Suspended Ticket Management in Zendesk - Detailed Guide for 2024

Ticket management is a crucial part of customer support. After all, tickets are the primary way customers interact with businesses and get their issues resolved. 

However, if you're using Zendesk as your help desk system, you may have encountered a common issue: suspended tickets. Zendesk may suspend tickets due to several reasons. 

The guide below will teach you the ins and outs of suspended ticket management in Zendesk so that you can review and deal with those tickets accordingly. 

How to Manage Suspended Tickets in Zendesk?

Management can mean different things in different contexts. You might want to view the tickets to check their content. Similarly, you might want to recover them. Learn how to do all this below. 

View Suspended Tickets in Zendesk 

The first thing to know is that not everyone can view suspended tickets. Only agents with custom permissions and the admins can view these tickets. Second, the suspended tickets are automatically deleted in two weeks. 

To find the suspended tickets, go to the Views section in Zendesk. Click on the Suspended Tickets tab, and you'll see all the suspended tickets. 

Zendesk shows you the reason each ticket was deleted in front of it. You can then choose to delete the ticket or recover it. 

Recover or Delete Suspended Tickets 

There are two ways to go about it. You can either delete or recover suspended tickets in bulk or do it one by one. 

If you want to manage them in bulk, follow these instructions: 

• Go to the Suspended Tickets view. 
• Choose all the tickets you want to recover/delete. Click on the box next to each ticket for selection. A checkmark will appear to show that the ticket has been selected. 

• Click on Recover or Delete at the bottom of the toolbar, depending on what you want to do. 

The tickets you delete will go away forever, whereas the recovered tickets will get a New status. You can find them in the Unassigned Tickets section. 

If you prefer recovering or deleting each ticket individually, do this: 

• Go to the Suspended Tickets view. 
• Click on the ticket's subject. 
• Select Recover automatically, Recover manually, or Delete from the right-hand corner of the ticket's profile. 

If you choose Recover automatically, the ticket will be sent back to the inbox. But if you choose to Recover manually, you will first be able to edit the ticket before recovering it. 

Deleting a suspended ticket will eliminate it permanently from your Zendesk account. 

Export Suspended Tickets 

If there are too many suspended tickets, you can also export them as a CSV file to manage them offline. You may want to do this to check the leading cause of the suspensions, analyze them in a spreadsheet, or share them with another team. 

When you're in the Suspended Tickets view, you'll see the option to Export CSV in the top right corner. Click on it, and wait to get the download link in your email inbox. 

Set Up Notifications for Suspended Tickets

As we've already mentioned, suspended tickets are deleted after 14 days. You can set up notifications to ensure you check and recover any important tickets before they are permanently deleted. 

Here are the steps to set up notifications for suspended tickets: 

• Go to Objects and Rules in the Admin Center. 
• Select Tickets. 
• Go to Settings. 
• Click on Suspended Ticket Notifications, and choose how frequently you want to receive notifications. 
• Enter an email address where you want to receive the notifications. 
• Click on Save.

If you don't want to receive notifications for suspended tickets at a later point in time, come back to these settings and select Never in the step where you set the frequency of notifications. 

Why Does Zendesk Suspend Tickets?

Zendesk has a whole list of causes of ticket suspension. Some of the most common causes include spam, malware detection, malicious pattern detection, authentication issues, and violation of Zendesk's terms and policies. 

We'll discuss a few major ones below. 

• Automated Response Mail: Zendesk will suspend any tickets in which the email header contains an automated response mail to avoid any ticket loops or spam emails that keep creating tickets with the same content. 
• CCs Limit Reached: If an email has more than 48 CCs, the ticket will be suspended. 
• Email Loop: If you get too many emails from the same sender within a short time period, the tickets are suspended. Zendesk also blocklists the sender for one hour. 
• Spam: Zendesk has a couple of email detection filters that determine if an email is spam based on the content and sender. If it classifies an email as spam, the ticket is suspended.
• Email Authentication Failed: In this case, an email is spoofed. That means the email has come from somewhere other than its stated origin. 
• No Reply Address: If a ticket comes from a no-reply email address (not intended to get responses), Zendesk will suspend it. 
• Too Large: The maximum size for an email in Zendesk, including attachments, is 10 MB. If the email is bigger than that, it will be suspended. 

Receive Tickets in Slack Through JustReply

As functional as Zendesk is, you might be more of a Slack team. If that's the case, you can integrate JustReply to start managing support tickets within Slack. 

Basically, the JustReply website live widget shows you all submitted tickets in Slack. Your support team can reply to tickets directly from Slack or assign them to a teammate for better assistance. They can also direct customers to your help center on JustReply to get help from support articles or how-to videos in case they want self-service support instead. 

JustReply's Notion-like editor and AI writing assistant equip your customer service team with sufficient tools to craft helpful support articles. All in all, it's a smooth user experience for both your support team and the customers. 

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