From Evan at ZOZI:
Although I wouldn’t call this entirely scientific, it’s my conclusion that the “pending” status and process doesn’t actually benefit our users. Customers who don’t respond, won’t respond. Instead, it wastes agent time and may annoy the customer.
Awesome to see Evan putting this practice through a test. Personally, I’ve never been a fan setting a “pending” status for cases where I’m waiting on a customer to respond. I use it for cases where I need to contact the customer in the next few days. But if I’m waiting to hear back from a customer, I go ahead and use the “closed” or “resolved” option for them.
Nice informal testing Evan!
Chase, did you read through the comments on how “pending” is intended to actually be used? This is how we use it at Figure 53, and it’s been quite valuable since we started using it in Help Scout (we’re recent converts from HelpSpot, which I don’t believe had an equivalent, or at least we didn’t use it if it did).
Using it how Evan explains, yeah, it’s pointless, but that’s not what it’s intended for. As intended, it’s definitely a useful tool!
Hey Andy!
When I posted this, there wasn’t any comments on Evan’s post. But I did go back this morning and read the new ones there. Thanks for tipping me off to those!
I think it all comes down to the workflows like people mentioned. If it’s helpful in your flow, go for it. If it’s not, don’t worry with it. It does help me in certain occasions – like if I’m following up with a customer a few days from now. I’m just not a fan of every single ticket being set to pending until the customer or I “officially resolve” the case.
Thanks for the comment!
Two other considerations here:
1. Aggressive spam filters are endemic (and understandable). It’s possible the reply was never read by a human.
2. If you don’t hear from the customer, that’s data on its own. We’re not here to respond to a customer’s email, we’re here to work through the issue which necessitated the email. Obviously if no reply is expected, this is moot, but if you ask a question and someone doesn’t reply, that’s a chance to learn. Something didn’t work.
Troy