The "Ghost Ticket" Auto-Closer

Every support team knows the frustration of "ghost tickets”. Those customer queries that go completely radio silent right after an agent asks for more context or provides a fix.

Leaving these stagnant tickets open is a silent productivity killer; it clutters your team's daily pipelines and more importantly artificially inflates your average resolution times, therefore destroying your data.

Implementing an automated pipeline hygiene system in your CRM, can help you solve this issue and tidy up your help desk system.

Building a "Ghost Ticket" Auto-Closer workflow in HubSpot will mean you can automatically send a polite check-in nudge and cleanly close out abandoned issues without your agents lifting a finger.

This simple hack not only sanitises your reporting metrics but it improves your customer experience with consistent communication and provides your sales and account teams with the accurate data they need for future renewal conversations.

Before building the workflow, you need the email that will be sent to the customer.

Step 1: Build your email

1. Navigate to Marketing > Email.
2. Click Create email and select Automated (this is crucial, otherwise you can't use it in a workflow).
3. Draft a polite "Checking In" email.
4. Click Review and Save (make sure the email is published for automation).

Step 2: Build the workflow

1. Navigate to Automation > Workflows.
2. Click Create workflow > From scratch.
3. In the left sidebar, select Ticket-based and click Next.
4. Click Set up triggers.
5. Under Filter type, select Ticket properties > Ticket Status. Select is any of and choose Waiting on Customer (or your equivalent pipeline stage). Click Save.

Step 3: Set up the "Safety Net" (Unenrollment)

We need to ensure that if the customer does reply during this process, the automation stops immediately and they are removed from the workflow.

1. At the top of your workflow builder, click the Settings tab.
2. Click Unenrollment and suppression in the left menu.
3. Under When a ticket no longer meets the enrollment conditions, select Yes, remove them from this workflow. 

Note: By default in HubSpot, when a customer replies to an email, the ticket status automatically changes to "Waiting on Us". Because the status changes, they will instantly be removed from this workflow and won't get auto-closed)

Step 4: Add Your delays and actions

Now we build the timeline for the chase.

1. The First Delay: Click the + icon. Select delay to set amount of time. Enter your preferred delay time.
2. The Chaser Email: Click the + icon. Select send email. Choose the automated "Checking In" email you created in step 1. Click Save.
3. The Final Delay: Click the + icon again. Add another Delay for a set amount of time. Click Save.
4. The Auto-Close Action: Click the + icon. Select Set property value.
• Target object: Ticket
• Property to update: Ticket Status (or Pipeline Stage)
• New value: Closed
5. (Optional but recommended) The cleanup action: Click the + icon and select set property value. Update your "Resolution" or "Close Reason" custom property to "Auto-Closed: No Response." This keeps your reporting incredibly accurate so managers know agents didn't just ignore these tickets.

Step 5: Test and turn on

1. Click Review and publish in the top right corner.
2. Choose whether you want to enrol existing tickets that are already "Waiting on Customer" or only enrol new ones from now on. 
3. Click Turn on.

And now you're done! Your service pipeline will now automatically clean itself, unresponsive customers won't ruin your SLAs, and your support team can focus entirely on the people who actually need help.

Mel Baker

HubSpot Marketing Consultant