When working on support cases, it is very common to get into back-and-forth email communication with Customer.

When support team is replying to Customer, they would normally change the case status to “Waiting for details” and then wait for customer to reply back. But what happens when the Customer does not respond? The open cases list would just keep on piling-up until the open cases count reaches a state to create panic in the support team.

A simple approach to avoid such situation would be that the support team nudges the customer for updates at regular intervals. However when your support team is working with 100’s of cases, it would be quite inefficient to manually keep check on each of such pending cases.

A better approach would be to automate the task of notifying the customer to respond… and still if no response received within a particular time-frame then close the dormant case as solved. This can be easily achieved using an out-of-box workflow as shown below:

Here, the workflow will activate and go in-to waiting status whenever the case status is changed to “waiting for customer details”. After 3 days of waiting, a reminder email notification would be sent to Customer… requesting to provide an update…and if still no response is received within next 3 days, then the automation would close the case as resolved!

Please note that whenever a customer response is received, the support agent needs to change the case status back to “in-progress”…this would automatically cancel the waiting workflow… (However if you are using Zap Objects – Helpdesk solution, you don’t even need to manually reset the case status… as the solution automatically resets case status whenever a new email response is received from the customer)

And that’s all there is to it! With this simple workflow, you’ll have an automated process that will automatically remind customers that you’re waiting for their response and eventually solve it if they don’t. You’ll no longer have to worry about managing pending cases.