Ticket creation troubleshooting guide

Regardless of which channel your customers use to contact you, all support requests become Zendesk Support tickets. Tickets keep track of the conversations between your customers and your agents until the issue is solved.

This article provides a guide for identifying and resolving the most frequently encountered issues when creating or updating a ticket.

1. Learn how to send an email

   In Zendesk Support, the send button is the Submit as button. You can find this button at the bottom right-hand corner of your ticket. When you click the button, select the status applied to the ticket upon submission.

   By selecting a ticket status, the ticket is updated and your message is sent provided you have the right triggers in place.

2. Find out why a ticket is marked as Open

   The New status indicates that no action was taken on a ticket. Once a ticket’s status changes from New, it can never be set back to New. Find below the situations in which the status of a ticket can change to Open.

   • An agent manually changed the status of the ticket to Open.
   • A ticket was assigned to an agent. When a New ticket is assigned to an agent, the ticket status automatically changes to Open.
   • If your account only has one agent, all tickets are automatically assigned to that agent and the status of the ticket changes to Open.
   • When a ticket is assigned to a group with one member, that agent becomes the ticket’s assignee and the status of the ticket changes to Open.
   • When an end user replies to a Pending, Solved, or On-hold ticket, the ticket status changes to Open.
   • A business rule changed the status of the ticket to Open. To find out if a business rule acts on the group of the ticket, see Viewing all events of a ticket.

3. Learn the reason why statuses change

   The status of a ticket can change for multiple reasons. Besides the reasons described in the previous point, there are other possible causes for a change in ticket status.

   • An agent manually changed the status of the ticket.
   • A business rule changed the status of the ticket. To find out if a business rule acts on the group of the ticket, see Viewing all events of a ticket.
   • Tickets are automatically closed 28 days after they’re set to Solved, regardless of any triggers or automations.

4. Understand if a message should update or create a ticket

   When a new email is received, Zendesk checks the message to determine if the email should be added as an update to an existing ticket, or if it should create a new one. The process is as follows:

   1. User sends a message to Support.
   2. Zendesk searches for the email’s Message-ID.
      • If the Message-ID matches the Message-ID associated with an existing ticket, the email threads to that parent ticket.
      • If the Message-ID doesn’t match any Message-ID associated with an existing ticket, the email creates a new ticket.

   View the original email to confirm if the email Message-IDs match up.

   If the customer replies to a ticket on the Closed status, their reply creates a follow-up ticket.

5. Track ticket changes coming from different channels and users

   You can see all the updates and notifications that happened on a ticket if you check the ticket events. Whenever you are unsure why a property of your ticket changed, check the events of that same ticket.

   The events of the ticket can also be used to troubleshoot business rules.

6. Understand if you can edit system ticket fields

   The default ticket status field is not customizable. However, you can create a custom ticket field to track any custom status you want to include in your workflow. For more information, see Can I add custom ticket statuses?.

   The priority ticket field and its values can not be edited or modified either, but you can follow Can I edit the priority field? for a workaround.