Hi Sarah, 

I assume you're talking about the following:

The only difference is "Pending" is what is shown on the agent dashboard, while "Waiting for customer" is what the client sees on the front-end portal. You can change what the client sees on their end to reflect your portal needs better.

You can do this for any of the statuses.

Hope this answers your question!

On our team, we use the Pending status for tickets whose background info has all been provided, but still requires the actual work of resolving the issue to be done (whether by the agent or some other department). "Waiting for customer" means we are blocked until we receive a response from the customer to a question we've asked before it can be completed.

Example:

When a ticket first comes in, it's Open. If the customer needs to provide more details, we send a reply to them and set the status to Waiting on Customer.

If it's a code issue that our software development team needs to work on, all of the ticket details must be provided before it is ready to be added to their queue of tasks to work on. Once that's done, the assigned group/agent is set to the software dev manager (me) and the status is set to Pending.

Once a member of my team actually begins working on the issue, I change the status to In Progress. That lets the client know that at that moment, we have eyes on the ticket and are working on it.

This allows us to see which specific tickets are being worked on at any given time (and by who), and identifies which tickets still need more info before they can move further along in our workflow towards a resolution.

Thanks guys!