Zendesk Ticket Status
Zendesk ticket status comes in six values, one of which is off by default and two of which people use interchangeably when they mean completely different things.
The Zendesk ticket status lifecycle
Solved and Closed being separate is deliberate. Solved gives the customer a window to say "actually, no". Closed is the archive.
Why pending makes your numbers honest
This is the status that decides whether your reporting means anything.
When a ticket is Pending, the clock on your reply-time SLA stops. You asked for a screenshot on Monday, the customer sent it on Thursday, and none of those three days count against you. Move the ticket back to Open when they reply and the clock restarts.
Teams that never use Pending end up with resolution times that measure customer response speed rather than agent performance. Then somebody in a leadership meeting asks why average resolution is four days, and the honest answer is that three of them were spent waiting for a photo of a serial number. That isn't a support problem, but it looks exactly like one.
The rule to teach agents is one sentence long. If the next action is theirs, Open. If the next action is the customer, Pending.
On-hold, and the argument against it
On-hold covers the third case: you are blocked, and the customer cannot unblock you.
It is genuinely useful. A ticket waiting on a warehouse should not sit in Open making your queue look worse than it is, and it should not sit in Pending pretending the customer owes you something. Enable it in the ticket status settings and it becomes available to everybody.
The argument against is real too. On-hold is where tickets go to be forgotten. Nobody chases a hold. If you turn it on, pair it with an automation that pings the assignee after five days on hold, and build a view that lists every on-hold ticket sorted oldest first. Without those two things you've created a hiding place.
Custom statuses
On the higher plans you can define your own statuses, each one mapped to a category that behaves like the standard status underneath it. So you might create "Waiting on engineering" and "Waiting on supplier", both sitting in the On-hold category, both stopping the same clocks, but visibly different in a view.
The value is precision without breaking the reporting model. Your SLA logic still works, your automations still fire, and a team lead can tell at a glance which blockage is which.
The failure mode is the same as with custom fields: somebody creates eleven statuses in a fortnight and agents start guessing. Three or four custom statuses is a taxonomy. Ten is a quiz. Don't add one until you can name the view or the report it unlocks.
Statuses and views go together
A status is only worth setting if something looks at it. Every status you use should map to a view someone opens, or an automation that acts on it.
The set most teams actually need: unassigned tickets, my open tickets, pending over four days without a customer reply, on-hold over five days, and anything breaching an SLA in the next hour. Five views. If a status feeds none of them, ask what it is for.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between pending, on-hold, solved and closed?
Zendesk pending vs on hold: pending means waiting on the customer, on-hold means waiting on you or a third party. Zendesk solved vs closed: solved is reversible for a few days, closed is permanent. Those four, plus new and open, are the standard Zendesk ticket statuses, and Zendesk custom statuses sit underneath them as sub-labels.
What is the difference between pending and on-hold?
Pending means you're waiting on the customer. On-hold means you are waiting on somebody internal or third party. Pending stops the reply clock and on-hold keeps the ticket out of your live queue.
What is the difference between solved and closed?
Solved is reversible: the customer replies and it reopens. Closed is permanent, set by an automation days later, and closed tickets cannot be edited or merged.
How do I enable the on-hold Zendesk ticket status?
It's a setting in your ticket status configuration and it's off by default. Turn it on for the whole account, then build a view for it in the same sitting.
Do custom statuses break SLAs?
No, because each custom status is mapped to a standard category. The SLA logic reads the category, not the label you invented.
Duplicates never reach a clean status
A duplicate gets solved twice or abandoned in Open. Merging it early keeps the lifecycle meaningful.
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