Zendesk Ticket Basics

Ticket status

Each ticket in Zendesk has a status that indicates its current state.

Ticket statuses and their descriptions

Make sure to reply to the user

If a user’s reply is the last one in the ticket, make sure to send a public reply when changing the ticket status.

Changing a ticket’s status (except for Solved) without replying will not stop the ticket’s breach clock. See SLA clock for more details.

Avoiding status change automations

By default, our Zendesk automations will do the following:

• After 7 days in Pending, it will send a notification to the user we are still awaiting a response from them.
• After 14 days in Pending, it will send another notification and mark the ticket as Solved.
• After 7 days in Solved, it will close the ticket.

While this is normally the right workflow, there might be situations in which you need to prevent this from occurring. To do so, use the appropriate Zendesk labels:

NOTE: If the ticket has been reopened after already auto-solving and we want to prevent autosolve from happening again, the autosolve and autosolve_message tags will be present. These do NOT need to be removed when adding the skip_autosolve tag.

Behavior of On-Hold tickets

We have a number of automations around tickets in an On-Hold status:

• When a ticket is set to On-Hold, it will be automatically assigned to you by the trigger Automatically assign on-hold ticket to the engineer who put it to the on-hold status.
• Tickets without an assignee will be automatically reopened by the trigger Automatically reopen on-hold tickets without assignee.
• Tickets with an assignee will be automatically reopened in 4 days by the automation Reopen on-hold tickets after 4 days, unless the ticket is of type Task.

SLA clock

If a customer’s reply is the last one in the ticket, do not set it to any status silently (except for Solved), because the SLA clock will continue to run and the ticket may breach SLA silently. Instead, send a confirmation, greeting, or other message, while also changing the status.

Ticket subject

Ensure that the subject of a support ticket is both descriptive and accurate. You can edit the Subject to fix typos or make the problem clearer. Some examples include:

• gitlab error 500 on login -> gitlab error 500 on login due to no partition of relation “audit_events”
• My Account was Blockes -> My Account was Blocked
• git reconfigure with below errors -> git reconfigure with letsencrypt_certificate errors

Other ticket fields

Ticket fields help us capture important data that will help us improve the user experience.

Depending on the view in which you are working and the form that has been selected for the ticket, you might need to fill out some ticket fields manually. As a high percentage of our tickets are solved or closed automatically through our workflows, it is important to begin your work on a ticket by setting appropriate values in all of the required (*) fields and relevant non-required fields.

Adding CCs to a ticket

Do not try to add external contacts to the CCs of a ticket, even if the customer asks you to. As a matter of security policy, customers have to add CCs themselves. Direct the customer to the corresponding instructions on how to do so.

You can still add internal contacts (like other SEs, the customer’s CSM, …) yourself.

Handling Large Files

Zendesk has a fixed maximum attachment size of 50MB per file. If you need a user to share a larger file than this, then see Provide Large Files to GitLab Support for information on how to do so.

Merging tickets

WARNING: Any attached files in the to be merged tickets will be shared across the tickets. Everyone in CC on both of these tickets will receive the files.

When Merging Tickets, leave Requester can see this comment unchecked in the ticket that’s being merged into (the second ticket from the top) in order to maintain the SLA. If the merge comment is made public, Zendesk considers it a response and removes the SLA. The ticket that was merged into another ticket is closed while the status of the target ticket is unaffected.

NOTE: Any ticket merge is final – there is no option to undo it.

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