Service Desk: How can I automatically notify customers that information is required for their request or after a certain amount of time, close the issue?

unknown

I'd like a way to automate the following:

When a Service Desk Request is in 'Waiting for Customer' and has not been updated for 'n' days, the customer is notified that further information is required and if not updated in 'n' days further... ticket is closed.

Thanks for reading, looking forward to see your solutions!

Kind regards,
David 

Jeff Tillett

Yes! We are currently doing this by manipulating SLA's. We have a couple of automation tasks that allow this to take place. The first being that any time we make a comment to the customer, it moves the ticket through the workflow into a status called "Waiting for Customer" I believe this is a canned automation script. We then have another any time the customer responds, it moves the ticket back into "Waiting for Support"

We then have an SLA created that begins counting time when a ticket enters "Waiting for Customer" status. The target for this SLA is set to 24 hours. 

Lastly, we have an automation script to auto-close the tickets. The automation is built with a trigger of "if the Waiting for Customer SLA" is breached, then the action is "advance workflow to resolved" AND "make a comment of X" where X is whatever verbiage you would like to give to your end user.

Another good practice is to use the canned automation trigger where if the end user replies on the ticket, it reopens it. This will place it back into the original techs queue.

On a side note, we are going to be implementing an "Inactive" step in the workflow that issues will transition to before actually closing. This will be purely to keep up appearances with the business that we have done our due diligence to give them adequate time and communication to respond before closing the ticket.