Tickets we created from audit findings that haven’t been resolved yet.
At a glance
Live count of Freshdesk tickets that Vortex IQ filed on your behalf from audit findings (broken checkout flows, refund spikes, performance regressions, ad-on-OOS, missing SEO fields) and which still sit in an unresolved state. The merchant question this answers is: “how many revenue-protecting fixes have I asked Freshdesk to triage that haven’t been picked up yet?” Treat this card as your unactioned-revenue-leak counter, not a generic ticket count.
| What it counts | Freshdesk tickets created by the Vortex IQ integration (tagged vortex_iq in Freshdesk) whose status is one of: Open (status 2), Pending (status 3), or any custom status mapped to “open” in Admin → Workflows → Ticket Fields. Resolved (4) and Closed (5) drop out. |
| API endpoint | GET /api/v2/search/tickets?query="tag:'vortex_iq' AND (status:2 OR status:3)" paginated with per_page=30 (Freshdesk Search API hard cap) up to 10 pages = 300 tickets per refresh. For accounts with >300 open findings the connector falls back to the bulk Tickets API and filters client-side. |
| Ticket-state filter | Open + Pending + custom-open. Resolved/Closed/Spam/Deleted excluded. Pending is included because in Freshdesk that state means “waiting for the customer/requester”, which on a Vortex IQ ticket usually means waiting on a developer or agency. |
| Bot-handled tickets | Included. Freddy AI replies do not change status by default; the ticket stays Open. Only a human or a workflow setting status:4 removes it from the count. |
| Multi-product (multi-brand) aggregation | Aggregated across every Product the connector token reads. Freshdesk Pro/Enterprise plans support multiple Products under one account; set vortex_iq.product_filter: <product_id> in the connector config to scope. |
| Multi-channel scope | All channels (Email, Portal, Phone, Chat, Mobihelp, Feedback Widget, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Outbound Email, API). Vortex IQ tickets always come in via API. |
| Time window | RT, refreshed every 60 seconds. |
| Alert trigger | > 20 open. |
| Anomaly detection | If the count grows by >5 in 60 minutes, Vortex IQ raises an “Audit findings backing up” alert. |
| Time zone | Account timezone in Admin → Account → Helpdesk Settings → Time zone. |
| Roles | owner, operations |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Freshdesk data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A UK fashion SMB on Shopify running Freshdesk Growth ($15/agent/month) with one Product configured. Snapshot taken on 02 May 26 at 14:20 BST.| Status | Count | Oldest | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open | 11 | 8 days (broken Klarna at checkout) | Filed by Vortex IQ during last week’s payment-funnel audit |
| Pending (waiting on dev) | 6 | 13 days (mobile menu z-index issue) | Engineer on holiday; tickets sat |
| Total open Vortex IQ findings | 17 | Below the 20-ticket alert threshold |
- The Klarna finding is the highest-impact ticket in the queue. Klarna failures correlate directly with cart abandonment for a fashion brand because BNPL is the typical payment method for £80-150 orders. Cross-reference
shopify.checkout_completion_rate. If completion rate has dropped 2-3 percentage points since the bug landed, the £/week cost is roughly (rate delta) × (Klarna-eligible session volume) × (AOV), which for a £100-AOV fashion brand running 30k weekly sessions works out to £3-6k/week. That justifies a same-day fix. - 6 Pending tickets is a leading indicator of capacity strain, not engagement. “Pending” in Freshdesk freezes the SLA clock. If the engineer is on holiday, those tickets quietly age past the 14-day cutoff and tip into Abandoned Findings on day 15. Set up a Freddy automation to reassign Pending Vortex IQ tickets after 5 days of inactivity.
- 17 open is healthy in absolute terms but unhealthy as a ratio. This SMB has 6 active CS agents and 17 Vortex IQ findings, so the team has roughly 3 unresolved findings per agent. Pair with
fre_open_tickets. If total backlog is also elevated, the team is drowning and Vortex IQ findings will get buried under live customer queries. - The mobile menu z-index issue is the cheapest fix in the queue but the oldest. A 5-minute CSS change. Aged 13 days because no one has assigned it. This is the typical pattern: easy bugs sit longer than hard ones because nobody owns “small”. Surface them with a “Vortex IQ findings, unassigned” view in Freshdesk and triage daily.
- Pair this card with
shopify.refund_ratefor narrative weight. “We have 17 open findings AND refunds are up 0.4 points” gives the CXO a single sentence: the audit programme is identifying issues, the team is not closing them, refunds are climbing. That sentence justifies adding capacity.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why pair it with VortexIQ Findings Open | What the combination tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Abandoned Findings (>14d no movement) | The “silently leaking” subset. | Open count steady but Abandoned rising equals findings filed faster than triaged. The team needs an SLA on Vortex IQ tickets specifically. |
| Open Tickets (all) | Total Freshdesk backlog. | If both elevated together, CS team is overloaded and findings get buried. Add capacity or a triage-hour. |
| Avg Cycle Time | Triage health. | Cycle time creeping while open count grows means triage broken. Inspect Top Assignees Overloaded. |
| Finding Resolution Rate (90d) | Throughput counterpart. | Open high + resolution low equals findings filed but never closed, the worst possible state for an audit programme. |
| Refund Rate (Shopify / BigCommerce / Adobe) | Refund spikes should generate findings. | Refunds up + findings flat equals audit gap. Findings up + refunds dropping equals programme working. |
| Customer Service Sentiment (Shopify) | NPS-side outcome of running this programme. | Findings dropping + sentiment rising equals proof the audit programme protects retention. |
| Datadog Operational Health Score | Technical findings should map to Datadog signals. | If a Vortex IQ “checkout error” finding is open and Datadog’s error rate is steady, the finding may be a false positive or stale. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Freshdesk’s own dashboard:Tickets list with a tag filterFor multi-product accounts, prepend atag:vortex_iqand the built-in “Open or Pending” status filter. Admin → Workflows → Ticket Filters, build a saved filter for the same tag and statuses. Analytics → Curated Reports → Ticket Volume withtag = vortex_iqandstatus IN (Open, Pending).
Product = <name> filter.
Why our number may legitimately differ from Freshdesk’s view:
| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Time zone | Boundary days off | Freshdesk Analytics honours the dataset’s configured timezone; agent UI shows agent timezone. The card uses account timezone for the alert calculation. |
| Ticket-channel scope | Ours equals theirs | Both include all channels by default. If you scope a Freshdesk filter to “Email only”, that view is a subset. |
| Archived / deleted tickets | Ours lower | Tickets in Freshdesk’s Trash are excluded from the Search API; some Analytics reports may still surface them for 30 days. |
| Pending status semantics | Ours sometimes higher | Pending freezes the SLA clock in Freshdesk and is hidden from some default agent views. We always count it. |
| Multi-product aggregation | Either | Card aggregates across all Products; per-Product Freshdesk views are subsets. |
| Search API hard cap | Ours capped | The Freshdesk Search API caps at 300 results per query (10 pages × 30). Accounts with >300 open Vortex IQ findings (rare) fall back to the bulk API; expect a 30-second refresh lag. |
| Card | Expected relationship | What causes the divergence |
|---|---|---|
shopify.refund_rate / bigcommerce.refund_rate / adobe_commerce.refund_rate | Refund spikes should generate findings (24-72h lag). | Refunds up + findings flat equals audit blind spot; findings up + refunds steady equals catching issues before they cause refunds (the goal). |
shopify.customer_service_sentiment | Inversely correlated. | Open findings climbing past 30 for 2+ weeks predicts CSAT drop of 3-5 points. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why does Vortex IQ’s number disagree with Freshdesk Analytics? Three usual culprits:- Search API page cap. The Freshdesk Search API returns at most 300 tickets per query. Accounts with very large open backlogs see slight lag while the connector pages through. Analytics has no such cap.
- Pending hidden by default. Many default Freshdesk views suppress Pending (the SLA clock is frozen). We count it.
- Time zone. Analytics dashboards run on the dataset zone; the card uses the account zone for alerts.
status by default. Build an automation that resolves the ticket when Freddy’s confidence threshold is met if you want bot-handled findings to drop out.
We run 4 Products on Pro plan. Do all roll up?
By default, yes, the connector token aggregates across every Product it has read access to. To scope, set vortex_iq.product_filter: <product_id> in the connector config. Multi-product merchants typically build per-Product panels in the Nerve Centre.
Open count just jumped, what should I check first?
A 5-step playbook:
- Commerce platform first. Refund Rate, Cancellation Rate, Order Volume on Shopify / BigCommerce / Adobe. Refund spikes drive most audit findings.
- Site reliability. Datadog Operational Health Score, Sentry error rate. A bad deploy generates a tail of errors that turn into support tickets.
- Catalogue. Catalogue Drift, Ads on OOS, Top Products. Pricing or stock changes shipped without QA flood the queue.
- Audit category mix. Filter by Vortex IQ tag (
vortex_iq:checkout,vortex_iq:catalogue,vortex_iq:performance) to see which audit area is firing. - Viral negative review or social mention. A bad TikTok or Trustpilot one-star spree can drive 30+ tickets in an hour.
vortex_iq tag and are excluded. Add the tag manually if you want them counted.
Multi-channel attribution: do social tickets (Twitter, Facebook) count?
Yes if they carry the vortex_iq tag, which they will if the connector created them. The card does not filter by channel; only by tag and status.