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How ticket states work

How ticket states are categorized and behave as a ticket moves through each state.

Beth-Ann Sher avatar
Written by Beth-Ann Sher
Updated over a month ago

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.

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 on the Help Desk

Teammates will see the ticket states (including custom ticket states) while working on tickets from the Help Desk. 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.

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.


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