How do customers track ticket progress? Is it only via e-mail notification or are they able to login somehow?

Just like you want to keep on top of you company’s support requests, you also want your users to be able to keep up with their own tickets. Zendesk gives them a couple ways to do this.

Your end-users are notified as soon as they send a ticket to your Zendesk thanks to your pre-configured triggers. By default, your end-users will also be notified when an agent replies with a public comment and when their ticket has been solved. (We discussed the Zendesk default triggers in a previous tip.) While your end-users can track their ticket progress via email notifications, they can also check on all their requests on your Zendesk support site.

When your end-user receives a mail notification, they are prompted to go to your Zendesk (as seen below) to view the status of their ticket:

Once at your Zendesk portal, your end-users can provide their email address and password and submit a new a request or, as in our case here, check their existing requests. (Log out of your Zendesk to see these tabs. If you don’t see them, you need to check your user admission settings under the Account tab.)

Once your end-user accesses the “check your existing requests” tab they will be able to see that either their request is “being processed” (i.e tickets marked new or open) or is “awaiting their response” (i.e for a ticket marked as pending).

In addition, your end-users will have the option to create a follow-up ticket directly from any closed ticket from under the “check your existing requests” tab.

You can check out how all this works by creating a test user account in your own Zendesk. To do so go to the People page under the Manage tab. Use this account any time you want to see what your customers see.