5 Most Important Service Ticket Statuses Every Team Needs To Manage

This is a the 2nd post in a series of posts based on our Best Practices for Service Ticket KPIs.  You can read the first post here: Open & Closed

In this post we’re going to dive into Ticket Statuses and how this critical component of a ticket can provide tremendous insight into how your team is performing and if there are any bottlenecks in the process.  But first, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page regarding the different types of Ticket Statuses and what they each mean.

With over 10 years of experience running customer support teams that have ranged from 1 person to 30+ people, I have found that the more simple your ticket statuses are the more value you will get from the data it provides.  When I meet with customers and review their Service Team Metrics I’m shocked at the number of ticket statuses companies have.

In my experience a ticket can only be in one of 5 statuses at any given time and the closer you keep the statuses to these 5 simple ones the easier it becomes to manage all the tickets (note, these status types are not just for service tickets it can cross over to any type of work).  The 5 statuses are New, Assigned, In Progress, Pending, and Resolved.  Every other status that you have on your tickets right now are simply sub-statuses from these main ones.

New means the request has been submitted but your team has not responded (key for those that track SLAs) and most probably has not reviewed it either.  Every request begins in this state.

Assigned means the request has been reviewed and “assigned” to someone to begin working on it.  This should be the first step in the request’s journey through your process and allows you to confirm with the customer that you are aware of their request (think response times for SLAs).

In Progress means the request is actively being worked on by one of the team members.  The number of “In Progress” tickets does not need to equal the number of team members, i.e. everyone is working on a single ticket, because the reality is team members may work on multiple tickets (that’s ideal).

Pending means that the person working on the ticket is at a stopping point waiting for some action to occur before continuing working on the request.  The most popular reasons for this status are (a) waiting for feedback from the requester (b) waiting for a 3rd party (i.e. vendor to ship a part) or (c) waiting for help from one of your team members like when escalating to someone else.

Resolved means the request has been completed and no more work is required.  Best practice is to confirm this with the requestor but more often than not it's unrealistic to expect this to happen.

Each time I run into customers with over complicated statuses I remind them to get back to basics and focus on each of these main statuses to help ensure tickets are swiftly moving through the process and customer’s requests are getting addressed and resolved as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

To learn more about how you can drive more Efficiency and Profitability thru Service Management, check out our webinar recording on the topic here: Download Webinar