In most help desks, a ticket can be in one of four statuses:  Open, Pending, Resolved or Closed. When a ticket requires any action from you or your agents, it is marked as “open”. That means every new ticket would be marked as Open by default. When your agents require additional information from the customer, they might mark the ticket as Pending, and when they are finally able to provide a solution, you might want to mark it as Resolved.


Any time a customer responds to a ticket, its status will automatically be moved back to Open. That way, all the tickets that your support team needs to get working will always be “Open”.


Once you have provided a solution to their ticket, the customer can Close the ticket from your support portal, or your agents can close the ticket for them.


What are custom ticket statuses?


Often, you might want to bring in your specific help desk workflows into your ticket statuses. For example, a ticket might need specific inputs from your third party vendors. You might want to create a field called “Waiting for Customer Response”. You can create these additional ticket statuses by clicking on the “Ticket Status” field.


With custom statuses, you can even decide what should be displayed to the customers when they log in to the support portal to check the ticket status and what is seen by your agents. That means you can show the ticket status as “Waiting on Customer” for your agents, but when your customers login to your support portal, they can see the status as “Waiting for Your Response”.


A quick guide to creating a custom ticket status in Freshservice:

  • Log in to your service desk as an administrator.
  • Go to Admin > Service Management > Service Desk Settings > Field Manager > Ticket Fields. 
    If your account has more than one workspace: 

    To modify global workflows, navigate to Admin > Global Settings > Service Management > Service Desk Settings > Field Manager > Ticket Fields

    To modify workspace-level workflows, navigate to Admin > Workspace Settings > {Workspace Name} > Service Management > Service Desk Settings > Field Manager > Ticket Fields

    Important Note:
    Workspace admins can view the list of global and local workflows applicable to their workspace. 
    The global workflows execute first, followed by the workspace-level workflows, to allow for the workspace-level workflows to take precedence over the global workflow. 
    For example, A global workflow can be configured to route tickets to the right workspace based on the subject/description.


  • Click on the Status field to add your custom statuses or to edit existing status' settings.
  • Hit the Add Item button at the bottom of the dialog box to add an empty textbox for a new ticket status.
  • Type in a name for the status. The display message for the requester is generated automatically from the status name. It can be edited if required.
  • Use the SLA timer toggle to decide if you want the SLA timers to run for tickets set to this status.
  • Click on the Done button to save the field.
  • Press the Save button in the Field Templates page to finalize your changes.