Love this feature!! thank you :)

Great news. Is it available in all languages suported? Specially portuguese?

Is this available for the New Zendesk agent interface? I've enabled On-hold, it show's up in the old interface but in the new interface I just get Submit as Open, Pending or Solved.

Ah. After a few hours, On-hold appeared in the new agent interface as well. Thanks.

Awesome. Thanks for the update, Sebastian! 

We've been using this in beta for a while now, and it's great - really helps us keep track of what's happening with our tickets. Quick question though, is there going to be a keyboard shortcut for setting tickets to the on hold status, like there is for the other statuses?

I'd imagine so, Hugh! It's not in place just yet. 

Do on-hold tickets still get auto-closed at the 28 day mark?

Resolutions from a 3rd party often take more than 28 days in our world, so this is important to know.

Thanks for commenting to let us know!

@Bernie,

The 28 day autoclose only applies to tickets that are 'solved'.  On Hold is very similar to pending, only rather than awaiting info from the user, we are awaiting info or actipon from someone else outside our Zendesk.

Well - this WAS going to be a little complaint about some lacking functionality, but with a little positive thinking.  Here is a tutorial instead!

-- HOW TO ADD ON HOLD REMINDERS --

> @Zendesk - a placeholder for a "time_stamp" would be useful for tickets at times... this would be easy right? :-)

INTRO

We often have customers who say 'call back tomorrow morning' or 'I am out of the office this week', or 'please leave the request open for a week or so'... we also have the position where we ask outside users for info and want to get back to our Zendesk customer once the info has been received. 

The 'On Hold' Status in Zendesk guives us more options in regard to this... however without a reminder function, it is only a technical change... but if we add a reminder function, this become a lot more powerful!

THE PLAN

What we are looking for is the option to make a ticket on hold for 4,8,12,24,48 hours etc. 

We make this using a macro, tag and automation.

STEPS - modify to suit your business model - For this example I use calendar hours (for those who have this option)

1) Add macros 'On Hold'>6/12/24/48 etc  Tag with hold24, hold48 etc...

2) add automations with CONDITIONS:  status='on hold', tag=hold4 (etc),  last assignee update > x hours... and ACTIONS: change status to 'Open'

Hey presto... reminders on tickets!

Enjoy!

Thanks for sharing, Andrew! 

@bernie @justin

I'm not so sure that having a keyboard shortcut to 'on hold' is a great idea.

I would be concerned about our agents overusing this option as it is - without making it easier.

Hi, I've got Zendesk integrated with Jira and I'd actually like to display the On Hold status in Jira. I've got a custom field in Jira which the Zendesk Status field is mapped to because I don't want Jira to automatically solve Zendesk tickets and my Jira statuses are very different to the Zendesk ones due to the much larger workflow. So, I have the statuses mapped between these two fields.

The new on hold status, doesn't show up even with the manual mapping, it doesn't show up as open either. Is there a value I could use to manually map it (like on_hold) and get around the standard ticket sharing setting of 'open'. 

Thanks, Stash

Hey Stash: 

I saw your ticket for this and just wanted to follow-up. To my knowledge, it's not possible to map this field as expected; it will simply have an open status. 

Thanks Justin, I've logged a separate support ticket as the 'open' status isn't working when zendesk status = on hold. I noted in there, that perhaps the integration plug-in needs an update?

Thanks again, Stash

Thanks for the update, Stash! We'll keep communication open in that ticket. 

Adding a vote to having a keyboard shortcut for updating as "On-Hold" :)

Thanks, Alex! 

There is a statement in the article...

"It's important to also note that the On-hold status is only visible to agents in your Zendesk; it is not visible to end-users. For end-users, tickets that are set to On-hold are always displayed as Open."

However, when I tried testing this, found that the status appears as 'On-Hold' for the end-user as well which is a contradiction to what is stated here. Please refer the attached screenshot.

I believe, displaying  ticket/request status 'On-Hold' to the end-user should be fine (we can justify this status to the end-user via email and set customer expectations) as displaying it as 'Open' would keep the customer waiting for a reply & also imply that  the ticket is being currently worked upon.

Thanks, Tejas

It's nog working in FF only in IE!

This on-hold feature is an awesome idea; however, I am unable to enable it.  I am using Zendesk Classic and have followed the instructions above but this does not seem to be an option for me (please see attached).  Is this because of my subscription level?

Tejas: Thanks for pointing that out! We'll look in to this a bit more. 

Angelique: Could you be a bit more specific? What about it isn't working? Feel free to send an email to [email protected] and we'll get it figured out. 

Kimberly: This status is available on the Regular, Plus, and Enterprise plans.

Justin, we intend to use 'On-Hold' status with our Zendesk as we feel that it would help to classify the tickets in more detail, along with its other benefits.

Would the status for the tickets that are set to 'On-hold' will be displayed as 'Open' to the end-users? In the test we performed earlier, we observed that the 'On-hold' status is displayed to the end-user as well - Is this an expected behavior?

Would highly appreciate your clarification in this regard. 

Hey Tejas: 

Let me double check on the status visibility. Stand-by for an update! 

Love this status! Although we would like a keyboard shortcut for this aswel :).

Would be good to have an open discussion on the pros and cons of a keyboard short-cut.  In our desk, 'on hold' would be used rarely and always with a reminder to bring it back to open (so they don't fall through the cracks).  Encouraging our agents to use on-hold and supplying a shortcut, is likely to see this function over-used and without the 'reminder' macros.  We have very few agents outside of Zendesk, and we prefer to move anything that is not the responsibility of our agents off the Zendesk altogether.

What are some other use examples?  I guess desks with longer ticket life would be finding this of more use.

As for the visibility to the end-user, I am seeing the tickets showing as "open", which is correct per the documentation.  However, I disagree that this is the ideal functionality.  I would much prefer showing "on-hold" to my end-users.  The internal status and "external" status of a ticket shouldn't be different.  Also, I would imagine anyone setting a ticket to "on-hold" did so for a reason, and therefore communicating that to the end-user is manageable as a business process (as another user suggested) since "open" does imply that the customer should be expecting a reply from the support team.

Thanks for the feedback, James! Just to clarify, the status should show as "open" to the end-user. We did push a fix to ensure that the appropriate status is displayed. 

Yep, that's what is happening for me currently.  I'm just putting in my vote that the functionality be changed so that "on-hold" is displayed to end-users instead of "open."

I disagree James,

To me 'On hold' is really an internal status for the convenience of agents. 

If a ticket is on hold, presumably we are awaiting movement from an outside party, however, from the users point of view, they may not be aware that the 3rd party even exists... our agents are procuring the solution... therefore they are waiting on us. Whether they have to HOLD or not is beside the point, the ticket is still open as it is not  solved, and is not pending anything from the customer.

You can always explain the situation in the comment putting the ticket on hold, but I still feel that the request is open from the customers point of view.

Would be interested to hear your case though.  Maybe I am missing something. 

Honestly I can see both sides of the argument.

My specific case is that when I place a ticket on hold, it indicates to the customer that the issue has been passed to our development team, where it is in the "bug fix" queue.  They then understand that the issue has been mutually agreed as a "problem" that needs to be fixed, and that we're actively working on fixing it.  This is opposed to an open ticket, where we are investigating the reported problem, trying to determine if it really is an issue that needs fixing.

So basically, the customer knows that unless a ticket is pending, then the ball is in our court, and the open vs hold statuses simply give them more context as to the state of the ticket.

I'd be interested to know what other Zendesk customers think about this.  Would everyone else prefer the hold status to be internal only, or to be public?

Perhaps a compromise is possible by allowing us to choose whether hold is internal or not.  Coming from a fellow software development company, I know a change like that isn't trivial, but it seems like it would solve the problem regardless of which side of the "hold status" fence one is on.

Thanks for the example James.

In this case, we would normally address this one of two ways.

a) Assign it to our Dev team (or bugfix as yours would be) and is becomes an 'open' case for them.

b) Create a Known Issues KB article stating the issue and encourage users to subscribe to this for updates when the issue is fixed.

This allows you to keep the ticket queue clean, and avoid possibly having a large number of 'On Hold' tickets.

It would be good to hear of other users preferences, as it is pretty easy to get narrowed up into our own way of doing things.

I would agree that having options on what to display to the customer might help. Though I am still of the opinion that a ticket that isnt solved should be open to the customer - being in bugfix, doesnt make it any more or less open.

Perhaps an option could be; "Show 'On Hold' to Customer as... On Hold,  Open or,  Other _________"

I second James here. We would always find variations in business processes. Allowing us (Admins) to make a choice to show 'On-Hold' or 'Open' to the end-users should help.  This being the only reason stopping us from using the 'On-Hold' status in our Zendesk.. :(

Andrew, having the option you suggested would be perfect for my use.  I do like the idea of creating KB articles, but the big issue for me is that I utilize the custom fields inside tickets to programmatically link our software dev team's project management items to tickets, so that tickets can be auto-updated and closed when bugs are fixed.  Putting tickets on hold is a part of this process, and it simultaneously serves as communication to my end users.  Anyway, having the ability to customize what is shown to the end user would be fantastic as far as I'm concerned.

How does this affect overall resolution time? Meaning, if I open a ticket - immediateley place it on hold for 10 days, then I closed it on day 12, is my resolution 2 days or 12?

Hello Dave,

This would show as resolution time of 12 days.  Resolution time is exactly that; time till resolution.  I believe there are a few ideas for reporting on total 'open' time etc.  I think I saw an App for the new agent GUI in the forums.

Hi, 

I am new to Zendesk, Is there any way to  generate SLA's to exclude tickets on hold? The on hold feature from my understanding affect the overall resolution time even though it is not the agent's fault. I have used other helpdesk applications with such features. Is there a work round on Zendesk?

Thanks for your response and help in advance.

I think it would be a "hack" to do so but if you don't use ticket type, priority or organizations for anything meaningful you could re-purpose one of those fields to mimic the on-hold status and thereby set separate SLA's for your on-hold tickets.

It would be great if the SLA conditions would include the ability to see tags but until then I think this will have to remain a hack.

Hi,

How can I communicate with third party from within the ticket without having Requester notified? If I have a ticket on hold as I need additional information from third party - for example a vendor - how can I send e-mail and then receive response from supplier directly to ticket, so I can provide Requester with a solution? 

Hi Adrian,

I had the same problem and solved it by using the Linked Ticket App (it's in the Apps list in your ZD). You can create a child ticket that's linked to the parent ticket. That way you can communicate with a third party without having to change the original ticket. As soon as the third party gets back to you with the information you need, you can update the original ticket and notify the requester. 

Works really well :) good luck!

Does the On-Hold status translate over to GoodData?  I am trying to create a simple report of # of tickets I have outstanding/On-Hold.  Thx

nm, I found it...

Hi All,

We currently have our on hold set to send a dynamic email to a 3rd party, and in turn the 3rd party automatically generates an incident.

However if the requester updates the initial ticket and it auto re-opens. If we then set back to OnHold it repeats they dynamic email and duplicates the incident with the 3rd party.

We have tried adding conditions into the trigger but these just seem to stop the trigger from working.

Screenshot of the trigger we currently have configured below.

Can anyone offer any advice?

Thanks

Hi Brandon.

I have tried what you suggested and it worked! Yeay! Something so simple but I didn't even think about using Tags.

Thanks for your help

Lindsay :)

Nice feature.

Re: what the user sees (for what it's worth), I work for a technology company too, and if we have a bug I think the user should see the ticket as 'open'. If they request development it should be in a forum (unless it's an obvious oversight). I guess every business is different though.

@Lothar - where did you find the field in GoodData? I can't seem to locate it :/

I'd like to show number of tickets on hold (and how long they've been on hold for); and also a separate report to show an agent metric for the period of time a ticket is open (requester wait time minus on-hold time).

@Samuel, In Attributes under Status it is labeled as just "Hold".  Check with GoodData and they can help you with the report you want.  Sounds like you may need a couple of custom metrics.

So the time tickets are in the On-Hold status do not reduce the resolution time?  

We implemented On-Hold hoping we could use this to indicate tickets which would not be worked on for a long time (possibly months) and use Pending for short term 'pauses' such as getting information from the client or when an issue is resolved but still going through client UAT before being set to solved.

@Victor - I asked the same thing a few months ago (scroll up). It doesn't change resolution time at all which made it mostly worthless to us as I wanted to use it for tickets where we were waiting for a software change. 

@Dave  I saw your post and meant my comment to be more of a surprise in how On-Hold has been implemented.

I expected On-Hold to be a timed data element in Gooddata which I could then subtract from total time to resolve.    From other comments it seems others would like to be able to deduct the time a ticket is On-Hold from resolution time as well.

Thanks for your reply :)

Victor

Ah ok. Then I'm totally with you! That would make it actually useable if they made that change. 

Hi Zendesk,

I'm curious to ask why you chose to place the "On-Hold" status under Pending.  Via the conversations above, it sounds like on hold is an internal way of saying that the ticket is open, but delayed or escalated.  This period doesn't affect SLA, but does affect resolution time.  Furthermore, agents should typically be paying attention to "On-Hold" tickets (waiting on the Support team), vs. Pending tickets, where we are either waiting on the requester or holding a ticket open per their request for longer than a solved issue.

It seems that the logical choice would be to group all statuses related to agent action required vs. customer action required together.

If Pending and Solved require customer action to re-open, then those should be next to each other for purposes of creating views, using triggers, etc.  New, Open and On-Hold all indicate required action from the agent side, and would be logically grouped together to use Less than Pending to show all agent "action required" statuses.

As an addendum to this opinion, I'd love to simply see the option to make some basic customizations to the default ticket fields, such as Status, so that each Zendesk implementation could have a certain level of implementation over these fundamentals.  I don't know all the backend that's tied into these statuses, so that may be difficult to use, but it would allow users to make the decisions about the structure of statuses such as Pending and On-Hold.

I'd be interested in your opinions about this.

Currently there isn't an option to change a ticket to 'On Hold' via an automation or trigger.  This would be a handy option at times, allowing us to move tickets to hold status for later review.  Any chance of adding this?

Hi Zendesk - just 2 points here to clarify :)

1. when a customer of ours replies to a ticket that is currently on-hold - does the ticket come back to 'open' status now that they have replied, e.g. asking for an update?

2. The comments above are getting a bit confusing, so could you please clarify  whether, for reporting purposes, the on-hold time reduces the resolution time as the pending status does?  We would like to use this status for longer term development  where we don't want to mark the ticket as solved - because to the customer the issue is not solved.

Even if there is a way to exclude the on-hold time from the resolution time in GoodData then that would be good.

Many thanks :)

Hello Emma,

1) Yes, when a customer replies, the ticket is moved back to open status.  This is 100% consistant throughout Zendesk; a customers comment will ALWAYS open a ticket.

2) The ONLY thing that affects resolution time, is CLOSING a ticket.  Having tickets in pending or hold does not affect the time till resolution.  From a longer term ticket aspect, I would be looking to move these to a different group for reporting purposes (Dev etc)

Hope this helps.

Thanks Andrew, makes sense :)  

Andrew is correct.  Resolution time is a distinct data element from Pending but Pending can be used in GoodData calculations to show the amount of time a ticket was in the 'active' state.  Note that we use ticket sharing so the Open state does not necessarily mean that we owned the ticket that entire length of time.

Like Emma we also have tickets that remain open for months at a time and On-Hold seems like the perfect solution but only as long as it is a data element that can be used in calculations.  At the moment On-Hold is not available in GoodData as a time element.

At the last NYC Zendesk user group meeting we were told by Shun Chen and Steven Yan that On-Hold is a Zendesk data element and  would eventually be available in GoodData (my understanding is that it is now available via the API).

It would be nice to get some feedback from Zendesk when On-Hold will be available in GoodData.

Thanks,
Victor

When will On Hold be available as a reporting metric in GoodData?  Is there another way to report on how long a ticket has been On Hold?

Hello!

Is it possible to have On-hold tickets show up in the Home view? I typically use only that and may forget to check the custom view I've created.

Any thought to adding the ability to reposition the On-hold status?  Currently it is located between Pending and Solved which affects triggers, automations, and view that use the less than or greater than with the status.  With our work flow It would make the most sense to place on-hold between open and pending but obviously there is justification to have it on the other side.  It would be nice to have a toggle to allow placing it before or after pending.

Hello Nick,

You raise a good point about its positioning for triggers/automations etc.  This can be worked around with creating a trigger with optional conditions OR exclusion condition.  But I can see why some users would like an inbuilt solution.

eg.

If you are after a trigger that works on Status > is greater than > open

instead use...

optional conditions -Status is On Hold,  - Status is Pending,  - Status is Solved,  - Status is Closed

OR

conditions - Status is NOT Open, Status is NOT New.

We currently have 71 triggers, 27 automations, and 39 public views not to mentions hundreds of individual agent views that utilize the status.  Going through and adjusting the status to use explicit inclusion/exclusion is a time consuming and error prone endeavor.  While I understand that it is a valid workaround it is not a solution.

Fully understand and respect that Nick.  There may be a feature request you can add you voice to.

Why not awalable in starter?

Hello Andrey,

On Hold is an extra feature, it really isn't necessary to run a helpdesk (it is practically the same as open).

For the entry level plan, there are of course going to be a few features that they want you to upgrade to get.  The starter plan is as good as free.

Hi there, it seems like on Help Center when I set a ticket to On Hold, the requester can no longer see it. I only put them On Hold so they don't appear as open for me--is there any way we can allow a requester to still see their On Hold tickets?

 On-Hold status does not work with Salesforce integrations.  Any tickets that are using this status will show as open to Salesforce users

The irony is that the only thing i need "on hold" for is to suspend the SLA clock. If I have a 7 day SLA and I spend 8 waiting on a user or a supplier I am always going to miss it. There is no "post analysis" I can do on the ticket (apart from reading each one) to identify the ones that we should be taking a hit on (i.e. genuine SLA breach).