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.
@James-PreseemThat seems like a good solution, although it's not at all obvious that it was required in the first place. And perhaps more importantly, how do you prevent spawning a multitude of new tickets if that response attaches to multiple old tickets, as often happens?
More to the point, why does everyone using the system need to reinvent that wheel when it is fundamental to how ticketing systems need to work?
@JDale This issue is exacerbated by a second issue which is the fact that HubSpot has a tendency to cross associate conversations with unrelated tickets. So imagine that you have a single conversation that you are having with a contact of a customer. Unfortunately, hubspot has that conversation associated with 5 other closed tickets that are unrelated to the ticket you are working on. The pipeline you are working in, is configured to move a ticket to an open status when a customer replies.
The contact replies to your latest email. The ticket you are working on moves to the 'waiting on me' status. However, because the conversation is associated with 5 other tickets that had been previously closed, all of those tickets also get moved to a waiting on me status which reopens them. Assuming that some of these tickets were closed for an extended period of time, the ticket being reopened, will in turn cause a negative impact on stats. Stats like ticket age go out the window because they are based on a delta between the create date and current time.
The work around is to then go back and disassociate the conversation from the 5 tickets that incorrectly opened, close them again, and change the close date back manually to what it was before it reopened.
For this reason, it is nice to have the ability to put a ticket into a state where it cannot reopen.
A better answer would be for HubSpot to provide some configurability to how it applies the auto-association of conversations to ticket objects or simply give an option to disable that "Feature" entirely.
Our clients just reply to the most recent email theyve received from us. This massively skews our figures as its hard to know how much contact we are receiving, as simply reporting on new tickets doesnt reflect a large portion of tickets just being reopened by customers. I'm sure there is some set of parameters of reporting how many went from Closed to Waiting On Me I could pull, but to be honest I dont think it should be that difficult to understand how much contact we are receiving. Thats a very standard contact centre metric.
Whats worse is that we have had some staff leave. When they leave ive done all the deactivating their account etc. housekeeping you are supposed to do.
However, when a customer replies to an old ticket, it reopens the ticket, still assigned to the ex member of staff. i am finding these tickets sometimes days later when I look at our reporting and see tickets open in their names.
The only way Ive found to get round this is once the ex-staff member has left the business, to reassign all their closed tickets to the new staff member covering their work, so that should a ticket reopen it reopens in their name.
But this now massively messes with historical KPIs and reporting as that ex staff member has now closed 0 tickets according to Hubspot.
This is a massive problem for us and Hubspot can ony direct me to this thread rather than recognise that this is a problem.
Bump for this - on a larger scale the ability to archive Deals/Tickets would be helpful to remove them from the "auto-associate" or even just the associations list in general. When I want to associate a Call with a ticket when the call was made on the Company page - I have to search through 100+ tickets and know the exact name of the ticket I am associating because every old support ticket the client has ever submitted is in that associations list. Why can't there just be an archive status that has some core functionality to remove these objects from reference when they are clearly no longer needed??
Our customers reply to old emails quite a bit with new issues. This skews reporting data and creates a lot of unnecessary work to manually create the new tickets for the customers. This is a basic feature in other ticketing systems so I don't understand why this has been ignored for so long.
This is one of the issues why we are looking for an alternative system now.
Same here. We are looking into other options for customer support case tracking as this one problem creates so many headaches. Ultimately we'll be pulled away from Hubspot altogether if they can't figure this out. Seems very stupid to leave such a gaping hole in the logic for the ticketing system.
This is an issue for our organization as well. We switched to Service Hub from Zendesk.
In Zendesk, once a ticket is closed, it's completely locked. We didn't like this, because if any mistakes were made, they could not be resolved. We were pleasantly surprised that tickets in HubSpot can be modified after they've been closed.
However, customers responding to closed tickets long after the ticket was closed is a big problem because HubSpot doesn't create a new ticket with their response. It routes the response into the closed ticket. While you have the option to have customer replies to set the status of a ticket to open, and this is something that everyone generally wants to have enabled, they don't want this to affect closed tickets.
Currently, we have a workflow in place that notifies us when this happens. Then, a manager goes in, creates a new ticket, associates the new email with the new ticket, disassociates the new email with the old ticket, closes the old ticket, and sets the close date on the old ticket to the original close date.
I have read over all of the workarounds here, and there is no perfect solution. One reason for this is that even the workflows that have been posted don't work for re-enrollment, because when your trigger is based on a property being updated after another property, you can't use that criteria for re-enrollment.
So, the best you can get right now is a solution that would create a new ticket if a customer replies to an old ticket a maximum of one time. I can tell you from experience in Zendesk that we had customers who would create follow-up tickets from the same old ticket throughout the year, sometimes half a dozen tickets from an old closed ticket. So, you can't make one of these workflows, set it, and forget it.
If you want a foolproof solution, you need a notification, a manual check, and manual work.
Another pitfall of the workarounds I've seen here is that this doesn't address the old ticket's close date. There's no way I can find to set the close date of the original ticket back to what it originally was, which means relying on one of these workarounds messes with your metrics.
I know everyone is doing the best they can to address this issue. My decision for now is to rely on manual work and an email notification when this happens because there is no way to cleanly and completely address the issue with the tools we have available. I certainly don't want to implement a half-solution with no manual oversight, leading to missed customer emails.
My recommendation to HubSpot is under Settings > Objects > Tickets > Pipelines > Automate, add more functionality so that you can set a number of days that after a ticket has been closed, it creates a new unassigned ticket. You should also be able to choose which pipeline you want the new unassigned ticket to go into. For example, if someone replies to an old closed ticket in our "Onboarding" pipeline, I would want the new unassigned ticket to go into our "Support" pipeline.
I've seen a number of ideas to resolve this issue (or at least make it easier to manage resurrected tickets. Please do something!!!!! We too are looking at other CRM options. We love most of what HubSpot does for us but this problem is huge!!!!!
Following this, we need it. Bummer it's been sitting here for literally FOUR years. We use HS for our customer support ticketing an without it causes big problemos.
Also experiencing this at the moment - we are finding that once a ticket is closed - it suddenly is re-opened automatically by HubSpot and we have no idea why this is happening but it affects how we are able to track the time between tickets opening and closing. Especially since we don't get a notification to say it has been reopened. This needs sorting asap, huge problem!
Typically a ticket that is closed will reopen because of the automate settings for the ticket pipeline.
If you go to settings - Objects - Tickets - Pipelines - select the ticket pipeline from the drop down list - Automate
On this page here is a section titled "Update ticket Status"
As you can see from the screenshot, when a customer replies to an email....the ticket status will change to "Waiting for support"
This rule does not take into account the current state of the ticket. In my case, if a customer replies to an email that is associated with a ticket in this pipeline the status of that ticket will change from whatever it is now to "Waiting for support". It does not consider the current status of the ticket, it does not consider whether the ticket has is open or closed or if it has been closed for 5 year. If someone replies to an email thread that is in HubSpot and is associated with that ticket and it is in a pipeline with that configuration, that ticket will change status to "waiting on support".
There are several factors that affect this:
association of email threads to ticket. This is a sticky subject because depending on how your users interact with email and track email in hubspot this can be really messy.
example. Using the google chrome sales extension with gmail that is integrated with hubspot. Depending on how the auto-associations in the sales extension are configured, the association of email to tickets can be a complete and utter nightmare.
Configuration of the Automate functions for the ticket pipeline
You can disable the update ticket status feature, but that might not be something you want to do....changing the status based on a legitmate reply from a customer is an effective way of letting an the ticket owner know that there has been activity and attention is needed on the ticket.
In my specific case, I was most concerned about very old tickets reopening blowing up stats and trends
When a ticket that is 3 years old reopens incorrectly and you close it again....the time to close stats get affected because now you have a ticket in the calculation that too 1100 days to close.
Archiving old tickets to a pipeline...."Support Pipeline Archive" for example....this is a different pipeline and as such can be configured with a different automate configuration, one that doesn't change the status at all or at least not to a status that is an "Open" Status. From here you can build other workflows that take other actions.....create a task, send a notification, create a new ticket with details from the original archived ticket.
Moving tickets to an archive pipeline can also be automated as well. Lets say you are okay with the ticket reopening for 5 days after the ticket is initially closed. This would give the customer up to 5 days to reply or respond to the last email and trigger the ticket to reopen. When the ticket has been closed for 5 days with no reply...move the ticket to an archive pipeline. If the customer replies to the email associated with that ticket, have a workflow create a new ticket, copy the body of the last email to the a note that references the original ticket, give it status of new and put it into an unassigned queue for the next agent to pick up. The original ticket remains closed and there is a new interaction created.
At the end of the day, the biggest factor in ticket / email associations seems to be related to where your email interactions with a customer happening. "Where" meaning which interface you are composing and replying to email associated with a ticket.
Hubspot
Inbox
Company Page
Contact page
Ticket Page
Email client
Gmail
with sales extension enabled
auto associate tickets enabled
auto associate tickets not enabled
without sales extension enabled
Outlook
with sales extension enabled
auto associate tickets enabled
auto associate tickets not enable
without sales extension enabled
Other
and a bunch of other considerations....how your email or email reply gets associated in Hubspot can vary pretty significantly. Association of email to a ticket and the configuration of a ticket pipeline if not considered properly can make managing tickets pretty unweildly.
In order to track reopened tickets....i created a series of properties and a workflow to catch these and notify me when it occurs.
Properties
Last Close Date
important: Created using the API with the type: datetime
Reopen Time (date picker)
Reopen Count (number)
workflow
Enroll
ticket in "Support Pipeline"
Ticket status is any of "closed"
enroll tickets in the support pipeline when they are closed
Action
Copy "Close date" to "Last Close Date"
Capture the exact time dd:hh:mm:ss that the ticket was closed. Important to make the "Last Close Date" value a datetime for two reasons. 1.) current time capture does not include hh:mm:ss just the date. 2.)You cannot copy a datetime value (Close Date) to a date picket value and keep the exact time. See NOTE at end for why this "Last Close Date" Can be really useful.
Delay
delay up to 30 days until one of the following happens
Property value changed
Close Date is unknown
30 days or whatever interval (up to 1 year minus 1 minute) you wish to assign is the limit of time that you want to allow the ticket to reopen before being archived.
Condition met if the close date changes to "unknown". Close date = "unknown" means that the ticket has reopened.
Condition not met (i.e. the ticket did not reopenwithin the 30 day delay)
set property value
Ticket pipeline and status = "Support Archive (closed)
enrollled tickets that don't reopen within 30 days get moved to pipeline "Support Archive" pipeline with the status closed.
Condition met
condition is met i.e. the ticket status changes to an open status (reopened)
Set property value
set Reopen time to the date of this action was executed
capture the reopen time dd hh:mm:ss is not important in this case, but can be useful in tracking the last time that the ticket reopened
Increase-decrease property value
increase Re-open Count by 1
increment the "Re-open count" by 1 when the ticket reopens. This can be helpful for troubleshooting when there are many cross association of multiple email threads associated with multiple tickets.
Send in-app notification
Ticket property ID: Ticket name reopened to Ticket owner (and whoever else you wish to know the ticket reopened)
Send other notifications (email slack etc...)
Send notifications to whomever you choose with the details of the ticket reopening.
End
Last Close Date: Capturing the last close date details as part of the enrollment process provides the information needed to essentially undo the reopen if the reopen happed erroneously.
Example:
A ticket that had previously been closed for 2 years....suddenly reopens because of an incorrectly associated email gets a reply that triggers a change in status. The result of this is that there is now a ticket whose time to close is 2 years which will completely skew weekly stats for time to close, even though it is not a ticket that was open that long.
Having the date time of the original close, allows you to change the status fo the ticket back to a close state and you can manually set the close date back to its original close time.
The "Last Close Date" and the "Reopen Count" can also be used as indicators that the ticket had previously been closed and reopened....or reopened multiple times.
Reopen count can also be used to help identify behavior or specific agents /employees who may not be following best practices for closing or associating tickets.
Not sure if any of this is helpful, but it has helped me track activity and problem areas in the past for troubleshooting purposes and reporting.
