How Incident Statuses Work
The four default incident statuses may be enough for your organization. However, if additional incident statuses can help you better organize the incidents in the knowledge base, you can add them.
An incident’s status is its state in the knowledge base. Service has four default incident statuses: Solved, Unresolved, Updated, and Waiting. Additionally, there are three default status types, which are Solved, Unresolved, and Waiting. These are displayed in the drop-down menu in the Status column on the editor. Not surprisingly, the Solved incident status uses the Solved status type. Likewise, the Waiting status uses the Waiting status type, and the Unresolved status uses the Unresolved status type, which is also used by the Updated status. You can rename the default statuses, but you cannot change their types, which are disabled on the Incident Statuses editor. The following list describes the default incident statuses.
- Solved—The incident has been resolved.
- Unresolved—The incident has been recently added, either by an agent or a customer.
- Updated—The incident has been updated by a customer through the Your Account page or by replying to an agent’s email.
- Waiting—An agent has responded to the incident and is waiting for a response from the customer. If the customer does not respond within the time specified in CI_HOURS (Agedatabase Utility > Batch Processing > Close Incidents), Agedatabase sets the incident status to Solved.
Service can automatically set an incident’s status when agents send a response. This is a property of the Incident Thread relationship item that can be set when you create an incident workspace. The property is called Status Change on Response, and you can set it for one of the following options:
- The status does not change when an agent sends a response.
- The status changes to Waiting.
- The status changes to Solved.
For information about setting properties for relationship items on workspaces, see Overview of Workspace and Script Elements.
The four default incident statuses may be enough for your organization. However, if additional incident statuses can help you better organize the incidents in the knowledge base, you can add them. When you add an incident status, you must assign it to one of the three default status types.