Archived tickets

Yes. We have the same problem.

We run reports for our account managers from the ticket list view. They want to know all the tickets that have come from their customers. Because of the split between archived and normal tickets, we now have to run two reports and combine them.

We don't need to view the archived tickets all the time, but we do need the option to be able to see both archived and non-archived tickets at the same time when we need to.

Archiving is a nightmare.  We have a need to correct some old tickets.  Once they are archived, they cannot be modified in any way.  You cannot add a comment, modify content, change the requester, or even add a tag.  This is crazy.  Some of our oldest tickets are not archived yet while some newer ones are.  We managed to edit a couple before they were archived only to find that the changes were reverted once the ticket was archived.

Shouldn't this data be ours to manage?

Forced archiving and locking tickets by Freshdesk is unacceptable.
I support Gregg's comment that the data is ours to manage, not Freshdesk's!

Forced archiving and locking tickets is becoming a major issue for us.
Becasue of this change it's becoming increasingly difficult for us to link tickets to other applications. This is vital for our business.    
We may have to reconsider using Freshdesk, which is a shame becasue overall we were quite happy with Freshdesk.  

Hi everyone,

A quick summary of our archive process just to ensure we share the same context:

We only archive closed tickets that have been inactive for over 120 days. Let's take a few examples:

• Let's assume there is a ticket in the helpdesk, say ticket #100, that is currently in "Resolved" status (or any other status other than "Closed") for 150 days. Will this ticket be archived? - Definitely not. Only tickets that have been in the "closed" status for a minimum of 120 days will be archived. 
• There is another ticket in the helpdesk, say ticket #200, that has been in the "closed" status for 118 days. On the 119th day, an agent (or the customer) updates the ticket by adding a note/reply or by changing the ticket properties. Will this ticket be archived the next day, i.e, on the 120th day? - Again, no. The day counter will be reset for this ticket and it will be archived a further 120 days after the update was done. 

We chose 120 days as the archival time period considering that closed inactive tickets seldom have transactions after a stagnation period of upto 4 months. However, decluttering such tickets from the ticket list views greatly enhanced helpdesk performance allowing day to day ticketing operations to happen a lot faster.

In an uncommon scenario that a customer responds to a ticket closed more than 4 months earlier, the response will be created as a new ticket with a link back to the archived ticket so that the context is maintained. Also, the search functionality and reports, both, include archive tickets without any differentiation. 

Having set the context, I can understand why frequently exporting from two different views or having to look at two sections in the customer section might be cumbersome. My only doubt around this - what are the situations in which an agent might frequently want to look at tickets that have been stagnant for so long or frequently export all tickets from the helpdesk? Do these situations arise often? It's always possible that certain workflows function differently than what we expected, and will be great to understand these workflows and the frequency of their occurrence so that we can plan our next step.

Thanks for all your feedback!

Can you add a way to see archived tickets in the recent tickets custom app? I see that this makes it difficult for us, because we never know the tickets that are archived, since we don't check the customer view directly when we work in Freshdesk.

Thank you,

Adam

>>My only doubt around this - what are the situations in which an agent might frequently want to look at tickets that have been stagnant for so long or frequently export all tickets from the helpdesk? Do these situations arise often? 

For us it's quite common. Here are some use cases:

1.  I can remember that I had a previous ticket with someone from a company about a particular issue and I'm trying to find it. I can't remember when it was (i.e. I have no way to guess whether it's within 120 days or not). I want to be able to filter for all tickets from that individual or company relating to that part of our product. It will slow me down to have to run two separate reports.
   
   
2. Our account managers request a 6 monthly review of how much their customer is using the support desk. We now have to run two separate reports to get a count for the archived/non archived tickets for a single customer in the year. 

>>In an uncommon scenario that a customer responds to a ticket closed more than 4 months earlier, the response will be created as a new ticket with a link back to the archived ticket so that the context is maintained.

It is still a new ticket and the conversation is now broken.  Yes it is somewhat uncommon, but it does happen - it happened to us today.  It becomes awkward for my agents who are not used to viewing two tickets for the same conversation.  That is why we merge.  It is then also awkward for the customer who has two tracking numbers for the same issue.  How does that work?

Like Gregg said, I do not think it is up to Freshdesk to decide when tickets can be archived because tickets do not belong to FreshDesk, do they?
This kind of process should be an option for customers (us) to choose whether to use it, and decide how many days to archive a ticket.

This is also a nightmare for us when you introduce this option, without any warning, notification, information... nothing!

I spend so much time going into a customer account, displaying recent tickets and then archived tickets.... 

And most of all, archive tickets cannot be accessed by the end customers (using FreshDesk API).

With other issues we have with Freshdesk (multilanguage options mainly), just like Emiel, we are already considering switching to another platform. Unless our suggestions and feature requests are taken into account (none so far).

I have another use case for you that I came across today.
I wanted to search for all tickets from a particular customer with a certain "Cause" tag, because I wanted to see whether we had had any occurrences in the last 9 months. 

With the normal filter view I could easily do this search on all the unarchived tickets.

However, the only way I can see all the archived tickets for a customer is to go to their page and view archived tickets. From there it's not possible to apply any filters using custom fields, so I wasn't able to filter the archived tickets for things with a particular "Cause". Meaning there's no way for me to get this information quickly and easily.

Archiving is a major pain in the ass. Searching for customer names does not bring up archived results or even the customers who have had tickets archived. When you find the customer you have to change your view to include archived tickets. Knowing a customers past issues is often essential to helping them with current issues. 

I understand why this change was made from a performance standpoint but FD makes way too many decisions based on this factor with no regard for how it will affect their customer base. Poor product management...again. 

I want to manage my own data as stated several times above. I understand the need for archiving and can live with it BUT I want the option at the ticket level to unarchive a thread if that is what is called for. Creating a new ticket on a similar or the same issue is inconvenient, disjointed, and unproductive. 

My colleague this morning has been trying to generate a report of all support tickets from the last year from a particular customer. It's so far taken her more than 30 minutes because she's having to switch between archived and recent tickets and set the correct dates for download.

It should be as simple as:

• Go to the list of all tickets
• Switch the filter so that it is including archived tickets
• Set the filter to look for everything created in the last year
• Export.

Archiving breaks our process with our Facebook Workplace app we paid Freshdesk to build for us. 

Now if someone replies to a post in Workplace that is tied to a ticket, the app can't update the ticket. As one can imagine, a social media post doesn't have a lifetime like a ticket could - the post lives forever, and if someone searches the platform and finds the posts issue is related to theirs, they comment on the post, we then have a request in Workplace that doesn't re-open the ticket for follow up. 

I'm also experiencing the following issue, which VERY inconvenient and has me contemplating another solution: "Searching for customer names does not bring up archived results or even the customers who have had tickets archived. When you find the customer you have to change your view to include archived tickets"

I see the point of archiving, but we should be able to control it, not have our data held hostage by it.