The goal of a well-run support system is to ensure that no customer requests go unanswered. OSTicket has the "Answered" attribute, and we can define a queue that shows all un-answered tickets. However, after our first answer, customers often have a followup comment or question that they will add into the ticket. In a busy support desk, there is a tendency to look at unanswered tickets first. Subsequent customer followups tend to get buried amongst other answered tickets and agents may not be aware of the replies because they are focussing on unanswered tickets first.

Other ticketing systems often use a "customer pending" attribute. Some have suggested inclusion of this attribute in osTicket in other forum posts. Technically, this is just another ticket status. But after setting the ticket status to customer pending, it behaves just like the answered attribute, which does not solve the problem.

What is needed is a "LastReplied" field, which will indicate if the ticket was last updated by Staff, or External. This field could be used in queue definitions, to have a "staff pending" queue that will show all tickets where the client initiated the last message in the queue.

When clients reply and their tickets visible in a "staff pending" queue, agents can focus on these and provide a faster response which will result in improved customer satisfaction. Everyone wins.

I hope my use case has convinced you, and that this will be built into a future version.