Best Practices for Managing Reopened Support Tickets

[JoshVe]

Hey Community,

I’d appreciate your guidance on best practices for managing reopened support tickets in a way that balances excellent customer experience with accurate tracking of SLA and resolution metrics.

Current Workflow:
Our clients can open support tickets by emailing our support team, which creates a new ticket—this part works fine.

The Problem:
Clients often reply to older resolved tickets instead of opening new ones. When this happens, the system reopens the original ticket, causing issues with SLA tracking and resolution time calculations. For example:

• A client opens a ticket on January 1, 2025.
• We resolve it the same day.
• The client replies to the same ticket on December 31, 2025, and we close it again on the same day.
• The ticket now shows a total resolution time of 1 year which is accurate but dose not reflect the real working time on the original ticket.

My Question:
What are the best practices for managing this scenario? Specifically:

• How can we encourage clients to open new tickets without creating unnecessary friction or impacting their experience?
• Are there ways within HubSpot or other tools to better handle reopened tickets to ensure SLA and resolution metrics remain accurate?

Any tips, workflows, or automation ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance for your help.

[danmoyle · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the mention @kennedyp! 

Hey there @JoshVe. In addition to what Kennedy shared, I have a few thoughts. 

It can definitely be difficult to manage the scenario you describe - and I don't think it's that uncommon. I'd imagine there's a mix of folks who just contact support new each time, and others who search through their emails to hit reply and re-open a past conversation. 

I agree that encouraging new tickets is best case for your team while may add friction for customers, but I'd first posit that not all friction is bad. Needing to create a new ticket could make the support process easier overall, so added friction could result in better service (re-opening maybe adds time to the process whereas a new ticket moves faster - potentially). 

Anyway, with that in mind, here's what I'm thinking about with the new ticket path. 

Educate clients: Send automated emails after ticket closure explaining the importance of opening new tickets for new issues.

Implement a ticket portal (HubSPpot's customer portal should work): Set up a customer portal where clients can easily create new tickets and view their ticket history.

Use auto-responders: Configure auto-responses for closed tickets, guiding clients to open new tickets for additional issues.

I also poked around the internet a bit and found this idea for a solution. Full transparency, I did not validate it to know if this works, so I'd suggest testing it. 

Adjust the ticket process with custom properties and workflows.

Custom properties: Create custom ticket properties to track reopening data, including "Time to Reopen" and "Time to Re-close."

Workflow automation: Set up a workflow to manage reopened tickets:

• Secure the close date in an auxiliary property
• Add a delay until the close date is unknown
• Set the reopening date
• Add a delay until re-close
• Copy the next close date

SLA management: Configure SLAs to pause when a ticket is solved and reactivate with the same elapsed/remaining time if reopened.

This may also help with metric tracking that's more accurate to your needs.

1. Separate metrics: Track "Time to Initial Resolution" and "Time to Final Resolution" separately to distinguish between original and reopened resolution times.
2. Reopen rate monitoring: Track the percentage of reopened tickets against total incoming tickets daily to identify trends and assess resolution quality.
3. Custom reporting: Utilize HubSpot's reporting tools to create custom reports that accurately reflect resolution times for both initial and reopened tickets.

Finally, I saw a suggestion here that might be an idea. Implement a "Validated" status by adding a status between "Done" and "Closed" to allow for customer confirmation before final closure.

I hope that helps ignite an idea for you! 

[kennedyp]

Hi @JoshVe! Welcome to the Community-- happy to have you here 😊

This is a great question. @danmoyle offers some awesome options (per usual) in these threads: 

• Prevent Ticket from Re-Opening When Customer Replies with "Thank You"
• Notate when Ticket is Reopened

Ultimately, it is not possible to prevent the tickets from reopening, but there may be a better way to track it. I would like to invite a couple other subject-matter experts who may be able to offer some advice. 

Hey @DSharma02, @DarianVretenar -- do y'all have any best practices to share with managing accurate metrics when tickets are reopened often? 

[JoshVe]

Thanks you very much for the information, i am cheking this as we speak. with the hope for more feedback from the community