Automate a daily open-ticket backlog aging report

A helpdesk view shows what is open, not how long it has been open. A ticket waiting on your reply for nine days looks the same as one that arrived this morning, until the customer writes again. The fix is dull and useful: every day, count open tickets by age, and name the oldest. Seeing the same references on the list three days running is what prompts someone to act.

You add the job and grant read access to your helpdesk. Each morning a scheduled agent lists tickets that are not yet solved, using ticket status and created-at fields. Zendesk, for example, exposes new, open, pending and hold statuses. The agent sorts tickets into age buckets you choose, such as under two days, two to five, five to ten and over ten, and splits each bucket by status. It then lists the ten oldest tickets with reference, status and last update date, and notes how many tickets were created since the previous report. It reads and reports. It does not reply to customers, reassign or close anything.

Before the report reaches you, the department head agent checks it: do the bucket counts add up to the open total, are pending tickets, which wait on the customer, kept apart from tickets waiting on you, and is any ticket listed twice. Then you approve, edit or skip the report, and nothing is delivered until you do. Tell the agent in the notes field about tickets that are old on purpose, such as a feature request parked for next quarter, so they stop topping the list.

Use the report as a morning triage list, not a score. If the over-ten bucket keeps growing, the problem is capacity or routing rather than one slow ticket. If most old tickets are pending, the issue is follow-up on the customer side and a reminder may help. Pair it with the weekly satisfaction report to see whether slow tickets are the ones getting low ratings.