Service Desk

FollowUpTime — Limit Ticket Reopen Period for Customer Replies

Prevents closed tickets from being reopened after a defined time period — late customer replies are automatically rejected or routed into a new ticket.

FollowUpTime gives service teams precise control over how long a closed ticket remains eligible for reopening through customer replies.

By default, Znuny allows customers to reopen closed tickets indefinitely by simply responding to the original notification email. While useful in many scenarios, this can cause problems when old tickets resurface weeks or months later — cluttering agent queues, distorting SLA metrics, and reactivating outdated workflows.

This add-on introduces a Max Response Time setting in queue management. Once a ticket is closed and the configured time window expires, any further customer replies will no longer reopen the ticket. Instead, the system automatically sends an auto-reject response to the customer — or, if preferred, creates a new ticket from the reply so that no request goes unanswered.

The time window is fully flexible: the unit — seconds, minutes, hours, days, or weeks — is configured globally via SysConfig, while each queue can define its own numeric value. This allows different response windows for different service levels, such as a short window for first-level support and a longer one for project-related queues.

The behavior after expiry is also configurable. Teams can choose between a clean rejection with an automatic response or a reply that generates a new ticket, ensuring that legitimate late requests are still captured without disrupting the original ticket's history and metrics.

As long as the customer replies within the allowed time window, follow-up behavior works exactly as before — tickets reopen normally, and no auto-response is triggered.

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