Ticket states help to set clear expectations, ensuring both your customers and teammates are aware of a ticket's progress. These are organized into four categories: Submitted, In Progress, Waiting on Customer, and Resolved, each with distinct behaviors.
Ticket state categories
The below table describes each category and what behavior a state in the category takes on.
Ticket state category | Description | Behavior |
Submitted | The "Submitted" state marks the initial phase of a ticket. | These states are assigned to a ticket upon creation and are visible to customers when tickets are shared. |
In progress | The "In Progress" state indicates that work is being done on a ticket. | These states are visible to your customers when a ticket is shared. |
Waiting on customer | The "Waiting on customer" state indicates that a ticket requires additional information from the customer to proceed. | States in this category can pause SLAs if configured. When a customer responds to a ticket in this state, the ticket automatically shifts back to an "In progress" state. |
Resolved | The "Resolved" state indicates the completion of work on the ticket. | These states are visible to your customers when a ticket is shared and are used to measure the "Time to resolve" metric. |
Submitted state tickets
You can have multiple Submitted states per ticket type in your workspace. Navigate to Settings > Inbox > Tickets and add as many submitted states as you'd like.
Once you've added additional states to your Submitted ticket types, you will have the ability to move a ticket between different Submitted states. You will also be able to move a ticket from other states (i.e. In progress) back to a Submitted state.
FAQs
What happens to reporting metrics that calculate time spent in Submitted states?
There will be no change to historic data. Reporting metrics that calculate time spent in Submitted states will take into account time spent across all Submitted states. The first Submitted timestamp is used to measure time to resolve.
Does the ticket view in the messenger change when a ticket is moved back to Submitted?
No, the ticket view will transition back and display the Submitted state as expected.
Can a ticket be moved back to submitted via workflows?
Yes, you can select Submitted states from the Set ticket state action in workflows. However, if a ticket is already in the state selected by the set ticket state action, we don't process the state change. This is true for all ticket state changes, not just for Submitted events.
What happens to SLAs if a ticket is moved back to a Submitted state?
The SLA timer is initiated once when the workflow triggers. The timer does not get reset if a ticket is moved back into a Submitted state. Subsequent state updates to Submitted states are treated the same as other state change events.
Moving a ticket from Resolved state back to Submitted means the SLA timer does not get reset.
Moving a ticket from Waiting on customer back to Submitted will un-pause the SLA.
Custom ticket states
You can create or customize ticket states under any of these categories and they will inherit the behaviors of their respective category.
Note:
Every ticket type must include at least one state from each of these categories.
Ticket states can be used across multiple ticket types.
Ticket states across the workspace can’t have the same internal label. However, they can share the same customer facing label.
📖 Learn how to create your own custom ticket states and report on ticket states.
Teammate experience in the Inbox
Teammates will see the ticket states (including custom ticket states) while working on tickets from the Inbox. These are displayed in the main ticket view, within the links app, and when using Command-K for transitioning a ticket from one state to another.
The ticket states available depend on the states you’ve configured for that ticket type.
Teammate experience in Slack & Jira for Tickets
The internal label of ticket states will be reflected in Slack notifications.
And Jira for Tickets.
Customer experience
Your customers will see the customer facing label for ticket states when a ticket has been shared with them across the Messenger, emails, or tickets portal.
If you edit or customize a ticket state, customers will see the updated ticket state labels in the Messenger, as well as in any new email notifications.
Emails sent prior to the update will retain the original ticket state labels.
API
You can see the internal and external labels of a ticket’s custom state when you GET a single ticket using the tickets API.
You can currently only change the system state of a ticket via the API. When you do so, the custom state of that ticket will be set to the first custom state on the ticket types page that matches that system state. For example, a ticket moved to “In progress” will be set to the first custom state in the “In progress” section on the ticket types page.
Ticket states can’t be managed (e.g. created or archived) via the API.
Report on ticket states
You can use the Ticket time in state dataset to report on time spent in each ticket state. This includes a "Ticket time spent in all states" metric and additional reporting attributes to filter and segment your custom report.
Filter by state tickets in the Inbox
You can use ticket states to search for conversations in the Inbox.
The ticket state will need to be selected in your columns list for it to be visible. Click the plus sign (+) to select it.
Once selected, you will see the column appear in your results.
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