Daily

Solve pending tickets after 2 weeks of silence

Tickets waiting on a customer who never replied are solved automatically, and you get the list.

Runs: Daily
Apps: Zendesk
AI: Not needed
Access: read+write

Send this to your assistant

Create a ClickRuntime automation: every day, solve Zendesk tickets that have been pending with no update for 14 days and email me the list of tickets it closed.

Paste it into your assistant. It tells you what it will send or change before it runs live.

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Why use it

Why teams use this automation

Agents set a ticket to Pending after asking the customer for a screenshot or an order number. Sometimes the customer answers; often they never do. Those tickets stay in Pending for months, bloating the open queue and dragging down reports, because pending tickets still count toward backlog in many views. A team of five can end up with 400 pending tickets nobody plans to touch.

Every day, Zendesk is searched for pending tickets that have not been updated in 14 days. Those are updated to solved in one bulk call, which Zendesk limits to a batch at a time, and an email lists every ticket that was closed so nothing is changed in secret. Customers can still reply and reopen.

Teams who keep their queue lean for reporting and SLA reviews use this most.

What you get out of it

A queue that shows real work
Removing abandoned conversations lets the open count reflect what agents need to handle. Managers stop explaining why 400 tickets are open when only 40 are active. Open queues shrink immediately.
Agents stop sweeping by hand
Closing stale tickets manually is a monthly chore done in a rush. A daily sweep makes the chore invisible and avoids the long list that nobody wants to start. Pending was meant to be a short wait.
Honest backlog metrics
Backlog and resolution figures calculated on pending tickets nobody will answer misrepresent performance. Solving them produces numbers that match reality. Closing happens daily instead of in a rush at quarter end.
Nothing closes without a trace
The emailed list names each ticket that was solved, so an agent who remembers a conversation can find it. Closing is automatic, but never hidden. Honest metrics help staffing talks.
Customers can still come back
A solved Zendesk ticket reopens when the requester replies within the reopen window. Closing a ticket after two weeks of silence does not cut the customer off. The list in the email makes the process transparent.
Less clutter in views
Agents scanning pending views see only conversations that might still move, which makes daily triage faster. Sweeping daily is gentler than a big quarterly purge, because each run only touches tickets that have just crossed the 14-day mark.

How it works

What happens, step by step

Every day, ClickRuntime finds Zendesk tickets that have been pending for two weeks with no reply from the customer.
It marks those tickets as solved.
You get an email listing the tickets it closed.

Before it runs live

Connect Zendesk

What you get

RunsDaily

Solve pending tickets after 2 weeks of silencetoday, 9:00Succeeded

Email · Stale tickets closedSolved 5 stale pending tickets #4601 Question about API limits · #4622 Logo upload

Build your own

Need it to work differently?

This template is a starting point. Copy the prompt and change it, or describe a different automation from scratch, with your own conditions, more apps or an AI step. Your assistant writes it, tests it and runs it on ClickRuntime.

Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.

Changes you can ask for

Run it at a different time, more or less often, or only on weekdays
Add an AI step, for example to summarize, sort or draft a reply
Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
Combine it with other Zendesk steps into one automation

Under the hood

The code that runs this automation

This is the Python script that runs each time the automation starts. Your AI assistant writes it for you when you send the prompt, and you allow each step in your assistant. To change how the automation works, describe the change to your assistant and it updates the script for you. For every function it can use, see the script reference.

close_stale_pending_tickets.pyexample

from datetime import date, timedelta
from clickruntime import on_trigger, http, credentials, notify

ZD = "https://yourcompany.zendesk.com/api/v2"
AGENT_EMAIL = "you@yourcompany.com"

def zd(method, path, **kw):
    r = http.request(method, f"{ZD}{path}", auth=(f"{AGENT_EMAIL}/token", credentials.secret("ZENDESK_API_TOKEN")), **kw)
    r.raise_for_status()
    return r.json() if r.content else None

@on_trigger
def run(event):
    cutoff = (date.today() - timedelta(days=14)).isoformat()
    tickets = zd("GET", "/search.json", params={"query": f"type:ticket status:pending updated<{cutoff}", "per_page": 100})["results"]
    for t in tickets:
        zd("PUT", f"/tickets/{t['id']}", json={"ticket": {"status": "solved"}})
    if tickets:
        notify.email_me(f"Solved {len(tickets)} stale pending tickets", "\n".join(f"#{t['id']} {t['subject']}" for t in tickets))
    return {"solved": len(tickets)}

FAQ

Common questions

Will customers get a survey or notice when it closes?

Whatever your Zendesk triggers and automations do for solved tickets will run, including satisfaction surveys if enabled. If you do not want surveys for these, add a tag condition to your survey automation. A different cutoff than 14 days is possible.

Can it exclude tickets from VIP customers?

Yes. The Zendesk search that selects tickets can include extra conditions such as organization, tag or priority, so important accounts can be left alone. That is a small edit to the search query. Add a condition for priority or tags.

How many tickets are closed per run?

Zendesk's bulk update handles tickets in batches, so a large backlog is closed across runs rather than all at once. After the first big cleanup, each daily run only deals with newly stale tickets. Larger backlogs are cleared across several days.

What permissions does it need?

read+write. Nothing else in your accounts is used.

Does it need AI?

No. It runs without AI, so it doesn't use your plan's AI allowance.

How many runs does it use?

One run each time it runs (daily). Checks that find nothing to do and stop right away aren't counted.

Can I change how it works?

Yes. Describe the change to your AI assistant, for example a different schedule, channel or filter. It updates the automation, tests it and tells you what changed.

Daily