IT Team Fixes Auto-Close Rule That Was Silently Failing Depot Shift Workers

A service desk tool was automatically closing unresolved tickets after three working days of no reply — a setting that worked for office staff but consistently failed depot workers on rotating four-days-on, four-days-off shifts. A night-shift employee reporting a fault on her last shift would return five days later to find her ticket closed as resolved, forcing her to reopen a new one or simply work around the problem. The issue came to light in June when a regional manager flagged repeated fault reports across his sites, and an audit revealed 43% of shift workers' tickets had been closed by the timer, versus 9% for office staff. The team overhauled the system so the auto-close timer now counts the requester's actual working shifts using rota data, rather than calendar days. Tickets closed by the timer are now tracked as a separate outcome from resolved, and any fault reopened within a fortnight is linked to the original ticket rather than treated as a new request.