1. At the front door
Requests arrive on a channel nobody watches — a personal inbox, a WhatsApp number, a contact form emailing an address that changed. Audit every route a customer could reach you and make each one land in the queue.
2. In the unassigned queue
A ticket in a shared queue with no owner belongs to nobody. Assign automatically on arrival, and put “unassigned” on the weekly review filter.
3. In pending
This is where most requests actually die. Marked pending awaiting the customer, the customer never replies, and nothing ever chases. Automate a follow-up at five days and an auto-close with a reopen link at ten.
4. After a handover
Leave, resignation and reassignment are where tickets fall silently. Make offboarding a checklist, and reassign every open and pending ticket the same day.
The measurement that proves it
Track the number of tickets with no activity for more than fourteen days. In an unmanaged desk this number is startling. Getting it near zero is the single best indicator that nothing is being lost.