when you copy from a Datatime property to a datepicker property and vice versa. If you create a customer property through the UI, you only have the option to choose 'datepicker' as the type. I worked around this personally by creating the custom property using the API, which allows you to create both datetime and datepicker custom properties.
We might not need all the complexity that the orignal submitted asked for but the Achieve it idea is a great one. We really need an avenue that will block automation from reopening a closed ticket. We are OK with one being reopened manually, just not through Automation once Closed. Sounds like a fairly simple bit of code.
We are currently using tikcet pipelines for: support, onboarding and training. We do not want the Tickets to re-open just we got an email like confirmation on meeting booking.
Chiming in on this thread to raise the importance of this feature for our company as well. it seems strange that is not possibbvle since you can have tickets unassign from a convetrsation...
Adding another voice to this thread. Once a ticket has been closed for X days, it should not be able to be reopened automatically. I want to automate sending surveys after tickets are closed, and not have them sent when an old email thread is used by the customer for something unrelated to the closed ticket.
Upvoting the need for this feature. We have customers responding to tickets that were closed months ago, this reopens the ticket and messes up all of our internal KPIs for ticket resolution times. We need the option to close tickets permanently and if the customer responds to a closed ticket after a certain number of days, HubSpot should automatically create a new ticket, not reopen an old one.
We've ran into this issue as well and have struggled with obtaining an understanding of our reopen rate and reopen reasons. We would like to be able to use data to see if our tickets are being reopened due to thank you repsonses, new issues, or the same issue. If it's the same issue then that tells us our agents are closing the tickets too soon. The idea I am noodling around (without knowing how the customer portals' reopen function works) is to create a fluid reopen process. Where if there is a response to a Closed ticket it will move the ticket to the New status (same ticket owner or trigger the round robin). The ticket maintains the original create date. A reopen property (#) marks the number of reopens (so first time = 1). The agent sees that is a reopened ticket and reviews if it's one of the 3 responses above. If it's a thank you response they can move it back to Closed, marks the original closed date, and marks the solved reason as a thank you response. If it's a new issue the agent will create a new ticket, associate the email, move the reopened ticket to closed with the original closed date, and mark the solved reason as new issue. If it's the same issue the agent will work the ticket to Solved as normal. Once in solved the agent must choose the solved reason (solved). This way you can pull reporting that shows tickets tagged as reopen broken down by solved reason to see if your agents are not solving the issue the first time around or if they are and customers are not using the proper channels for new requests/feedback.
Not sure if this is the best route to take but a simple solution that provides helpful insight is preferrable (without having to create a lot of workflows that can break, causing more time in troubleshooting and a messy ticket pipeline).
This is a constant issue. It's not just that an old ticket is reopened. It's that every single old ticket from that same user gets opened. I get a new email related to a new issue and now there are a half-dozen other tickets that have reopened. I have to manually de-associate the emails from all of those tickets and close each one. Even if I change the subject line of the emails for the new ticket, the old tickets continue to get the new emails associated and reopened, even if those tickets have been closed for months.
The association logic for tickets needs to be a lot better. Find the best ticket to associate with, don't link it to multiple, especially if those tickets are closed.
But just avoiding the link to closed tickets would solve a significant amount of the problem.
This ruins our workflow and actually makes it so we MISS helping clients because there latest contact is stuck in an old closed ticket. Please put something in place to prevent this. Someone above suggested after X days and new response to a CLOSED ticket = NEW ticket. How hard is that?
@TMayton I think the main reason they don't do anything like that is because that would ruin their Service Professional plan.
Because Hubspot is like an empty spreadsheet designed to give you the functionality that you want through Workflows, and not through a pre defined operating mode.
Even the simple step to change ticket status when someone replies an email is done by Workflow in the background.
@TMayton@ThiagoF The functionality of moving a ticket to an archive pipeline after X # of days is pretty easy. Extending that to include the functionality to create a new ticket if a customer response is received to an archived ticket is not difficult at all. I built this functionality previously and I think anyone with a good understanding of the workflow process would be able to implement such a thing. The only real concern would be making sure that you preserve any reporting that might be dependent on the original pipeline.
