Deskpro tracks the status of a ticket. Status tells you whether it’s an agent or the user that needs to act next - or if there’s no need to act at all, e.g. the issue is resolved.

A single ticket might be assigned back and forth between several agents, and go through several different statuses, before it is resolved or deleted. You can view the details of a ticket’s history when you open it in the content pane.

The most important statuses for a ticket are:

Awaiting Agent - this means the helpdesk needs to act on the ticket; typically, the user is expecting a reply.
Awaiting User - this means the helpdesk is awaiting a reply from the user before any more progress can be made in resolving the issue.
Resolved - the issue is resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and communication has ended.
Pending - the ticket cannot move forward for an extended period of time due to a stall either on the agent or user side.

A ticket will often go back and forth between the ‘awaiting agent’ and ‘awaiting user’ statuses a few times before it is resolved.

An example ticket lifecycle:

A user reports an issue by email, creating a ticket with ‘awaiting agent’ status.
An agent replies, perhaps requesting more information, and sets the ticket to ‘awaiting user’ status.
The user replies to the agent, setting the status back to ‘awaiting agent’ again.
The agent is waiting on some external work to be completed before they can repond, and sets the ticket to ‘pending’.
After work is completed and a few more messages, the user confirms the problem is solved, and the agent sets the status to ‘resolved’.

As you will see below, when you write your reply to a ticket, you can decide what status to give it.

Usually you would reply and set the status to ‘awaiting user’ (this is the default option when you just press the reply button).

In some cases, you might reply and set the status to ‘awaiting agent’ if you are telling the user that you’re assigning the ticket to a different agent, or reassuring them that you’re working on the problem and will get back to them.

The goal for most tickets will be to get them to ‘resolved’ status.

Resolved tickets can be re-opened by agents (and possibly by users; this depends on Usergroups permissions).

Pending status

Pending status is a way to record that an agent needs to act on the ticket, but that you’re waiting for something else to happen first. This often involves waiting for a third party.

For example, a user has raised a new ticket and you need to check something with one of your suppliers before you reply. You have emailed the supplier and you are waiting to hear back.

Leaving this ticket marked as awaiting agent isn’t quite right, since that would make it seem like there’s something you need to do to it now, whereas in fact you just have to wait for the supplier. The solution is to mark it as pending.

If you have tickets pending, there will be a checkbox in the top part of the filter pane of the Tickets app - check it to view the pending tickets, uncheck it to view awaiting agent tickets as usual.

Hidden statuses: awaiting validation, spam and deleted

There are three ticket statuses that are used for tickets that are hidden from the main filters. These are:

Spam
Deleted

These hidden statuses will not generate notifications and will not show up in searches. You can still find them by looking in special filters.

Spam and deleted status

You may get tickets created as a result of spam emails or web robots posting junk messages into the forms on the web portal. You can set the status of these tickets as spam.

::: info Note

Deskpro does not have its own automatic spam filter, but your admins may use another spam filter system combined with Deskpro features to mark suspected spam automatically.

:::

Tickets set as spam can be seen in the Spam filter in the filter pane.

Tickets can also be deleted. They are then shown in the Recycle Bin in the filter pane. You might want to delete a ticket that is abusive or irrelevant (e.g. the user has sent it to the wrong company). You don’t need to manually delete resolved tickets - if there are problems

You can set a single ticket as spam or delete it using the Remove button.

You can use Mass actions to spam or delete tickets in bulk.

Tickets in the Spam filter or the Recycle Bin will be purged - deleted permanently - after a certain amount of time. Your admins set the time until automatic purging. It can be different for deleted and spam tickets. Admins can also purge all the deleted tickets manually.

You can always undelete or unspam a ticket before it is purged.