[rt-users] status change when reply on resolved ticket

[Tim Cutts]

On 27 Aug 2012, at 23:04, Duncan McEwan <duncan at ecs.vuw.ac.nz> wrote:

> You can't have it both ways.  Either you disable the auto open scrip in
> which case you potentially miss a customer responding to a resolved ticket
> to say the problem is not fixed.  Or you leave the scrip enabled in which
> case you may have to manually re-resolve tickets that are reopened due to
> "Thank-you" emails.
> 
> We do that latter and find it not that big a deal for our ticket volumes.  
> Your situation may well be different.
> 
> I suppose you could try writing your own auto open scrip that searched
> through the body of a reply to try to figure out whether it looked like it
> was just saying "thank you".  Maybe someone has already put something like
> this on the wiki.  If not, good luck getting something that works reliably...!
> 
> The other suggestion that has been made on the list from time to time is
> to have an "On resolve" scrip with a template that includes text along
> the lines of "There is no need to reply to this message to thank us if
> this issue is now resolved as that will just reopen this closed ticket".
> But you'll still get some users doing it anyway...

That's what we do too.  The problem is that it tends to mess with ticket resolution times, and that upsets the various managers who rely on dubious statistics like mean time to resolution for KPIs.

It's not such a problem for the "thank you" emails, more for the breed of user who each time they have a problem think "who helped me last time?", look through their email, and reply to any old email that appears to have come from that person.  They often re-open tickets which are months or years old.  I'm considering writing a scrip which checks how long ago the ticket was resolved, and if it's longer than a certain threshold, leaves it closed and automatically creates a child ticket with the new transaction in it.  I think there are bits and pieces to do this in the wiki already, (ForkIntoNewTicket or something) but I haven't pieced all of it together yet.

Tim

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