Prevent previously closed tickets from reopening.

[James-Preseem]

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.

Thank you...

~James

[James-Preseem]

Hi everyone, a quick update to share that this feature is now out of beta and available to Service Professional and Service Enterprise portals. Thank you again for taking the time to share your feedback, questions, and insights during the beta! Although this feature has been released we know that ticket automation and re-opening behavior is not one-size-fits-all, so we have some additional work currently in planning with the goal of providing more ways for support teams to manage their processes here. 

[James-Preseem]

Hi @lsamuelson8 ! I have a hunch that the reason this isn't working for you is what @ABeian mentioned above. There was an error where the unenrollment criteria was conflicting with the enrollment criteria, which would certainly cause hiccups. We have removed this from the template, but for workflows that have already been created I would recommend removing the un-enrollment criteria.

Thanks so much to the folks who have shared feedback, flagged issues, and provided their thoughts- we really appreciate it and it's been incredibly valuable as we look to evolve this feature. The goal with this first iteration was to provide a configurable option using an already-familiar tool (workflows) to our beta cohort, and have that serve as the foundation for a simpler experience that suits a wider audience and range of use cases. While we don't currently have a timeline to share, that's the direction we're headed. Thanks again!

[James-Preseem]

@VCunningham of course- the name of the beta is "Ticket Re-Opening Management in Help Desk." Please let me know if it doesn't appear in the Product Updates section of your portal when you search this!

[James-Preseem]

Hi everyone! Sophie from the Service Hub product team here. There is currently a private beta available to Enterprise customers that allows users to manage ticket re-opening behavior via workflows. The beta adds a new workflow action that can "copy" the new message and properties from the re-opened ticket into a new ticket. This action can also close the original ticket again and set the close date property back to what it was originally to maintain SLA and reporting consistency. 

There is also a template for this workflow so folks don't need to build it from scratch. To use the template, navigate to workflows > create workflow > "from template." The name of the template is "Control if closed tickets open based on new replies" (find it more easily by clicking the "Service Hub" tab on the left hand side of the page. Quick note here: the enrollment criteria "last closed date" should be customized depending on your process, e.g. "last closed date is more than 5 days ago" if you want to allow closed tickets to re-open within 5 days of being closed, 3 days, etc. If you never want closed tickets to re-open and instead have new replies on closed tickets always create a new ticket, you do not need this property in the enrollment criteria. 

By using workflows for this beta we hope to give folks as much flexibility as possible to tailor these ticket re-opening rules to their team's process. That said, we plan to iterate on this functionality and improve it based on your feedback! Any feedback and insights that folks can share here is much appreciated and will help us to improve how this feature works.

[SlimBob]

@smerrow, this is great news! Could you share resources about how this is implemented?

[SPause]

Hi, I just tested the function. Am I correct in understanding that the last email copied from the old ticket is only displayed in the new ticket in the helpdesk and does not appear in the ticket view? @smerrow