Auto re-open threads quickly and easily?

[leyton01]

We regularly send out emails that require follow up one week later but don't want them sitting in our main queue taking up space. Is there an easy way to have tickets re-open after 1 week. By easy I *do not* mean setting the follow up option as there is too much involved in this when you do many tickets a day.

To set follow up you have to do all of the following for *each* ticket:
Click Follow-up
Click the time drop down
Click X weeks
Type in 1
Click General
Click the Status drop down
Click Open
Click Submit
And then the ticket has to be closed:
Click Open Status
Click Status drop down
Select Closed
Click Submit


As you can see this is not a good option for many tickets a day.
I had a great idea but it doesn't quite work - creating a Status called "Reopen 1 week" and setting an SLA/escalation that re-opens the ticket after 168 hours (1 week). If this had worked all I would have had to do was:
Click Open status
Click Status drop down
Select Reopen 1 week
Click submit.

MUCH less work. Problem is tickets created by staff do not have an "overdue" time associated with them and so they never get escalated.

Question:
Does anyone know a quick and easy way of getting tickets to re-open after a week? Any way of getting escalation to work with staff created tickets? Work arounds or ideas to achieve what I want?

[Varun Shoor]

Hrmm, I am sure SLAs should apply to staff created tickets. If not then let me know, It might be a bug.

Regards,

Varun Shoor

[leyton01]

By default new tickets (and replies) do not have a due time. Without a due time they do not become overdue and so the SLA does not kick in.

The SLAs need to be extended to include "Last Activity" not just Overdue times. Auto-close runs on Last Activity - the SLAs should have this feature as well.

If Last Activity is made an option in SLA the Auto-close also becomes much more powerful. Right now you can only set 1 option for all departments to auto-close tickets. With last activity monitored tickets can be closed at different times according to their category etc.

A mail-parser type ruleset would also be good for SLAs - eg there is no way to set a rule according to the last replier. Some people will only want a ticket escalated if the customer was the last replier, other people will want it escalated even if a staff member was the last replier.

The escalation actions probably need to be expanded as well - extra options like sending an email to a certain account, adding notes to the ticket etc should be added. The "follow-up" options are fairly comprehensive (general, add notes, post reply, forward) - all of these should also be available in escalations.