Companies with a high number of tickets in pending status often struggle with SLA breaches.
Over 60% of SLA violations can be traced back to poor handling of pending tickets, mainly when communication with clients or vendors is not maintained.
There is a myriad of possibilities on when to or not to use the pending statuses. The way the support team choose to use it, can make or break the relationship with clients. Support departments must keep in mind that timely resolutions are critical, and managing pending tickets effectively is a no-brainer.
When left behind, or the process of defining as pending is not that clear, these issues can lead to client frustration and dissatisfaction, which impacts a business’s reputation.
1. Define Clear Criteria for Pending Status:
Defining when it’s appropriate to mark a ticket as pending help prevent misuse of this status, such as using it to delay work or avoid responsibility.
Awaiting client feedback, external vendor actions or parts arrival could all be valid reasons if it is accorded between parties and your support team is well-trained to use them
Remember that the ‘pending’ status in GLPI makes all SLA and date to solve to be updated after the ticket is changed to other status different from pending. So being honest and clear with clients about these reasons, can be crucial.
45% of pending tickets are due to awaiting client feedback or necessary information.
30% of pending tickets are attributed to waiting on external vendors or third parties.
15% are related to awaiting internal approvals or additional resources (e.g., parts or budget).
2. Set Limits and Follow-up Protocols:
Tickets left in pending status for too long may increase unhappiness and missed deadlines.
Establish time limits for how long a ticket can remain in pending status before a mandatory review or follow-up is triggered. Use GLPI’s automation rules to send reminders to technicians to reassess pending tickets regularly.
Saved searches with time ranges and notifications may help technicians to not let pending status
It is known that best practices in handling pending tickets can increase SLA adherence by up to 25%, significantly improving customer satisfaction.
3. Document All Actions and Reasons:
Proper documentation within each ticket ensures that any team member can quickly understand the ticket’s history and current status, reducing delays caused by knowledge gaps.
GLPI AI plugin helps technicians to be aware of a vast timeline of facts in a ticket
4. Prioritize Client Communication During Escalations:
Sometimes, a ticket might need to be escalated due to delays or complexity, which can further frustrate clients if not handled well.
Plugin Escalade, for example, add options of adding followups automatically when an escalation is done
Tickets that remain in pending status for longer than 3 days without updates or communication result in a 25-30% drop in customer satisfaction ratings.
Proactive communication (even with pending status updates) can maintain satisfaction levels, keeping the negative impact to less than 10%.
5. Communicate Transparently with Clients:
Clients need and want to feel informed about the status of their tickets, even when they’re pending. Don’t let clients feel ignored.
The number of pending tickets can increase if processes are not optimized, leading to backlogs and longer resolution times.
Set up a dunning process, so GLPI may keep the user automatically updated about the status of the ticket or when you need to remind people about the need to interact with the ticket.
Twig is a templating Engine for PHP that helps to keep the code clean and organized by separating what is coded from what people see on the website. This makes the task of managing and updating templates a bit easier.
GLPI has brought since the version 10, the ability to use Twig variables on followups, tasks and solution templates. But you may ask, what is it useful for?
Well. Let’s take a template you use on a daily basis and have to always change some fields. Start with a welcome message in a ticket, as an example:
Dear {Client’s Name},
Thank you for reaching out to our support team. We wanted to let you know that your support ticket has been successfully inserted into our support area. Our team is already on it and will start the process of analysis within {specified time frame}.
If you need to add any additional information or have further questions, you can simply reply to this email or visit our website at upport.yourdomain.com to update your ticket.
We appreciate your patience and will get back to you as soon as possible.
Best regards,
I know. Sometimes we forget to manually change the fields by the correct ones, or we just let general information there as don’t make any mistakes.
The twig variables are exactly for this.
Every ticket has some pre-filled fields. Be it by the user, by the technicians, by automatic business rules. The only thing we want here is to be accurate, quick and informative.
Let’s change this same message to add
The first name of the requester
The Time to Own the ticket received at this moment
The group that is responsible for the ticket at the moment
Dear {% for user in ticket.requesters.users %}{{ user.firstname }} , {% endfor %}
Thank you for reaching out to our support team. We wanted to let you know that your support ticket has been successfully inserted into our support area. Our team is already on it and will start the process of analysis within {{ ticket.tto | date("d/m/y H:i") }}.
The group {{ group.name }} is responsible for this ticket at this level.
If you need to add any additional information or have further questions, you can simply reply to this email or visit our website at upport.yourdomain.com to update your ticket.
We appreciate your patience and will get back to you as soon as possible.
Best regards,
As you can see, there are some variables in this template. It means that every time a technician selects this Followup template, GLPI will insert:
Every first name of users at the requesters field
{% for user in ticket.requesters.users %} {{ user.firstname }} , {% endfor %}
The Time to Own date and time added manually or automatically via business rules
{{ ticket.tto | date("d/m/y H:i") }}
The responsible group of the ticket
{{ group.name }}
The best part is that, once these fields change during the lifecycle of the ticket, the new followups, tasks and solutions will get updated information to be inserted during the time.
Here are some other ideas of templates you may use
Fill with a KB article
If you have a knowledge base article that may be useful for the user, you may:
relate this article with the ticket using the knowledge base tab in a ticket
create the followup or solution template with the following variable {{ knowbaseitem.answer | raw }}
select the template you’ve previously created. GLPI will insert the content of the article to the solution or followup template.
here is a template example
{% for user in ticket.requesters.users %}{{ user.fullname }} {% endfor %} There is a possible article on our knowledge base that may be of help: {% for knowbaseitem in ticket.knowbaseitems %}
{{ knowbaseitem.link | raw }}
{{ knowbaseitem.answer | raw }}
{% endfor %}
Use it for pending reasons
relate this article with the ticket using the knowledge base tab in a ticket
create the followup template with the important variables
create the pending reasons
connect the template you created to the pending reason you’ve previously created
here is a template example
Hi {% for user in ticket.requesters.users %}{{ user.firstname }} , {% endfor %}
Hope you’re doing well! We’re just dropping a quick note to remind you that your response is needed to proceed with ticket # {{ ticket.id }} regarding {{ ticket.name }}.
Your input is crucial for us to move forward. If you could spare a few moments to provide the necessary information or feedback, we’d greatly appreciate it.
If the issue has already been resolved, or you have other questions, please let us know.
Thanks for your attention to this matter!
Best,
{% for user in ticket.assignees.users %}{{ user.firstname }}
{% endfor %}
The Twig variables may be found at the followup, task and solution templates. Explore it and make me know what are the projects you have created with them. We will have news about those same twigs in next versions.
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