Decoding pending help desk tickets using Analytics Plus

Tickets in any status other than 'closed' can be categorized as "pending". These include unassigned, on-hold, and open tickets that are being worked upon by technicians.

Pending tickets are a little complex to understand because each help desk has its own way of categorizing them. A classic example is marking tickets as 'resolved' and not 'closed' after answering the customers' question. Some help desks follow this practice to ensure that the customer is completely satisfied with the technician's answer. In such cases, tickets will remain 'resolved' for a couple of days, and then be automatically updated as 'closed', provided the end user doesn't respond.

If a help desk manger wants to look at the actual number of tickets pending with his help desk, he has to consider pending tickets in different statuses.

The sample report given below shows the number of pending tickets owned by each technician, split into the different statuses. You can see that most of the technicians have a lot of resolved tickets, and only a few technicians have 5 or more on-hold and open tickets. If a help desk were to look at the total pending tickets under each technician as such and not the split, they'd be looking at inflated numbers that's nowhere near the actual count.